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Paradoxes and Possibilities

Sebel Fusi

Physics

7-23-17

The theories revolving around paradoxes and possibilities astound me, and always make me reconsider the preconceived notions I learned as a curious child. The idea of the Copenhagen interpretation, also known as Schrodinger’s Cat, was newly introduced to me as I read Paradoxes and Possibilities. Essentially, Schrodinger’s Cat was an experiment that tried to prove a cat dead or alive while it was concealed in a box full of lethal objects. Quantum theory states that there is a 50% chance of the cat being dead or alive, and therefore the cat is both dead and alive simultaneously because cannot be declared either without us legitimately knowing the answer. This state of quantum indeterminacy and uncertainty is what baffles physicists and laymen alike.

Throughout Particles and Possibilities, many different paradoxes and possibilities are described, the most intriguing being time travel. Firstly, you must understand how particles even move through space and time. This motion of particles can be represented as a world line, which is a time versus space graph. For instance, an electron travels at a linear slope unless it emits a photon, in which case it recoils at an angle. As other electrons approach each other, they repel and redirect each other. Like the first electron mentioned, these other electrons emit photons, which consequently create electron/positron pairs. As you can tell, there is a perpetual relationship between the movement of electrons and photons through time and space. To redirect time travel, an electron would simply need another photon to collide with it and recoil in another direction.

However, Einstein’s Time is a theory that further elaborates on this idea of time travel, where a photon’s perception of time is evaluated. Technically speaking, a photon travels at the speed of light, so time has no meaning to a photon. The author tries to explain the difference between underlying reality and our own human perception, but it honestly is ambiguous, and it just reiterates how photons may or may not be “real” in their own existence. He states, “Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particle level.” This quote was enough to summarize the idea of space-time travel for me, and shows that anything can move through space, but time is always continuous.

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Poster Reflection

First and foremost, the poster presentations were very well executed, and I noticed many good features within each of the speakers I visited. Regarding their physical poster, there was a lot of color, and the vibrancy of the display better engaged the audience. The descriptions were very direct and concrete in order to quickly convey their ideas to the listeners. There was also a particular format that was used to complete each poster, and that entailed the purpose, materials, data/experiment, conclusion, and acknowledgements. This structure looks like it could be of use to my own poster presentation.

If I could make one point of criticism, it would be about the deliveries of the speakers themselves. There were only two presentations I noticed with energy and an engaging voice, and I believe delivery is crucial in presentations, especially if the audience has no prior knowledge of the subject. Nonetheless, all of the presentations had good analysis and made good use of their resources for the project.

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The Fabric of the Cosmos

Sebel Fusi

Physics

7-16-17

Roads to Reality begins with an anecdote given by the author, which introduces the idea of analyzing and pondering the world around you as you live. Essentially, this idea was agreed upon by the author’s source, Albert Camus, and it is the central message within the anecdote itself. Understanding physics has a lot to do with understanding and analyzing the existing world, and should be taken advantage of while you are alive. This is why the first line of Camus’s book said, “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Camus was trying to convey that living life exposes you to the incredible world from which you can learn from. Suicide would end that learning and begin a new understanding without fully comprehending the initial experience.

Nonetheless, the author continues by speaking to the changes in scientific thought throughout the decades after the publishing of Albert Camus’s book. The author uses a comparison between Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein to subtly illustrate this change. Newton was one to believe that space and time were simply a set stage for the events of the universe to play out, while Einstein believes that space and time played a part in reality, and were a raw material of the universe’s existence. In physics, incorporating space and time has become essential and important, but no one can fully understand the vast concept. This is why the knowledge of space and time would fluctuate over time; the inability to completely describe something leaves the mind in a continuous search for new answers.

Furthermore, the author brings in a series of realities that have been observed throughout the development of physics. Relativity is a theory that may philosophers and physicists gravitate towards because it is something that has the power to describe this indescribable concept we call the universe. With every era, a new type of reality emerges, morphing and changing preexistent ideas, each with a different sense of how things are connected and relative to one another. So, we come to a concluding question: Is the universe an abstraction or is a physical entity? The author explains how this question has been motivating physicists and others to further their searches, and find a way to something we’d never foreseen before.

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I agree that this week’s reading was much more interesting than the previous week’s. There was a lot going on in this reading, and it really challenged my preconceived ideas about matter and organic energy. Who knew that a rock could actually interpret and react to stimuli the same way that we do? Human knowledge has always been biased with only the human perspective on one side of the spectrum, and we never took the time to understand how the objects of the world work without that bias. Even the light itself was obstructed by our point of view, which is ironic in its own. Einstein was very perceptive, and he used his unique interpretations to actually make sense of the real world in a new light.

Physics Response 3

The reading for this week was much more interesting than the previous reading to me. Although it covered abstract ideas and theories, the author explained it in a manner that I could understand it. The two ideas that I thought were quite fascinating were the idea of rocks being organic and the theory that light is justifiably a wave and a particle. The idea of being organic is applied to things that are living and animate. A typical person would say that organic items include people, fish, plants, etc. No common person would come to the conclusion that a rock could be considered a living thing. A rock does not to the visible eye seem to respond to stimuli, but in reality they do. They react and adapt over a long, long period of time and eventually they respond to this stimulation. The contradiction of this belief that rocks at organic are the fact that they do not possess all of the characteristics of living things. The second topic I found fascinating while reading this week’s passage was belies in the thought that light could actually be a particle and a wave. What makes this even more bonkers is the supporting evidence that both sides have for their beliefs. Einstein and Young had a substantial amount of evidence that truly proved that their theories were not wrong. This fact would mean that by law, light can be defined in two contrasting ways that are completely accurate. Light can be seen as a particle because it yields tiny packets of light called photons, which generate heat and reflect off of metal surfaces in a straight line. On the other hand, light can also be defined as a wave simply because it reflects, refracts, diffracts and interferes with things in a wave like manner. I like it best how Einstein defines this duality as he believed that light is a particle, or stream of photons, and those photons flow like a wave. In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed this reading and would probably rate it as a 4, because the author uses humor and tons of examples/evidence to prove the ideas presented in the passage.

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The Dancing Wu Li Masters

Sebel Fusi

Physics

7-9-17

The Dancing Wu Li Masters, as a whole, is an intriguing excerpt, and it challenges the preexistent knowledge we learned as children. The initial focus of the essay is to illustrate “organic energy”, which is how Gary Zukav describes the concept of physics. Organic energy is something that is applied to both biotic and abiotic objects, but the word organic itself means living. There are discrepancies between the ideas of stimuli in the interactions of abiotic versus biotic objects. Human understanding leads us to understanding that because of the abiotic object’s incapacity for free will, it cannot react to stimuli without an outside force initiating that reaction for it. However, Zukav makes an analysis that human comprehension is in fact incorrect, and that plants, rocks, and such have reactions with stimuli, although in inanimate. The inanimate objects’ reactions can be significantly slower than our own, which would be a factor explaining why humans never noticed the reaction of a rock to stimuli.

Zukav then begins to delve into quantum mechanics, and even more difficult concept to understand in regards to the organic and inorganic discrepancies. Essentially, quantum mechanics have to do with particles’ relationships with one another, and their abilities to instantaneously react to other particles. Einstein’s theory of light is cited predominantly at this point, explaining how photons can hit the electron on the surface of a metal, and creates a domino effect that affects the entire piece. I did not realize how involved it was for a photon to interact with a metal and create light. The relation of particles is a lot more complex than just the flip of a light switch.

The most interesting part of this excerpt, however, was that Einstein also speculated that photons were guided by “ghost waves”, paths that were mathematical entities in theory, but did not have any actual existence. The photons seemed to follow their own paths, which makes sense, but most physicists don’t follow this ideology due to its lack of factual explanation. This speculation relates back to the initial topic of the excerpt: organic energy. As numerous examples proved, abiotic entities can be affected by stimuli although humans do not notice. Therefore, organic energy, or physics, can be applied to any object, regardless of its organic state. That very conclusion is what made me reevaluate my entire basis for scientific thinking.

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Prompt A

Sebel Fusi

Technical Communications

7-6-17

Humans portray and perpetuate their personal ideals in the objects that they engineer, and ignorantly marginalize or oppress other groups of people due to their lack of exposure and empathy towards human variation in society.

The readings discussed in class all have a common theme of describing how discrimination is expressed through the objects that we create. As humans, we strive to develop and enhance our ideas to improve our ways of life. However, there is an inherent ignorance in these improvements due to the diversity of people. Therefore, many pieces of technology and architecture are interpreted as oppressive and racist, which is caused by their creators’ unique interpretations of the world.

The products of human creation perpetuate the creator’s individual biases and ideals into society due to either ignorant or intentional agendas that oppress certain groups of people. These oppressive agendas have been observed in modern technology, like Google Search, for example. The Google Search engine utilizes user input as well as initial programming by the creators to help users find what they are looking for. An article on Complex.com stated, “Search any human body part in Google Images, and one pattern quickly emerges: virtually all of the stock photos that pop up show white bodies- whether you search ‘leg’, ‘arm’, ‘handsome man’, or ‘beauty’.” Complex.com was describing how white bodies consisted of nearly the entire search for a reference to human bodies as a whole. This sole example reflects the genuine ignorance of the creators and the input from the users that perpetuate the idea of eurocentric beauty standards. Why was there such a minuscule percentage of people of color under the search of beautiful, or human in general? The creators’ own perception of beauty and humanity is reflected into this technology, and it can be inferred that only white bodies were interpreted as such. The exclusion and ignorance towards people of color creates oppression, unjust treatment that lowers self-esteem and self-worth. Although people may claim that the things they create do not reflect their ideals, evidence proves otherwise. The objects created by humans clearly show their personal biases that have an effect on society, regardless of intention or ignorance, and can dictate a perpetual cycle of oppression.

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I like how you begin the response with a fundamental analysis of the word “paradigm”, which is the core of Kuhn’s argument. With this initial definition, you easily make a comparison of the definition to the context and diction used around the word by the author in the argument. I see the main part of your argument as a criticism of the author’s use of “necessity” when describing the scientific revolution. The author would be conveying that society would crumble without scientific revolution, but his previous point about how ideas have to be commonly accepted in society contradicts his statement of crucial necessity. If most people oppose the new ideas, human ingenuity is wasted. The perspective of determining what is important to a certain group and what is not is something that I truly agree with from your response.

Scientific Revolutions

Before I begin this evaluation of the article that was read, I want to elaborate on what exactly a paradigm is. Basically, it can be defined as a framework containing all of the commonly accepted views about a subject. So when the author uses this word to describe how its constant evolution is the reason that scientific revolutions occur in the first place, he theoretically understands that a scientific revolution is when the framework that makes up a subject is either changed or simply looked upon by a new perspective or point of view that spreads to the rest of that given field of knowledge. Now that this term’s meaning has been established, I would like to address how interesting it was for the author to use the diction he did for the title of this part of the work. Specifically, I found that he explicitly stated the “necessity” of scientific revolutions as almost an obvious fact that he would elaborate on, rather than an extremely controversial and deep question that has no definite answer. I prose this question because the argument that anything is necessary is unresolved and leads to many other discussions about ethics and other factors for what life (and its “meaning”) are. Obviously the author did not mean for this when he wrote the title, however I found it ignorant to state that something is necessary without also stating what outcome is expected from this “necessary” action. Regardless of this, the main point of the article is to discuss what constitutes a scientific revolution and how it affects the scientific field. Now before a scientific revolution can even be recognized as a revolution, there needs to be a large enough group of people or ideas regarding the topic for it to be significant to the the science field as a whole. This brings up the argument that if a change in paradigm constitutes a scientific revolution, and a paradigm is essentially a point of view or a widely accepted system of thought on a topic, then it should be accurate to state that scientific revolutions happen extremely often. Engineers, for example, have to take advantage of various points of view and try thinking in new ways every single time that they design something. Does this mean that every time something new in the STEM field is innovated and implemented into society that a scientific revolution has occurred. Technically you could make this argument based on the information that the author of this work provides the reader. The irony of this is that when the question of classifying something as a scientific revolution is proposed, the thing that causes the most controversy is the magnitude of effect that the revolution has on science. This causes arguments because what is of large scale importance in one field of science may be insignificant to another field. It is due to this issue that I feel scientific revolution as a term is solely based on perspective and should only be applied to large scale changes in paradigm that affects a larger quantity and variety of the STEM field. I think that another term should be applied to new ideas and changes in paradigm for smaller fields and/or innovations.

Zack Van Dreese

Matt Ambrosio

Physics

Scientific Revolution Write Up

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The Structure of Scientific Revolution

In the words of Thomas S. Kuhn, “A scientific revolution is a non cumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one.” The word revolution has now become colloquial, as people use it interchangeably with progression and change. However, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, written by Thomas S. Kuhn, specifically expresses how scientific revolution does not build upon previous ideas, but rather expedites the creation of a completely new idea. Kuhn uses political revolution as an analogy to compare the similar characteristics of scientific revolution. From that analogy, I was able to interpret how scientific revolution shaped our politics, ideas, and decision-making processes.

 Further expanding upon the political revolution analogy, I came to find how scientific and political revolutions share the notion that preexistent ideologies and methods proved to be inadequate for society, and thus, new thought was necessary. It was striking for me to see how the previous paradigms were suddenly rejected, and now ‘competing camps and parties’ formed to either revitalize or destroy the previous paradigm. Once this occurs, political recourse is unattainable due to the nuances of the new paradigms. The end result is a new set of ideas (agreed upon, or not), and the older ways are given less attention, so to speak.

 The most intriguing aspect of this reading, however, was the notion that assimilation, or a complete shift, in thinking was necessary for scientific revolution to be complete. Kuhn explained that a mass amount of people needed to improve in the new paradigm and have it commonly accepted by society to deem it as a revolution. But then the question arises: Do we really need public approval to verify a revolution in scientific knowledge? The political analogy and other analysis primarily suggests that the public is crucial in the verification of scientific revolution. But if Newton’s laws of physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity were never accepted by the public, would they be considered irrelevant despite their importance today? Fortunately, Kuhn touches on this as he talks about the perpetual movement of human thought around the world. Once something new is discovered, all ideas change, either leaving behind the previous paradigm, or acknowledging its importance and moving on. Nonetheless, this reading has shown how diction and the simple concept of change can affect human understanding and begin a global revolution.

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I find it fascinating how you utilized the importance of foundational laws to enforce the simple concept of the atomic theory, the basis of all matter. In addition, you connected the creativity and open-mindedness of the engineering field to the studies of mathematics and science. This relates to the progression of human intellect and observation, which has formed new ideas for understanding the basis of our existence. From your commentary, I perceive the author to be leaving the atomic theory behind as a final sentence for humanity because of its numerous applications. Although some of our resulted conclusions may be incorrect, you showed that all theories and conclusions should be analyzed to continuously reevaluate our perception of the world around us.

Physics Reading Write Up

Zackary Van Dreese

Physics

Reading Reaction Write up

               To begin, the first sentence of the article was an excellent start and fully grabbed my attention. It succeeded in doing this due to the author’s choice to make the reader feel like they had to see the article from the point of view of an actual Physicist. It was also interesting that the author talked about how science and/or the way the world works in general was defined by humans through a series of “laws”. He sees the laws as almost impossible to grasp without crossing over into another scientific field or set of ideas, which, in turn, has its own set of laws to grasp. This causes an immense knowledge in the Science and Mathematics fields to truly understand where laws come from and their applications. To really show how advanced human knowledge has developed throughout time, the author explains how valuable one simplistic piece of knowledge would be in speeding up the process of amassing a theoretical equal amount of knowledge if the human race were to “start over”. The one sentence that the author claims that he would pass on is about atomic theory and its basic principles. When discussing the scientific method, the author speaks about how the most important parts of scientific and mathematical studies in terms of discovery are experimenting, imagining, deduction, and guessing. I found this quite entertaining because these are all the traits that engineers must have in order to be successful. From this reasoning, I realized how important creativity and an open mind is in regards to engineering. I always thought that is was important, but unrelated and less important than a great amount of knowledge in the Science and Mathematical fields. This was incredibly incorrect, however, because knowledge is almost useless without being able to apply it to discovering new things and/or creating things based off of past knowledge. Returning back to the discussion of laws, it was extremely insightful to think about how laws are often times incorrect, but the human race almost “doesn’t care” to an extent. To elaborate, the author brought up the fact that many laws that have been “discovered” are actually incorrect on either a scale that we cannot comprehend, or in a way that affects us in such an insignificant way that they are arbitrary. Should these small flaws be corrected or should we continue with an easier way of teaching an incorrect law? This is the question that the author brings up and it provides a new way of thinking on how humans view and dissect the information provided by the universe. This question is how I want to conclude this response because it questions the accuracy of what people determined as science and can theoretically make parts of the following information incorrect. This line of thought was what I found the most interesting about the reading and caused me to further question science and the accuracies it contains in regards to the universe.  

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Six Easy Pieces

Sebel Fusi

Physics

6-25-17

Six Easy Pieces is a commentary focused on unveiling the foundational principles of scientific knowledge that humans need to understand in order to thrive. Physics, as a concept, concretely illustrates matters’ relationships and properties, and lies a foundation for many advanced analyses of science. Without this foundation, however, humans simply cannot make factual assumptions about the world around them. Thus, the author begins the commentary by theorizing what would be a single sentence left for humanity if all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed. The sentence that he would leave behind is the atomic theory, which reads: “all things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” This basic theory is the foundation for all matter, and can be applied to understand many situations.

The author continues with explaining the technical composition of matter using atoms, referencing their “stuck together” positions and jiggling motions. Atoms are extremely small particles packed close together due to an attraction, but will repel if they are pushed too close together. Due to the molecular attraction, the matter composed of the atoms will not fly apart. Water, for example, is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and has a constant volume. Even if water flows, the water does not break apart; the atoms just move along because of the attraction, and the volume stays the same. Now, the jiggling motions refer to the perpetual movement of the atoms within matter. This “jiggling” is what we represent as heat; if we increase the temperature of an atom, the motion of the atom increases as well.

He then goes on to talk about how gases can only be confined in a contained that is made air-tight with pressure, usually a piston or something can lock in air pressure. Using the steam as an example, if you confined it an a cylindrical container with a piston covering the top and applying pressure, the steam would be safely contained. Later, you learn that the compression of gases increases its temperature, and expansion will decrease its temperature. Atom abundance and compression are slightly coincided, for in all matter, the adding of atoms increases temperature, and the extraction of atoms decreases temperature. Much of the commentary further evaluates the chemical attributes to the compositions of elements with atoms.

Nonetheless, the key hypothesis that is trying to be conveyed is: ‘Everything is made of atoms’. All of the properties the author explains about atoms and molecules relate to humans and animals, too, not just elements on the periodic table. This is why the atomic hypothesis is so critical to scientific knowledge; you must first understand yourself to understand the world around you, and you are one of the countless things that are made of atoms on this earth.

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Clarity

The beauty of human communication is the multitude of perceptions that can be formed by receiving any sort of information, whether it be visual or auditory. However, the clarity of the communication is not always clear. Depending on the audience that is receiving the information, their interpretation of what is being communicated can vary due to their previous experiences in life. The main difficulty in communication, especially for modern academics, is overcoming this perception barrier, and conveying their ideas in ways that would best suit a general audience. Thus, syntax and diction are stressed to improve clarity of communication.