Waking up and going to class now feels routine even though we've only had one day of class. It's the built-in student mechanism in my head but it's still strange because I don't feel much different even though I'm dorming. Maybe my near ancestors were nomads? Huh, just a weird thought for today.
In class, we started the day with kinematics followed by dynamics. The two correlate but there's a major difference - dynamics deal with objects with mass and kinematics does not. Kinematics confronts velocity, distances, and time but dynamics deals with Newton's Laws, forces, and aspects of kinematics. The two are quintessential to modern-day physics and I'm expecting to learn more of Newtonian physics because they're more practical, but ultimately, they're not quite as accurate. Einstein's definition of gravity was proven to be "more correct" when they took the measurement of the bent light of Venus (I think this was the experiment , not sure) and his measurement - and uncertainty - was significantly more accurate than Newton. This discovery by Einstein eventually lead to the public acceptance that space and time is a fabric that can be warped. In class, the class debated (kind of philosophically) whether or not time was a vector. The class was split apart in terms of opinions and it was quite surprising. The point that was brought up was that time can be referenced both forwards and backwards, therefore time is a vector. The other side countered that by saying that time moves at a constant rate and since we cannot go backwards in time, time is a scalar. However, that side's argument is false. As I mentioned before, space and time can be warped, they're not constant. What happens at places of high gravitation is that objects (or in Einstein's case, light) are bent either in terms of their size (they can appear stretched or compact, the closer the object is to the speed of light, the more compact it appears) or bent in terms of their time perspective. Time of an object in high gravitation may be slower than that of time of objects outside the high gravitation. If it were not for Einstein, it would have taken much longer for scientists to figure this out. If an object's "time" can be warped, therefore time is not constant. The professor answered the matter of time going backwards by mentioning the positron; based on Feynmann's graduate paper( I think, it may be one of his other works), positrons are electrons that are moving backwards in time. I'm still trying to work out the logic of it, but I'm slowly approaching quantum dynamics level. For now, I will accept it although I don't like doing that. I think it was an impulsive move to mention the positron and not many of the students truly understood it (including myself). It either created curiosity or confusion in the classroom, and for me, it was curiosity. In the end, we identified time as a vector and that was that. During break, I further asked the professor about time being a vector. He expanded on it even more by saying that higher level of physics (quantum and string), time HAS to be a vector or all the equations and relationships to make sense. Again, I'm becoming more curious and curious.
The first lab for today was just using a computer and ultrasonic to record the velocity vs. time graph of an object. The slope of that graph represented acceleration. What we did was we had a cart connected to a pulley that had an object attached to the end of the pulley on the other side. We placed weights on both the cart and object and we let the object fall, thus making the cart move. By placing weights on both the spots, we saw the actual acceleration/velocity changes in the objects with different weights. We received a physical representation of Newton's Second Law, most famously denoted as Force = Mass x Acceleration. In Layman's terms, an applied force to an object will cause it to accelerate. This is common sense to most of us but back in Newton's times, people were amazed by his conclusion. Really amazing to think in that perspective.
Professor Burner gave an amazing presentation about Newton's Third Law through this self-made cart with a fire extinguisher as its engine. Essentially, the force created by the fire extinguisher goes to the right of him, but he gets a reaction force to the left, thus causing his car to move left. After that hilarious experience, he talked about cars for an extensive amount of time. About the history of cars to the functionality of the cars at specific times of history. After all of his extensive shenanigans, we listened to Mary talk about dynamics. She made it as simple as possible for the class and used Michael as a reference for her examples. Apparently, by tomorrow we'll have covered the first semester of college physics basics.
At the end of the night, I played Cards of Humanity with over ten people. The game is for terrible people who have creative minds. I won't talk about it in this blog but I must say, it was HILARIOUS. My excitement seems to accelerating as the days progress. Go education!
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