Final Reflection

Well, well, well. This was quite a project indeed. I have to say that in the beginning I completely thought this was a bunch of bull crap, I'm happy to say that I somewhat enjoyed this though. It gave me a lot of time to do other things when I was done posting. It forces students to look up information all by ourselves, not to mention we covered such cool topics.

What I Would Keep

I like the entire idea of blogging. When your done with it, there are so many other things that I can get caught up with. I love playing Mother Load so much, thank you for giving me the opportunity to bask in its glory. So definitely keep the blogging, however, I didn't any of the topics that we had to blog about. Some of them were just down right retarded. Which brings me to things I would change.

What I Would Change

I would change all the bologna topics. None of them had anything to do with physics. My last post about quantum mechanics was as close to physics as we got topic wise. I also didn't like how sometimes you changed shit without telling us, or just putting it on our blog. That's not cool, no one ever goes on it in their spare time, unless they absolutely have to.

Well, all in all, this was a learning experience. I learned a lot of things that I'm never going to use anywhere else, but don't take it personally, you tried your hardest, just not hard enough.

See ya!!!

Cam the Flim Flan Man

In physics, quantum mechanics is “the study of the relationship between quanta and elementary particles”. Quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of physics with wide applications in both theoretical and experimental physics. Quantum theory generalizes all classical theories, including mechanics, electromagnetism and provides accurate descriptions for many previously unexplained phenomena such as “black body radiation” and “stable electron orbits”. The effects of quantum mechanics are typically not observable on macroscopic scales, but become observable at the atomic and subatomic level.

An easier to understand definition is “Quantum mechanics is a mathematical theory that can describe the behavior of objects that are roughly 10,000,000,000 times smaller than a typical human being”. Quantum particles move from one point to another as if they are waves. However, at a detector they always appear as discrete lumps of matter. There is no counterpart to this behavior in the world that we perceive with our own senses. One cannot rely on every-day experience to form some kind of "intuition" of how these objects move. The intuition or "understanding" formed by the study of basic elements of quantum mechanics is essential to grasp the behavior of more complicated quantum systems.

The discovery that waves have separate energy packets, otherwise known as “quanta”, that behave in a manner similar to particles led to the branch of physics that deals with atomic and subatomic systems which we today call, quantum mechanics! It is the mathematical framework of many different fields of physics and chemistry, including condensed matter physics, solid-state physics, atomic physics, molecular physics, computational chemistry, quantum chemistry, particle physics, and nuclear physics. The foundations of quantum mechanics were established during the first half of the twentieth century by Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, and many others. Some fundamental aspects of the theory are still actively studied. The word “quantum” came from the Latin word which means "what quantity". In quantum mechanics, it refers to a discrete unit that quantum theory assigns to certain physical quantities.

The history of quantum mechanics began essentially with the 1838 discovery of cathode rays by Michael Faraday. The 1859 statement of the black body radiation problem by Gustav Kirchhoff, and the 1877 suggestion by Ludwig Boltzmann that the energy states of a physical system could be discrete. Finally the 1900 quantum hypothesis, by Max Planck explains that any energy is radiated and absorbed in quantities divisible by discrete ‘energy elements’. E, such that each of these energy elements is proportional to the frequency v. In 1905, to explain the photoelectric effect, that shining light on certain materials can function to eject electrons from the material, Albert Einstein postulated, as based on Planck’s quantum hypothesis, which light itself consists of individual quanta.

The year 1924 saw the publication of another fundamental paper. It was written by Satyendra Nath Bose and rejected by a referee for publication. Bose then sent the manuscript to Einstein who immediately saw the importance of Bose's work and arranged for its publication. Bose proposed different states for the photon. He also proposed that there is no conservation of the number of photons. Instead of statistical independence of articles, Bose put particles into cells and talked about statistical independence of cells. Time has shown that Bose was right on all these points.

Also in 1927 Bohr stated that space-time coordinates and causality is complementary. Pauli realized that spin, one of the states proposed by Bose, corresponded to a new kind of tensor, one not covered by the Ricci and Levi-Civita work of 1901. However the mathematics of this had been anticipated by Eli Cartan who introduced a 'spinor' as part of a much more general investigation in 1913. Dirac, in 1928, gave the first solution of the problem of expressing quantum theory in a form which was invariant under the Lorentz group of transformations of special relativity. He expressed d'Alembert's wave equation in terms of operator algebra. The uncertainty principle was not accepted by everyone.

Its most outspoken opponent was Einstein. He devised a challenge to Niels Bohr which he made at a conference which they both attended in 1930. Einstein suggested a box filled with radiation with a clock fitted in one side. The clock is designed to open a shutter and allow one photon to escape. Weigh the box again some time later and the photon energy and its time of escape can both be measured with arbitrary accuracy. Of course this is not meant to be an actual experiment, only a “thought experiment”.

However Niels Bohr had the final triumph, for the next day he had the solution. The mass is measured by hanging a compensation weight under the box. This is turn imparts a momentum to the box and there is an error in measuring the position. Time, according to relativity, is not absolute and the error in the position of the box translates into an error in measuring the time. Although Einstein was never happy with the uncertainty principle, he was forced, rather grudgingly, to accept it after Bohr's explanation. In 1932 von Neumann put quantum theory on a firm theoretical basis. Some of the earlier work had lacked mathematical rigors, but von Neumann put the whole theory into the setting of operator algebra.

There are four basic principles of quantum mechanics and they are:

Physical States
Every physical system is associated with a “Hilbert Space”, every unit vector in the space corresponds to a possible pure state of the system, and every possible pure state, to some vector in the space. In standard texts on quantum mechanics, the vector is represented by a function known as the wave-function, or function.
Physical Quantities
Hermitian operators in the Hilbert space associated with a system represent physical quantities, and their Eigen values represent the possible results of measurements of those quantities.
Composition
The Hilbert space associated with a complex system is the tensor product of those associated with the simple systems (in the standard, non-relativistic, theory: the individual particles) of which it is composed.
Dynamics (2 types)
Contexts of type 1: Given the state of a system at t and the forces and constraints to which it is subject, there is an equation, “Schrodinger's equation” that gives the state at any other time. The important properties of U for our purposes are that it is deterministic, which is to say that it takes the state of a system at one time into a unique state at any other, and it is linear, which is to say that if it takes a state onto the state, and it takes the state onto the state then it takes any state of the form onto the state.
Contexts of type 2 ("Measurement Contexts"): Carrying out a "measurement" of an observable B on a system in a state has the effect of collapsing the system into a B-eigenstate corresponding to the Eigen value observed. This is known as the Collapse Postulate. Which particular B-Eigen state it collapses into is a matter of probability, and the probabilities are given by a rule known as Born's Rule.

All in all quantum mechanics is a bunch of scientific nonsense. You have to be almost a genius to one hundred percent, fully understand it. If you have to the choice to never do anything on it, make the right choice and not get yourself mixed up with it, like gangs. Hopefully everything that I’ve blogged about will help you understand it if you are unfortunate enough to get stuck with it. A lot of the information I researched I don’t even completely understand, good luck!

In photography, one is concerned only with the brightness or irradiance distribution (square of the amplitude) of the image. The optical path to different parts of the object is not recorded as the photographic emulsion is a square law detector and records only the amplitude.In holography, the aim is to record complete wave field (both amplitude and phase) as it is intercepted by a recording medium. The recording plane may not be even an image plane. The scattered or reflected light by the object is intercepted by the recording medium and recorded completely in spite of the fact that the detector is insensitive to the phase differences among the various parts of the optical field.

Holography is the science of producing holograms. It is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image produced changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way is if the object were still present.

The technique of holography can also be used to optically store retrieve, and process information. It is common to confuse volumetric displays with holograms, particularly in science fiction works such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Red Dwarf, and Quantum Leap. Holography was invented in 1947 by Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor (Hungarian name: Gábor Dénes) (1900–1979), work for which he received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971. It was made possible by pioneering work in the field of physics by other scientists like Mieczysław Wolfke who resolved technical issues that previously made advancements impossible. The discovery was an unexpected result of research into improving electron microscopes at the British Thomson-Houston Company in Rugby, England. The British Thomson-Houston company filed a patent in December 1947 but the field did not really advance until the development of the laser in 1960.

The first holograms that recorded 3D objects were made by Yuri Denisyuk in the Soviet Union in 1962;later by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks in University of Michigan, USA in 1962. Advances in photochemical processing techniques, to produce high-quality display holograms were achieved by Nicholas J. Phillips. Several types of holograms can be made. Transmission holograms, such as those produced by Leith and Upatnieks, are viewed by shining laser light through them and looking at the reconstructed image from the side of the hologram opposite the source. A later refinement, the "rainbow transmission" hologram allows more convenient illumination by white light rather than by lasers or other monochromatic sources.

Rainbow holograms are commonly seen today on credit cards as a security feature and on product packaging. These versions of the rainbow transmission hologram are commonly formed as surface relief patterns in a plastic film, and they incorporate a reflective aluminium coating which provides the light from "behind" to reconstruct their imagery. Another kind of common hologram, the reflection or Denisyuk hologram is capable of multicolour image reproduction using a white light illumination source on the same side of the hologram as the viewer. A diffraction grating is a structure with a repeating pattern. A simple example is a metal plate with slits cut at regular intervals. Light rays travelling through it are bent at an angle determined by λ, the wavelength of the light and d, the distance between the slits and is given by sinθ = λ/d.

Holography is "lensless photography" in which an image is captured not as an image focused on film, but as an interference pattern at the film. Typically, coherent light from a laser is reflected from an object and combined at the film with light from a reference beam. This recorded interference pattern actually contains much more information that a focused image, and enables the viewer to view a true three-dimensional image which exhibits parallax. That is, the image will change its appearance if you look at it from a different angle, just as if you were looking at a real 3D object. In the case of a transmission hologram, you look through the film and see the three dimensional image suspended in midair at a point which corresponds to the position of the real object which was photographed.

In 1972 Lloyd Cross developed the integral hologram by combining white-light transmission holography with conventional cinematography to produce moving 3-dimensional images. Sequential frames of 2-D motion-picture footage of a rotating subject are recorded on holographic film. When viewed, the composite images are synthesized by the human brain as a 3-D image. In 70's Victor Komar and his colleagues at the All-Union Cinema and Photographic Research Institute (NIFKI) in Russia, developed a prototype for a projected holographic movie. Images were recorded with a pulsed holographic camera. The developed film was projected onto a holographic screen that focused the dimensional image out to several points in the audience.

A one-meter square hologram of an architectural model shows how an architect can realize a space in three dimensions before a project is built. A holographic image of the Lindow Man , the 2000-year-old remains of a man discovered in a bog in England, demonstrates the use of holography for anthropological, educational, and archival purposes. Also featured are works by MIT Professor Stephen Benton (1941-2003), inventor of the white light-viewable hologram. The holographic imaging process uses laser light to store and reproduce three-dimensional images. Invented in the late 1940s, holography is best known for industrial and commercial applications ranging from credit card security to product packaging. Many artists have experimented with holography's creative properties since the late 1960s.

Renewable Resources

A natural resource qualifies as a renewable resource if it is replenished by natural processes at a rate comparable or faster than its rate of consumption by humans or other users. Resources such as solar radiation, tides, and winds are perpetual resources that are in no danger of being used in excess of their long-term availability. Natural resources such as fresh water, timber, and biomass might be considered as renewable, depending on usage and location. They can become non-renewable resources if used at a rate greater than the environment's capacity to replenish them. For example, groundwater may be removed from an aquifer at a rate greater than the sustainable recharge.
Hydropower
Mechanical energy is derived by directing, harnessing, or channeling moving water. The amount of available energy in moving water is determined by its flow or fall. Water flows through a pipe, or penstock, then pushes against and turns blades in a turbine to spin a generator to produce electricity. In a run-of-the-river system, the force of the current applies the needed pressure, while in a storage system, water is accumulated in reservoirs created by dams, then released when the demand for electricity is high. The reservoirs or lakes are used for boating and fishing, and often the rivers beyond the dams provide opportunities for people to raft or kayak.

Solar Power
Solar energy is energy from the Sun in the form of heat and light. Solar energy technologies harness the Sun's heat and light for practical ends such as heating, lighting and electricity. Solar energy technologies utilize heat and light from the Sun for practical ends. Technologies date from the time of the early Greeks, Native Americans and Chinese, who warmed their buildings by orienting them toward the Sun. Heat and light from the Sun, along with secondary solar resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass, account for most of the available flow of renewable energy on Earth. The power we obtain from solar engery may only be able to be used during day light hours if it is not conserved into batteries of some sorts.

Tidal Power
Tidal power, sometimes called tidal energy. It is a form of hydropower that exploits the movement of water caused by tidal currents or the rise and fall in sea levels due to the tides. Although not yet widely used, tidal power has potential for future electricity generation and is more predictable than wind energy and solar power. In Europe, tide mills have been used for over a thousand years, mainly for grinding grains. This is the only form of energy which comes from the tidal forces by the Moon and the rotation of the Earth in the Earth-Moon system. Tidal energy is generated by the relative motion of the Earth, Sun and the Moon, which interact via gravitational forces. The stronger the tide, either in water level height or tidal current velocities, the greater the potential for tidal energy generation.

Geothermal
Energy generated by heat stored beneath the Earth's surface or the collection of absorbed heat in the atmosphere and oceans. The largest group of geothermal power plants in the world is located in The Geysers, a geothermal field in California. Geothermal power supplies less than 1% of the world's energy. From an environmental standpoint, the energy harnessed is clean and safe for the surrounding environment. The hot water used in the geothermal process can be re-injected into the ground to produce more steam. Although geothermal sites are capable of providing heat for many decades, eventually specific locations may cool down. In these locations, the system was designed too large for the site, since there is only so much energy that can be stored and replenished in a given volume of earth.