SCIENCE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO LEARN IN HIGHSCHOOL

SCIENCE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO LEARN IN HIGHSCHOOL

Lita and I spent a great week in Hawaii last week before she has knee replacement in early February. I had a chance to do a lot of reading and one book I enjoyed was "A Short Hstory of Nearly Eerything by Bill Bryson. It covered science from universe to the ocean and the world of atoms. Here are some random passages which were impressive to me.

You can summarize the scientific knowledge by saying our earth is estimated to be at least 4.5 billion Universeyears old and the universe 13.8 billion years old. The fact is that we live in a universe whose age we cannot quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can identify, operating with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way. Estimates range from hundred billion or so to perhaps 400 billion. And, the Milky Way is just one of the hundred and 40 billion or so other galaxies, many of them larger than ours.

A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our sun, collapses and then explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of 100 billion stars. If a star collapses the densities in the core of atoms would be compacted to an extent hard to grasp. The electrons would be forced into the nucleaus forming neutrons. The result is a neutron star. Imagine 1 million really weighty cannonballs squeezed down to the size of a marble and you're still not even close regarding the density. The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 90 billion killigrams.

In addition to Newton and Einstein, there have been brilliant genius scientists. For example, Scottish mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin was a child prodigy who was admitted to Glascow University at the age of 10 years. By the time he had reached his early 20s, he had studied in London and Paris as well as graduating from Cambridge. At age 22 he was a professor and natural philosophy at Glasgow University. He accumulated many patents including a method that led directly to the invention of refrigeration. He devised the scale of temperature that still bears his name. He invented devices that allow telegrams to be sent across oceans. He invented a Marine compass and the creation of the first depth sounder.

It was Bertrand Russell who conceived of an illustration to explain Einstein's theory of relativity. He suggested imagining a train 100 yards long and moving at 60% of the speed of light. To someone standing on the platform watching it pass, the train would appear to be only 80 yards long and everything on it would be similarly compressed. The people on the train however would have no sense of a distortion. To them everything on the train would appear to be normal and it would be the people on the platform who look compressed and slowed down.

It was the physicist Richard Feynman who once said that if you had to reduce scientific history to one statement it would be: "all things are made of atoms." They are everywhere and they constitute everything. Not just solid things like walls but the air in between and are in numbers we cannot conceive. The atom is a molecule. A molecule is two or more atoms working together in a stable arrangement. Every Adam is made up of three kinds of particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons which have no charge. Protons and neutrons are packed into the nuclear's, while electron spin around the outside. They are tiny. Half 1 billion lined up shoulder to shoulder could hide behind a human hair.The number of protons is what gives an Adam its chemical identity. For example an item with one proton is an atom of hydrogen, one with two protons is helium and with three protons lithium. Every time you add a proton you get a new element.

Adams are long lived. Every Adam we possess has passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. Atoms are recycled at death so that a significant number of our atoms probably once belonged to Shakespeare, Buddha, Genghis Khan and Beethoven. We are all reincarnations in that sense. When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere. They go on forever but no one knows exactly how long they can survive.

Not surprising, we have wasted a lot of money in the name of science. In the 1980s in Texas, construction of a superconducting supercollider began. Its purpose was to let scientists probe the nature of matter by re-creating conditions in the universe during the "first 10,000 billionths of a second" when creation began. Particles were to be spun through a tunnel 84 km long achieving 99 trillion volts of energy. It was a plan that would've cost eight billion dollars and cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run. Congress spent $2 billion on the project and then canceled it in 1993 after 22 km of tunnel had been dug. Texas now boasts the most expensive hole in the universe.

Facts about how we have polluted our world are also touched on in the book. For example, since 1946the United States has been ferrying 55 gallon drums of radioactive material out to islands 50 km off the California coast near San Francisco where it was thrown overboard. The drums were the sort you see resting behind gasoline stations were standing outside of factories with no protective linings of any kind. If they failed to sink, Navy gunners shot them with bullets to allow  water in, and of course, the contents out. Dumping was finally stopped in the 1990s but hundreds of thousands of drums have been dumped into 50 oceans by the United States, Russia, China, Japan in nearly all the nations of Europe. 

Claire Patterson a professor at Caltech University played an important role in the passage  of the Clean Air Act. His studies and research indicated that before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere but that since that time lead levels had climbed steadily and dangerously. It was in 1923 that the gasoline suppliers added lead to gasoline for a smoother engine function. Patterson established that about 90% of the lead from that time had come from the exhaust of automobiles. His efforts led to the introduction of the clean air act of 1970 and finally to the removal of lead from the sale of all gasoline in 1986. Almost immediately the lead levels in blood of Americans fell by 80%. However, lead last for ever. Americans alive today have about 625 times more lead in their blood then people did a century ago.

What does strike me about the complexity of the everything in the universe, from the atom to the largest body in the  universe is it utter complexity. Socrates and ancient Greek scholars proposed a supreme creator based upon the design of the universe. Plato and his student Aristotle developed the idea. Thomas Aquinas had five  arguments for the existence of God, one of them being the design of the universe. William Paley used a watchmaker analogy and what he called “argument from design.” It is an impressive place we live in and we know so little about it.

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