I've Never Though of Oil as Beautiful Before...

Just to mix things up this morning, I actually got out of bed early so I had enough time to grab breakfast with my floor at the dinning hall (the blueberry pancakes today were almost as good as I get them at home) and then return to the quad to collect up the lab data that was due today. It was a nice, leisurely start to my day.

The first lecture of the morning was about Saturn's rings and what they tell us about the way gravity behaves. Bills presentation explained Newton's Law of Gravitation only after we understood the general concept based on what er know about the way Saturn looks (and also, the way the position of the moon affects the tides). It was a short talk, but there was a lot of really valuable and accessible information packed into it.

We then took care of some logistics. We went over the lab that we would be performing that afternoon (measuring the magnitude of a singular charge) as well as some information we needed for tomorrow and the weeks to come. Mary showed us pictures and gave a short shpeel of all the rides available for us to analyze at Hershey Park. We split up into the groups we would be working with for the acceleration experiment, discussed our options, and got familiar with the accelerometers we will be using tomorrow while we waited for our guest speaker.

They also discussed with us the options we had for the groups we are going to break up in for next weeks afternoon labs. These groups are not chosen based on who we think we would work best with, but rather, which group in investigating a subject we are interested in. We are going to be studying and experimenting with the same subject for the entire week in order to really be able to get into some investigative labs and theories. Some of the options that seemed especially cool were radio wave astronomy, wave/particle duality, and Non-Newtonian fluids. I am still having trouble deciding on just one topic because they all seem extremely interesting,

When our guest speaker showed up, things really picked up. His name was Randy Kamien and he is an expert on soft condensed matter. He started his lecture off with a magic trick where he unlinked together two solid rings (he later admitted that, in fact, one was not solid he was just covering the gap with his hand). He tied the trick into his lecture about topology (which he described simply as the science of counting) by telling us that the trick was magic because the ring originally intersected at one spot that you could count and it is impossible to change that in a loop. He went on to talk about liquid crystals in display screens and how lights ability to pass through the screen depends on the orientation of the molecules in the liquid crystal. To be honest, I don't think anyone understood all of what he was saying (he started involving fourth and fifth dimensions in his hypothetical looped path situations) but I could tell that he did a good job of making it much more accessible than it could otherwise be and I learned a lot of really cool stuff the things I didn't fully grasp only sparked my interest in physics more. Once again, we ate lunch only after all of our questions had been asked so we ate a little late, but it was definitely worth it.

When we returned for our afternoon labs, microscopes and perfume-like spray bottles filled with watch oil was waiting for us on the table. We recreated the experiment Millikan performed in order to find the charge of one electron. By looking at the speed of minuscule oil droplets falling through space and comparing it with the time it took them to rise when a known voltage was applied, we found that the average charge was very close to the accepted value of 1.6x10^-19. It was really fun looking through the microscope and timing these tiny droplets of oil illuminated on a black background. My eyes did start to hurt after a while (I can only imagine how Millikan must have felt) but the little specks of light moving around in the microscope was actually quite beautiful.

After class was over, I hung out in my room with my room mate and a couple other girls from our floor, One of them played a couple pop songs on the french horn that she brought. She was very talented so it was good fun listening to them (it is not easy to make a french horn sound that nice). Afterward, I grabbed some dinner and met up with Brian, Alex, and one of their floor mates and we watched another movie in the lounge before bed.

Modern Physics is Mind Blowing

It was hard to get out of bed this morning. I think I hit the snooze button about 4 times. It all worked out though because instead of walking to the dining hall, I grabbed a quick bagel at WaWa's (the Philadelphia version of a super seven-eleven) and ate it in the shade of the huge tree in the center of the quad. It was quite relaxing.

When my morning picnic was over, I walked to class with one of my current lab partners who is from LA. We had a nice chat about how interested we were in attending Penn as an undergraduate. It was very cool hearing his opinion of the place.

The class was lecture heavy today, which is not to say that it was boring. Whatsoever. In fact, today was probably one of the most interesting and thought provoking days of the entire course. We started out with a concept that is slightly counter-intuitive: particle/wave duality. Ryan, one of the student teachers, set up a very helpful PowerPoint in order to aid our understanding. We discussed the uncertainty principle and all that in entails. He showed us a diagram of Shrodinger's thought experiment involving a cat in a box. As long as the cat is in the box, you know where it is, but because it's in the box with a breakable vile of poison, you can not know if it is dead or alive, and so, for all intensive purposes, it is both dead and alive. It was a very strange scenario, but it definitely helped the entire concept make a little bit more sense.

After we all got headaches from wrap our minds around the concept of light as both a wave and a particle, Bill set aside an hour or so when we might normally do a lab to talk a little bit about what our past labs entail. He stressed that data is not important unless it is contemplated, analyzed and discussed.

The next lecture was a guest speaker by the name of Mark Trodden who is an expert in the field of cosmology. He talked a lot about galaxies and how he uses them to better understand gravitation, even applied to life on earth. He also discussed interesting concepts like the Doppler Effect, Hubble's constant, and dark matter and energy. He basically told us the entire story of scientist's current theory of the creation of the entire universe in less than two hours. I was fascinated by it all and how the study of the universe can be both humbling and helpful in appreciating just how special life on earth is. It's a touch of psychology mixed into physics.

We were released to go to lunch only about five minutes late, but almost everyone stayed behind at least thirty more minutes to ask fascinating questions that received equally as thought-provoking answers.

When we returned from our late lunch, we separated into lab groups to wok on labs as usual, except today, not only did we get to decide who our partners would be, we also got to decide what our experiment was going to be about and we were able to set it up ourselves. The only constraint put on us was to investigate the relationship between two non-linear variables and determine whether or not the relationship was exponential. Brian, Alex, and their floor mate Onour and I chose Newton's law of cooling. We graphed the curve of temperature vs. time of a probe first starting in hot water then cooling to room temperature, then starting from ice and warming to room temperature. Next we used two probes, one in the ice and one in the boiling water and switched them to see how their curves intersected. It was my favorite lab so far because of how independent and exploratory it was. Next Friday, once we collect our data and organize it, our job is going to be to give a presentation to the class about our findings, which sounds interesting, but not nearly as interesting as it will be to hear all the other group's findings.

After class, I took another quick nap before dinner, followed by what is becoming a fairly routine game of ultimate Frisbee. I'm proud to say I've improved quite a lot since the first day. Today was especially cool because we played with some students taking art classes here at Penn who were very fun to talk to (they were stressing about finishing their Mona Lisa).

After the game, we walked down to Seven-Eleven for some refreshments, then back to the quad where the weather was nice enough, even by 9:30 that we could just lay on the grass for a while before heading back to our rooms to sleep.

Not Enough Time in the Day...

Today seemed to fly by. Ever since I woke this morning, things seemed to be non-stop. I felt rushed while walking around campus, it felt like our activities came and went, and even time just sitting talking seemed to be fleeting. However, this didn’t make the day any less enjoyable. I still had a great time in class and after class.

Today Mary (one of our class TA’s) announced that we would be cutting back on the amount of labs we do in class. The reason we had been doing two labs per day in the beginning was to make sure that everybody had the basic knowledge that we would need for the rest of the course. Looking back at what we had learned, it makes sense. Mechanics is the very first step to a physics class and optics really helps us understand perspective, which can help us with our observation in other labs. Now that we have covered the basics, we are ready for the more intense labs, such as measuring the speed of light. Today we discussed waves and particles. This lecture was a lot different than the others because it was more theoretical than the rest. With our other discussions, we had been learning about things that could actually be measured and tested accurately. With waves and particles, there is a lot of guess work involved because we are dealing with things that are either invisible or too minute to see. Despite these obstacles, Bill and Ryan explained particle physics (a small part of it anyway) with extreme detail. Near the end of the lecture, Bill informed us that we would be performing our own research on a topic of our choosing next week. This project will be done in groups and we have to assemble a presentation upon its completion. We then got a fifteen minute break from the lecture to choose our groups and topic. I will be researching Newton’s Law of Cooling with Julia, Brian, and Onur. I am very excited about working together and learning about a topic that I have never studied before.

After the break, we had our first guest lecture. Dr. Mark Trodden, a professor here at Penn, came to talk to us about astrophysics and cosmology. Dr. Trodden received his PhD at Brown University and now teaches at Penn, as well as lectures other universities. I had never dealt with astrophysics or cosmology before today so this was completely uncharted territory. I was very lost at first, but with careful note taking, I was able to get a slight handle on Dr. Trodden’s lecture. The majority of the lecture revolved around light, energy, and how the two interact and behave in space. He also discussed the movement of galaxies and a few aspects of the big bang theory. One of the most interesting things that he said today was that the galaxies are accelerating, and that is proof of a big bang. The idea is that if the galaxies are accelerating outward, there had to be something to propel them outward in the first place, which is where the idea of a big bang comes in. Dr. Trodden was very thorough and was able to cover a massive amount of information into only an hour. That is something I really admire about college professors – they can talk at length about almost anything and still manage to make even the most complicated of topics interesting and engaging.

Dr. Trodden giving his lecture.

After the guest lecture, we had lunch, and following lunch was another brief lecture. We did not really cover any new concepts, but it was more an explanation of how we would have to conduct ourselves while researching our new topics. This research will be much different than the other labs that we have done. They will give us the materials, but we will have to come up with procedures and tests to run on our own. They are giving us complete control, which is something I’m not quite used to in a lab setting. Immediately after Bill gave us our instructions and guidelines for the project, we went into the lab to perform our first tests. We observed how fast thermometers would adjust to different temperatures after being placed in or removed from hot and/or cold water. Our graphs showed exponential changes in the changing temperatures of the thermometers. We have only taken a few steps, but I am already looking forward to this project.

After class, Brian and I returned to our dorm and reorganized our room. We maximized our floor space and made a few more areas for guests to sit. Since our room is the biggest out of all of our friends, it is kind of a central hub. After organizing, we went to dinner with Fred, Alison, Julia, Abheek, and Onur. Afterwards we decided to get a little exercise and throw around our Frisbee. Somehow we wound up in a game of ultimate Frisbee with another summer program at Penn right now. We won 15-10 in the end. We all went to get victory slurpees at 7-11 again. We decided to make it a tradition that whenever we play an intense game of ultimate Frisbee, whether we win or lose, we grab a slurpee after the game. We spent the remainder of the night relaxing out on the quad, and later in our new lounge when it got too dark.

Although everything that happened today seemed to go by so fast, I still had a great day. They say time flies when you are having fun. Today I experienced that first hand, and I loved every speeding minute of it.

Mark the Man

As I like to say, an adventure a day keeps the boredom away. Today was a great day right from the beginning. Blessed with a full 8 hours of sleep because of the cereal stash in our room, I felt ready to go from the moment I woke up. The cereal wasn’t quite filling enough however, so I grabbed a bagel from the food cart outside of our classroom and took my seat. While much of the last week’s work has been on fundamentals such as mechanics and basic optics, today was time for our introduction to modern physics. After a brief lecture, Bill introduced us to Dr. Mark Trodden so that he could introduce us to some modern physics. Assisted by his slight British accent and charismatic oratory, Mark was very easy to listen to and understand. Mark began his lecture by introducing his field of study-particle cosmology-. He soon began to discuss one of the most important particles/waves in his field, the photon of light. We sped through some introductory stuff, the majority of which I already knew, about the Doppler Effect. The Doppler Effect takes place when there is a moving source or receiver of some kind of waves. For example, a car that is driving along the street and passes by a person standing on the sidewalk exhibits the Doppler Effect. What happens is that as the source and observer become closer while the source is emitting waves, the sources waves continually get scrunched up because each successive wave emitted is closer to the source than the last one. By definition, closer waves meant that the waves that the observer observes are at a higher frequency than they were emitted. Based on the shifts in the spectrum of emitted light from objects such as stars, astronomers can tell how quickly distant objects are moving.

The next topic that Mark spoke about was one that everyone used to think they understood perfectly- gravity-. For hundreds of years, Newton’s Law of Gravitation had worked great at describing every application that was thrown at it. Soon enough, people realized that it didn’t accurately describe the orbit of Mercury. During Einstein’s amazing burst of science, he came up with the Theory of General Relativity which envisions gravity as bending space and time.

To continue his discussion, Mark began to talk about an area of physics that he dedicates a huge amount of his time to, the Big Bang. He discussed how immediately after the Big Bang atoms would form for fractions of a second and then get hit by a massive amount of light that would break them apart. A few seconds after the Big Bang, protons had enough energy to collide and make nuclei without being torn apart by light. While this phase lasted less than a minute after the Big Bang it was the only window where atomic nuclei were formed. Scientists made careful theories to predict the abundance of light elements in the universe due to the Big Bang. In one of the greatest documented successes of science, the model fit the actual data almost perfectly. This occurrence was a great success for science because of how well the model and actual data lined up.

Finally, Mark introduced several questions that he is researching because particle cosmology currently fails to explain them.

Why is there more matter than antimatter?

Why didn’t the universe begin in a higher state of entropy?

Does dark energy really exist, or does General Relativity break down on universal scales?

I found Mark’s lecture very informative and above all, it made me want to learn more about our universe. In the afternoon we had a lab to learn about things in nature that display exponential properties. My group decided to try the lab where you try to find if object’s cool and heat up at exponential rates. Using a thermometer linked to Logger Pro and containers of hot and cold water, we graphed the change in temperature versus time and found an exponential relationship. While many people are uncomfortable with exponential relationships, they are vastly important to science. As Albert Bartlett put it, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." While this might seem over exaggerated, in order to understand nature, we have to understand exponents and today I learned about many of these relationships in the lab which was great.

Field Trip to Swarthmore

My floor and I started the day off with a quick breakfast at the dining hall before class. I'm really glad they require us to walk in pairs outside the quad area even though sometimes it's a hassle finding someone to accompany you, it provides opportunities for diverse and dynamic meal-time groups. I really enjoyed sitting with the girls, as I often sit with Brian and Alex's floor. The food today was also very tasty: french toast, raspberries, and blueberries.

I walked to class with Brian, Alex, and one of my lab partners from last week. The morning lecture was an introduction to how to use a digital oscilloscope to measure . After a few demonstrations and clarifying questions, we went into an early lab where we used the oscilloscope to measure the speed of electricity running through wires. It was very cool. We also played around with reflecting electric signals back using an open-ended wire and creating a pulse almost identical to the original versus shorting the end of the wire sending back a reversed pulse or dampening the current, resulting in no pulse at all. The lab really gave each of us an opportunity to experiment with the dials and buttons of the oscilloscope and really get the hang of how to use it.

After the morning lab, Bill gave a lecture on exponential functions. His presentation, as usual, gave me an even deeper understanding of the concept even though I was already familiar with it (in this case, I had been learning about them for many years). Bill used the example of four bugs in a square each trying to catch up to the bug before it so that as one bug moves, its position affects all the bugs behind it, which in turn affects the bug in front of it, thereby affecting its self and so it's position is in fact a factor that determines its position. I am doing a good job of complicating it all, but believe me, when he described it it was very easy to understand. He also showed us a toy car that he had build with an adjustable speed dial on it that trailed behind it so that it moved as the car moved. In this case, the speed of the car was a factor that determined the speed of the car.

At the end of his lecture, he described to us a lab that we would all be doing sometime in the near future where we collect data that describes a non-linear relationship. The unique part about this experiment is that not only do we get to choose our groups, but we also get to decide exactly what non-linear relationship we are going to investigate and set up the design for the lab all on our own. Clearly, the class is going in a more independent and investigative direction which is very exciting.

Today exceptional in that Bill's lecture didn't end 15 minutes late. In fact, today we went to lunch 10 minutes early. It was a Physics Summer Discovery first.

After lunch, we worked more with the oscilloscopes, this time with diodes and resistors in circuit boards instead of just wires. Once we got the hang of that, we moved on to LED lights (light emitting diodes). Using both the oscilloscopes and Logger Pro, we were able to find the wavelength, frequency, and energy that each different color gave off. With that we could find Planck's constant. It was pretty amazing how precisely we could measure these things with this equipment. The results we got were within about 15% of the accepted values.

After class, Mario signed us out and took us to see Swarthmore College. We hopped on a trolley, and then on a train and before we knew it we were standing in the picturesque lawns of Swarthmore. We got maps and took a self-guided walking tour of the campus. The scenery is really incredible and based on the bulletin boards in the main buildings, there are some really interesting groups and clubs active. But Swarthmore is an incredibly tiny campus, and the town, when compared with Berkeley or Philly leaves much to be desired. I do not see myself attending the College in the near future, but it was definitely fun to look around. They even have a climbing tree (the plaque on it said "please climb and laugh") it was quite nice.

For dinner, we went to an Irish pub. I ordered a delicious salmon BLT with thick-cut sweet potato fries. It was a great break from the dorm food.

When we returned to the quad, it was already 8:30. We checked in, had our weekly floor meeting with our RC to restate the rules and make sure everyone was on the same page (apparently the 5th floor lounge is now off limits after another program had a dance there and failed to clean up properly), played a few creative card games and then it was off to bed and the end of another day.

I Met Iron Man. What Did You Do Today?

Tony Stark!!! (aka Craig)

Okay, I didn’t really meet Robert Downey Jr. today, but Craig is close enough. He brought in his “arc reactor” that he gutted and improved with better lights. Some people in class have even taken to calling him Tony (Tony Stark/Iron Man). This made for quite an entertaining morning.

However, the fun and games could only last for so long and soon Bill began his lecture. Today we continued our discussion from yesterday about voltage and current, but we also began discussing resistance and how to use a device called an oscilloscope. This machine is essentially a cross between a graphing application on a computer and the scanning equipment. It primarily scans and graphs voltage and current, but it has a wealth of uses that we did not even cover today. When we weren’t covering the oscilloscope, Bill was going over Ohm’s Law. Ohm’s Law has several variations, all of which state that the quotient of voltage and current is equal to resistance, the quotient of voltage and resistance is equal to current, and the product of current and resistance is equal to voltage. He did not just tell us the definition of the law though. He went through a lengthy explanation that told us the derivation of Ohm’s Law. I think this is the part of the class I enjoy the most. I really appreciate the explanations that Bill gives regarding how certain principles came to be. This is material that was not covered in my high school physics class, so it makes me appreciate this advanced course that much more.

Today’s lab was very simple (in principle). All we had to do was become associated with the oscilloscope, which was not as easy as it sounds. The device has many different menus and configurations. In order to measure and compare the correct values, one must find just the right settings and sift through a series of menus in order to get to the correct arrangement. In order to get associated with the machine, our task was to measure how long it took for a generated pulse to go from one point to its opposite point, a reception port on the machine. Setting up the wires and cables for the task was easy enough, but we were baffled by the menus on the oscilloscope. We needed the help of a TA to get us out of our haze. Iron Man was busy, but thankfully Ryan is very knowledgeable about the device and he was able to help us get going in the right direction. After Ryan helped us, we completed the lab without any issues and my entire group knows a few of the basics of using an oscilloscope.

Our post-luncheon lecture covered several things. First we discussed diodes, which are conductors that only allow current to flow in one direction. Then Bill combined the ideas of wavelengths from yesterday with our instruction on the oscilloscope that we had earlier. The latter did not have much new information; rather it explained what we were going to be testing in the lab and how we would go about doing it. Our task was to illuminate LED’s and, using the oscilloscope, measure how many volts it took to light it ever-so-slightly. After doing this for three different colors of LED’s, all of which we recorded different values for, we were tasked with finding how much energy was required to illuminate the lights, what the wavelength of the lights were, and the frequencies of the lights. Luckily, we were able to finish in a timely manner (despite technical difficulties) because Brian, Julia, and I had to meet Mr. Miranda to visit Swarthmore College.

Our cohort took a train to Swarthmore at about 4:45. We arrived at the campus and my first glimpse of campus took my breath away. We stepped off the train and turned around to see a lush, green hillside with many trees and a group of students playing Frisbee in the distance. It was a truly magnificent first impression. That first impression did not change as we walked to the General Admissions Building. Everything was tranquil. I would not be surprised if you could hear someone whispering from over thirty feet away if you were standing on the main green. The entire campus was silent, even with a lot of people on campus! We took a self-guided tour with complementary maps from the Admissions Building because it was so late in the afternoon. I could not get enough of the Swarthmore campus; it was like a dream. There were even Adirondack chairs scattered about the campus for group discussion or solitary reading. You could tell that this was truly a campus for intellectuals. I absolutely loved my first impression of the school and I plan to discuss Swarthmore as a possibility for college with my college counselor.

After the train ride back, our cohort enjoyed dinner at a nice pub and enjoyed massive meals. We then returned home and told our friends our perspectives of Swarthmore. The rest of the night was spent relaxing after a long day of work and learning. We also learned that the fifth floor lounge is off limits because other parties left quite a mess the last time they were up there. It’s okay with me though, because we hadn’t been going up there much lately anyway because there were always a lot of people up there and it was always loud. We have found a new hangout in the dorm building that hopefully will go unnoticed for a long time. On that note, I am signing off.

The Solitary Chair...

Something isn't right here...

The Swarthmore belltower

Gravity Gouges

Today was one of those mornings where I felt sure that there was an exceptionally strong gravitational field located directly under my bed. I was pretty sluggish at first, but I was motivated by wanting a shower and being extremely hungry, so I wandered out of our room and found the shower stall. After my shower, I felt much more awake and we walked over to the dining hall together. Over time I’ve figured out that I am a lot more energetic after eating only a light breakfast, so I visited the fruit bar and then got a large bowl of cereal in lieu of hot cooked food. Alex, Julia, and I have the walk to class down to a science now, and we arrived just a few minutes early.

Today in class we talked more about waves and how they are related to energy. Bill re-introduced the oscilloscope to us so that we could use it in our lab. Today, we attempted to measure the speed of different waves using the oscilloscope. By using the oscilloscope to graph exactly when each wave left the device and then graphing it again when the wave had gone through a circuit of wire we could measure the speed of electricity through the circuit. We knew the distance that the electricity travelled through the circuit and we found the time it took from the oscilloscope so we calculated the speed of electricity in our circuit and found it was roughly 60% of the speed of light. We also determined the wavelength of several different colors of light using a sensor and Logger Pro.

After class we all raced back to our dorms to meet with Mr. Miranda. After we dropped off our stuff in our rooms and got through all the necessary paperwork, we walked to the subway station nearby. We rode the subway to the Amtrak station downtown where we took the train several stops to the Swarthmore stop. As soon as we got off of the train, I was amazed by the view of the Swarthmore campus. While I don’t have a strong preference for a more open or urban campus yet, I really liked how open and beautiful the Swarthmore campus. We walked up a wide path through a large grass field up to the undergraduate admissions office. We each took a self-guided tour map from the office and walked outside to begin our tour. We walked around for about an hour and saw most of the campuses’ buildings. I enjoyed seeing the library, science buildings, and the expansive gardens in the area such as the rose garden. I liked the campus a lot, but I think that I am at least currently interested in going to a college with a slightly larger campus than Swarthmore’s. That said, the combination of a beautiful campus, highly driven students, and dedicated college town would make Swarthmore a great place to go to college.

After we returned from Swarthmore, it was time for the social part of my evening. While I honestly have a ton of fun in class each day, I always look forward to returning back to the dorms, kicking off my shoes, and hanging out with my friends. After spending some time hanging out in our room, we decided to go somewhere else which ended up being a bad idea for me. In the interest of being ridiculous, I attempted to climb upstairs without touching any of the stairs. While it worked for about two and a half floors, I never saw the landing of the third. As my physics teacher Bill would have been eager to describe, I used the chemical energy from my food to climb up several floors which converted my energy into the gravitational potential energy that ultimately was converted back into kinetic energy and a nice little gouge in my shin. Luckily the Summer Discovery staff was well-prepared to repair the damage of my stupidity, and my leg is nicely bandaged up and feels fine now. Anyways, that’s plenty of physics for today, goodnight.

P.S. Alex fell off a swing at Swarthmore which was hilarious! Further proof that gravity was exceptionally strong today.