Eye-Saving Witchcraft

Time to learn about some magic folks, but first! A story.

So! Knowing me and my love of sleep, most of my friends are surprised when I tell them my favorite job was a research position that involved waking up at 4:30 am. But it was really the best: I got to stomp all over the prairie and wrangle critters (for science!) and everything. I only stumbled over a rattlesnake once. It did require some special equipment on my part, however. Namely cacti-resistant boots, cargo pants (tip: if you’re doing field work, get a pants with pockets big enough to hold a Nalgene. It’s worth it and you’ll thank me later) and sunglasses. I couldn’t get just any sunglasses, though. I was working outside for up to 11 hours, that is a LOT of sun exposure and my eye sight is bad enough without throwing sun damage into the mix. The solution for me was polarized sunglasses (also a hat).

If you’ve lived in a place with any significant amount of sun, you’ve probably seen polarized sunglasses at the store. If you grew up in a place that’s as damp, grey and dark as if it were being swallowed by a giant oyster, you probably haven’t. Or you didn’t until you moved to a place with sun and got a job that had you working outside all day (COUGH COUGH). To understand polarized lenses, you need to understand light.

Light has electric fields that move in waves and these waves acan be oriented in all different directions. Light from a lamp or the sun is like this and thus is unpolarized light. Reflective surfaces can polarize light so that it all travels in one orientation: horizontally. Besides being damn bright and annoying, this light can damage your vision. To combat this, you can get polarized lenses. Polarized lenses have a coating of polymers all aligned parallel to one another. This coating only allows light to pass through that has an electric field perpendicular to the orientation of the polymers.

Scary diagram, but I want you all to see the important bits the official way, first. Namely, the orientation of the wave (the transmission axis of energy) and the direction it flows in.

Simplified diagram

You would think that the light would need to be oriented parallel to the polymers, but such light waves actually get absorbed by the polymers. Anyway, the result is that half of unpolarized light is blocked, while polarized light from glare is virtually eliminated.

Eye saving MAGIC.

Although polarized lenses are expensive, they are very much worth it for protecting your sight if you spend a lot of time in the sun.

Oh, FACT: lots of companies can say they sell polarized lenses even if they don’t. To tell for sure, find a highly reflective surface or a monitor screen and tilt your head to the side. Looking at it normally, it won’t be very bright, but after you tilt your head all the way to the side, the surface should be almost black.

Sources

–. 2012. “Polarization of Light.” Physics. Whitman College. Walla Walla, WA. Lecture.

Tyson, Jeff.  “How Sunglasses Work” 14 July 2000.  HowStuffWorks.com. <http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everyday-innovations/sunglass.htm&gt;  02 April 2015.

Image Credits

Prof Josh (seriously cannot remember his name, someone HELP) for 1^st.

Heartland Optical for 2^nd.

CTS Wholesale Sunglasses for 3^rd.

Schrodinger’s Cat- Now You See Me…

Finally got some topic requests! Some of which are pretty brutal and some are just full of it (you know who you are). First up is Schrodinger’s Cat.

This one is brutal for me because I am not a physics or quantum anything sort of person. However, a lot of people like talking about Schrodinger’s poor, pent up kitty, so I’m going to try and clear things up a little. If anyone has any questions or corrections, please let me know; I am by no means an expert.

First of all, here is the original scenario by Schrodinger, translated from German:

“A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed.”

Although it may not be clear immediately, this is a model intended to describe the state of sub-atomic particles, such as electrons. Schrodinger used the cat to make a point and to get people thinking about applying the existing modes of thought to something from “real life”. At least as “real life” as a cat in a box with acid and radioactive matter can be.

Anyway, one of the existing modes of thought was the “classical model”, which said you could predict whether the cat is alive or dead based on models. However, Schrodinger points out that people made these models and you can’t expect reality to conform to a man-made model. The cat’s conformity to the model’s prediction would be arbitrary (as would that of the subatomic particles), that is, it may or may not follow the prediction and whether it does or not is random. So the classical model is not helpful.

Another idea follows the concept of the wave function, also called the psi-function. This would say that the cat’s state is blurred between all possibilities, “mixed or smeared out in equal parts” between living and dead, as Schrodinger put it. You could say the cat is undead, but that would have to encompass a complete range, from completely living to completely dead. So whether or not you believe in zombies, that’s a pretty hard concept to envision (let alone accept). Schrodinger invented the cat because he agreed: this isn’t how life works. Psi-function assumes the blurring of states is confined to a sub-atomic scale, when in reality, sub-atomic particles affect macroscopic objects and systems. A particle can no more be in two places at once than a cat can be dead and alive at once.

Schrodinger’s solution is simply that the cat is dead or alive. The only way to discover its state is to open the box and observe it. In a similar way, sub-atomic particles may be anywhere, but we only know where when we try to observe them.

So how is any of this useful? Consider the various models of the atom. The first models you see of atoms show sort of an onion, with protons and neutrons at the center, and electrons arranged in layers surrounding them. Getting into college chemistry, you understand that electrons have “atomic orbitals”, regions in which you are most likely to find the electrons. Diagrams show the orbitals as specific shapes, but that’s just the shape of the area the electron moves around in. So while you have a certain probability that the electron will be in a given location, you can’t predict it. Neither can you say the electron is smeared around its orbital. It is the cat, but rather than alive or dead, it is in this spot or somewhere else, and you won’t know until you look at it.

Hope that helps a little. Now that I’m done, I think I’ll have lunch, maybe draw, or return some books. You won’t know which unless I’m observed.

But that would be creepy, so please don’t.

Sources

Kramer, Melody. 2013. “The Physics Behind Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox.” National Geographic. Jan 8 2014. < http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130812-physics-schrodinger-erwin-google-doodle-cat-paradox-science/&gt;

Schrodinger, Erwin. Trans. John D. Trimmer. 1996. “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A translation of Schrodinger’s ‘Cat Paradox Paper’.” Technical University of Hamburg-Hamburg. Jan 8, 2014. <http://www.tuhh.de/rzt/rzt/it/QM/cat.html&gt;

Diagram credit to Dhatfield, Wikimedia Commons.

Thermodynamic Witchcraft

Story time, everybody!

So, right now I’m on a field research team working on the prairies of Colorado. Also right now, the temperature out where the deer and antelope play is stuck in the nineties. Needless to say, I bring a lot of water to work. But since I do not want my water to warm up too quickly and start tasting like old bath water, I freeze it overnight. This is very nice, but I can’t drink completely frozen water. Solid ice is just about useless when you’re thirsty. It needs to melt. Luckily, water (and everything else) has free energy. Free energy (represented by G) is a component of the total energy of a system that can do work at constant pressure. The system is the object or react in question and by work I don’t mean that free energy has a desk job or something. In physics, work is the displacement of an object by a given force. Push a book across your table/desk/park bench with wifi and you can say that you are doing work on that book. This also means you are transferring energy to the book, causing it to move. It’s like witchcraft. Minus the hoods and black goats.

Such evil things.

ANYWAY, if free energy changes, the system/my water bottle is undergoing some kind of reaction. If the change in energy is negative, that is, energy is exiting the system, then we say that the reaction is exergonic. Such reactions are also called spontaneous because they produce product under a given set of conditions and without any work until a reaction reaches equilibrium. However, when the change in energy is positive, energy is entering the system and we say that the reaction is endergonic. It is also non-spontaneous because the reaction won’t proceed toward product production without work being done. So where is my water bottle in all this? It is sitting in the hot Ford Explorer, and given those conditions it doesn’t have to do any work in order to melt. The bum.

Exergonic and endergonic reactions do not necessarily involve things heating up or cooling down. Explosions are a great example of exergonic reactions and they involve (quite a lot of) heat, but protein synthesis is an excellent biological example of an endergonic reaction that does not involve a drastic temperature change.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go set up another exergonic reaction in my glass.

Cheers!

Sources

Hoffman, Kurt. “Work and Power.” Physics. Whitman College. Walla Walla, WA. 2011. Lecture.

Sholders, Aaron. “Thermodynamics.” Biochemistry. Colorado State University. Fort Collins, CO. Jan 2013. Lecture.

 

EDIT: Got my endergonic/exergonics confused with regard to ice melting. Fixed now!