Networks of Neurons

Today was full of learning and adventure from the start. I woke up and got breakfast with the usual suspects, Alex and Fred. Feeling well-fueled, we made our way to class and excitedly took our seats. I was excited for today’s lecture, because I knew that Craig was going to talk about a topic that I am quite interested in – general relativity-. Craig’s talk was very good and I enjoyed the content a lot.

Craig began to talk about the idea of general relativity which basically says that physics is just a form of geometry. While we all think oh geometry, I did that back in the freshman year of high school; Craig began to talk about Non-Euclidian geometry which is geometry on curved surfaces. In straight space, the degrees in a triangle add to 180, but in curved space, the angles can add to more or less than 180. The next thing that Craig talked about was defining what mass is. Mass can be thought of as a measure of how much matter there is, but also as a measure of inertia. While it might seem obvious, Craig stressed that an object in motion and a stationary object have the same mass. Craig then moved on to state Einstein’s Equivalence Principle which states that without an outside reference frame, it is impossible to tell the difference between gravity and acceleration.

The next topic that Craig discussed was the bending of light by gravity. Einstein predicted that light should be bent by the mass of the Sun as it passes through its gravitational field. When the experimental measurements were taken, it became clear that Newton’s Law of gravitation was not in fact a Law, and that Einstein was right. While I was confused at first why light photons, which are mass less, would be bent by gravity, Craig reminded us of Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2. Another cool thing that Craig talked about was the irregularity of Mercury’s orbit. It was interesting because he presented the idea of gravitational waves that ripple through space-time at the speed of light. While we tend to think of gravity as instantaneous, gravity also takes time to make its way through space. The new way of thinking I have about gravity now is that an object with mass bends the space around it and that other masses simply follow the paths of least resistance and approach the massive object.

Following Craig’s lecture, we were fortunate to have another guest lecturer from the UPenn faculty visit us, Dr. Vijay Balasubramanian. Vijay was one of the best speakers I have ever heard, because regardless of the fact that he has 30 more years of education than me, he presented his ideas perfectly. Vijay began his discussion by discussing how the brain works. What I found very interesting was his way of thinking about how individual neurons know nothing by themselves but that together they make up our personalities and complex emotions. Vijay continued to explain how the mind overcomes being imperfect by having redundant processes check each other and in a way ‘vote’ to decide with great accuracy what is true. An example of this is a bundle of photoreceptors that are hit by photons of light. While a ton of photons might hit them at the same time and lead to confusion, the photons cleverly figure out what happened by deciding what the majority experienced. One of the things that amazes me most is how imperfect humans are and yet we are still able to outperform machines that are superior to us statically.

All of us wonder how much smarter we can become. Vijay addressed this question from a very realistic standpoint. The most important statistic of the day that he told us is that the brain is 2% of the body’s mass yet it consumes 20% of the body’s resources. Thus doubling our brainpower would require that we eat a ton more, in which case we would spend more time food gathering and less thinking. Additionally, nature imposes limits on how smart we can get, because even if you double your mental faculties you would still not be able to think twice as fast as before. While we can’t be sure without seeing how our brains evolve over the next several millennia, Vijay seemed fairly confident that our brains are quite optimized. Hearing this from a man that was quoted three times in the latest Scientific American article on neurology was quite convincing.

What an amazing day.

Electrodynamics By Any Other Name Would Not Sound As Sweet...

Today was exciting. In class, we covered magnetism, one of my favorite topics from my high school physics class. Bill began by telling us that magnetism actually has another name, but it is not often associated with magnetism and electricity. The proper name for these topics is electrodynamics. He continued by going over the basics of electrodynamics, such as the poles of magnets and also about magnetic fields. We also learned that the Earth’s magnetic field is constantly shifting. Once we covered the basics of poles in magnets, Bill showed us something amazing. He showed us a black liquid he called Farrow Fluid. This fluid was extraordinary because it behaved just like any other liquid at room temperature, but it reacted to magnets. The fluid was placed in a Teflon bottle and two strong magnets were placed against the outside of the bottle. When the magnets were close to the liquid, it would gather around where the magnet was on the outside of the bottle. I had never seen any kind of reaction like this so I was instantly interested. After Bill astounded us, he told us about the “Right Hand Rule”, which states that electrical current flows through a wire in the direction that one’s right thumb points along that wire and then rotates in the direction of one’s curled right hand fingers. Bill packed a lot of principles of magnetism in our short lecture, but it was all very clear and easily accessible.

The amazing Farrow Fluid...

After lecture, we were given the chance to look at our data from Hershey Park. It took a while for us to get started because we spent a long time searching for our video of the ride in the Dropbox server. Mary had separated all of our data and videos into different folders, which were labeled by the names of our respective rides. Our folder had our data, but not the video. She told us it was likely that it had been misplaced in another group’s folder. We searched for a very long time before it was suggested that we just check the cameras. Our video was still on the camera that we used, but it had not been uploaded to Dropbox. This was only a minor setback though and we were still able to synchronize our video with the data and get all four recorded values from the roller coaster on one graph. In fact, despite the hiccup in the beginning, we finished before several other groups.

When we got back to class, we discovered that our guest lecturer had arrived. We quickly sat down and waited for the other groups to finish with their data. Today’s guest lecture was all about biophysics. Doug Smith, a doctor who works in the Penn Department of Neurosurgery, lectured us about the dangers, or lack thereof, of getting brain damage from roller coasters. He began by telling us that 1.7 million people experience brain damage annually around the world. Of all those instances of brain damage, only fifty unsubstantiated cases of traumatic brain injuries (or TBI) have been the cause of roller coasters over the past few decades. He told us that, at their peaks, roller coasters have about 4-6 G’s of G-Force, which is not threatening to our bodies at all compared to the 8-10 G’s that we experience when we hop off of steps or “plop into chairs.” Essentially, we are more likely to experience brain damage from sitting down in a chair too forcefully rather than from the whiplash of roller coasters. It has been concluded from several studies, by Dr. Smith and many of his peers, that there is no significant public health risk regarding brain damage and roller coasters. The only exception is if one has prior brain damage before getting on the ride. I found this fascinating because I have always been a little wary of roller coasters because of how violent many of them seem. Now I know that these fears are irrational and I can start getting over my fears of certain coasters.

Doug Smith lectures on the biophysics of our brains.

After lunch we returned to our special interest groups from yesterday. My group made its way down to James’s lab in the basement and we began our work. Today was actually more focused on questions rather than experimentation or demonstrations. Yesterday we observed the basics of how radio telescopes operate, but today we asked James a lot of questions about radio waves and how they are applied in recording data about subjects of observation. We actually spent about half of our time with James asking questions. I feel fortunate for being placed in the radio telescope group because James can answer any kind of question we throw his way and he is interesting to listen to. The other half of our time with James was spent discussing how radio waves are used in cables and wires. We also discussed how and why they are used to transmit information. Unfortunately we had to cut today’s session short because James had an appointment. However, we still have three days to study in the radio telescope lab and I cannot wait to learn more.

My special interest lab professor, James Aguiree

After our session, I ran to the AT&T Store to pick up a wall charger for my phone and then returned to the dorm. Brian arrived about half an hour after I did. We discussed our respective special interest groups for quite a while. I have to say that I am jealous of his studies with ooblek, but I am enjoying my studies as well. I had the chance to look at a sample of ooblek earlier today. It acted just as we had been told it would; the substance was soft and thick when small amounts of pressure were applied, but it hardened when large amounts of pressure were applied. We hung out for a while, waiting for the time to come when we would have to get dressed to go to dinner. At 6:20, we started to get ready so we could meet Mr. Miranda in the Summer Discovery office at 6:45. Signing out went smoothly and the three of us even got compliments about our formal dress. Once we filled out all the paperwork in the office, we walked to Mr. Miranda’s hotel to meet the rest of the group.

We arrived in the lobby to find Matt Lee, my friend and fellow PVHS Spartan, and Tom Miller, a friend of Brian and Julia, waiting. The three of us spoke to our friends and caught up a little bit. Little by little, the rest of our party (Dyana So, Ms. Kronenberg, Mr. Ramsey, and Ms. Nardone) joined us in the lobby and we headed to dinner fairly quickly. We dined at Butcher and Singer again, but this time we would be meeting the Assistant to the Dean of Admissions for Swarthmore College, Joaquin Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton was excellent company and made Swarthmore sound even more appealing to me. He told us that the most important thing at Swarthmore is the sense of community on the campus. Teachers, students, advisors, and other school officials all come together to form cohesive units. He also emphasized the importance of choice at Swarthmore. He told us that even if you are trying to follow a certain path towards a major, students are encouraged to take classes that are in no way related to their majors. I was also fortunate that he knew quite a bit about the college’s engineering program. He told me that a significant part of the engineering curriculum is focusing on how to constantly adapt and innovate. Because many colleges teach engineering to a set of standards without a strong emphasis on innovation for the future, students often leave college with outdated information that turns out to be a hindrance when they attempt to find work. In order to prevent this, the engineering curriculum at Swarthmore makes sure students know how to anticipate change and work towards it, while still learning the principles of today. I found this philosophy very admirable because Swarthmore is really taking into consideration the lives of their students post-graduation. Although I talked to Mr. Hamilton at great length for most of dinner, those were the highlights of what I learned about the college. Overall, dinner was excellent because I was able to learn more about a college I may decide to apply to and I was able to see some familiar faces.

Fellow Spartans in Philly

After dinner, Matt, Dyana, and Tom returned to the quad with us, where we continued to talk. I introduced Matt and Dyana to Abheek and Fred, as well as gave them a tour of the quad. They had a lot of questions about my experience thus far at Penn. The ease with which I was able to talk about Penn, as if it were my home, made me realize how attached I had become to the school. The Yalies hung out in the quad with us until about 11:30 and then they headed back to their hotel. At this point, Brian and I returned to our dorm to retire for the night. I think seeing some familiar faces made my day. Although I enjoy meeting new people and making all kinds of new connections, it is nice to get reminders of my close friends back home. I know my fellow Spartans will perform excellently in the Grand Strategy program at Yale, and I wish them the best of luck. On that note, I am signing off. I hope that my remaining days may be as great as this one was.

Dinner With the Dean

Today I woke up full of energy because I went to bed at 10 yesterday, so I got a good 9 hours of sleep. With Alex and Fred, I walked over to the dining hall quickly because I was very hungry. Today, I decided to have the French toast and potatoes which I’ve found quite delicious in the past. We then strolled through the campus and talked a little about how our different research groups were going.

When we got to class, Bill began to teach us a bit about the relationship between magnetism and electricity. We learned how when there is a magnetic field that it generates an electric field and when there is an electric field that it generates a magnetic field. Bill was quick to give us examples of applications of this relationship. The most prominent example was the electric motor. By coiling a spool of wire in a circle and running electricity through it, you can turn a wheel with permanent magnets in it that turns whatever you want it to. While I can grasp theoretical material fairly well, it helps me a lot to think about applications of theory which is one of the things I have enjoyed most about the program here.

After a brief introduction, Bill introduced his fellow Penn faculty member, Doug Smith. The first thing that hit me about Doug was that he absolutely knew what he was talking about and is literally one of the top researchers in neuroscience, but that he delivered his talk without any air of conceit and with a down to Earth form of communication. It takes a special kind of person to be the top in your field but still be willing and even enthusiastic to take time out of your day to talk to high schoolers. Doug was absolutely that type of person, so I enjoyed his talk a lot because he presented it understandably without really dumbing it down. The main focus of Doug’s talk was about Traumatic Brain Injury or T.B.I. for short. Doug presented some scary statistics about T.B.I. and then began to talk about the many causes of it and the various degrees of severity.

One of the most common forms of brain injury is concussion. While many people including myself before Doug’s lecture believe a concussion to be when your brain hits your skull and you go unconscious, Doug presented a different definition. Doug said that even when you don’t become unconscious, any sort of blow to the head that makes you feel woozy is extremely serious and should be considered a concussion. One of Doug’s most important points was to those of us that play contact sports. He said that repeated concussion can lead to very serious brain damage in the short term, and can triple or more your chances of getting brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s later in life. Doug expressed very strongly that he believes regulations for sports players on returning to the field after concussion need to be strengthened significantly. Finally, Doug talked about one myth that he wanted to debunk for all of us, that roller coasters can cause brain damage. In a typical example of how the free press can cause issues if unregulated, Doug talked about how one article that said roller coasters might cause brain damage spread rapidly through reputable news sources. Doug then proceeded to show us numbers about the accelerations on roller coasters and more importantly the side to side strain on your neck which is known to be sensitive to acceleration. Even in the most extreme roller coasters, accelerations were nearly 50 times below the threshold of causing brain damage. Thus, Doug taught me to be very weary of signs of concussion, but to also be skeptical about sensational news articles that only site one article.

This evening was also quite a pleasure. After I got spiffed up with my suit on, Alex, Julia, and I headed over to the Sheraton Hotel to meet with our fellow ILC members from the Yale program. The three members of the Yale program; Tom, Dyana, and Matt were all very friendly and engaging. Tom and I go to the same school and know each other well, so it was a pleasure seeing each other. Dyana and Matt were also very friendly and we enjoyed talking about college and just life in general. Our main guest of the evening was Joaquim Hamilton who is an assistant dean of admissions for Swarthmore College. Joaquim was interesting because he was open about how he went through the process of getting into college and he contrasted it with what students go through today. I found that he was very open about what Swarthmore had to offer, and what it did not. Overall, the dinner was pleasant and I had an excellent evening.

Physics is Beautiful

Class this morning was made incredible by the excitement of analyzing our roller coaster data, the many creative demonstrations that Bill had set up for us for his lecture, a very interesting guest speaker, and beginning to collect some very interesting data for our interest group afternoon labs.

First thing in the morning, we broke into our Hershey Park groups and downloaded the data we collected on our accelerometers and video cameras to the computers and making sensible graphs out of them. I was really impressed at how well our data came out and how interesting it is to compare acceleration in the x, y, and z direction as well as altitude versus time, especially once we have synced it to the first person video we took from the front car of the ride (which is admittedly mostly the grab rail, but there is definitely some useful information lurking in the background). We really only spent enough time with that to get the data on to Logger Pro, fix up the graphs and save it. The rest of the work for the presentation of Friday will be done outside of class.

After that, Bill gave a really interesting lecture on magnetism and its interactions with electricity. As always, his unique analogies and awesome demos gave me an even deeper understanding (in an enjoyable way) of a subject I was already familiar with. The first demo was one I had already seen; he sprinkled iron filaments on a magnet and we noted the patterns they aligned themselves in. In my high school course, that's as far as we went but because we have access to Penn's numerable resources, today we also got to see magnetic fields in three dimensions with tiny iron particles suspended in oil, forming a magnetic fluid. The shapes formed were more than interesting, they were beautiful. Bill also showed us how a moving current can form a magnetic field, and a moving magnetic field can form a current. The demo he used for this was an electron beam (visible through neon) between two loops of current carrying wire forming a circle. It was all really amazing to look at.

After morning lecture, Doug Smith, a medical doctor gave a talk about Traumatic Brain Injury. The lecture focused a lot on the biology that went hand in hand with the physics of the collisions we endure. It was a very interesting and probably the most applicable talk to our every day lives. I have always known the importance of wearing a helmet, but now I understand not only the physics but also a little bit about the biology behind why that it.

As the day progressed, things just got more exciting. Today was our first day of data collection in out interest groups. First, we used the radii we found with our electron deffraction patterns on phosphorous screens and the De Broglie formula to find the distance between the muclei in our crystal filter. We also played around with the voltage and the location of the beam and got some really beautiful patterns.After that, we hooked a photo multiplier to a counter and a double slit interference chamber that contains only one photon at a time. We adjusted the position of a small shutter by half a millimeter and took new data samples at each place so that we could understand the deffraction pattern that occurs even when only one photon is moving at a time. In esenc, what this means to us is that even though light can be thought of in photons, or massless particles, each of those can behave as a wave independantly of any other photons and with no medium to travel through, which is impossible in large scale mechanics so we do not fully understand whats going on. It's mindblowing.

After class, I had a couple hours to chill in my dorms and get dressed up before our dinner with the Yale ILC group, Charles Ramsey, Madeline Kronenberg, and an admissions councilor at Swarthmore. The food was delicious especially compared to the dorm food, but the conversation was even more satisfying. Although I still don't see myself thriving at a college as small as Swarthmore is, what our guest said about all the options available for courses and the freedom undergraduates have in choosing their own path was really appealing to me and I hope to be able to find that same system at a slightly more busy place with more of a focus in research.

When we got back to the quad, it was already past 10, so we spent a little time introducing our friends from the Yale porgram to our classmates at Penn and then we said goodnight. I am very excitid for tomorrows guest lecture on the physics of neuroscience because those are the two fields that I have the most interst in and I am curious to see how they can be combined.

Tales from the Antarctic

Today Alex and I got up at the usual time to get ready for class. We got our stuff together and then walked over to the dining hall. In lieu of my usual fast breakfast, I went for the slightly more substantial pancakes and potatoes. All things considered, I’ve found the dorm food to be quite good at UPenn which was a surprise considering how bad many adults have told me the food used to be. I quickly polished off my pancakes, Alex also finished his meal, and we went back to our room to grab our backpacks and notebooks for the day. We had about half an hour to spare, so I spent a while catching up on a summer assignment for my English class, and then I spent a little time reading a physics book. The book I am reading right now is called “50 Ideas You Really Need To Know about The Universe”. I enjoy the book a lot because it is excellent at presenting many wildly different ideas in short articles. When I find an article that is particularly interesting, it is easy for me to further learn about the idea that I might not have otherwise been exposed to.

The walk to class was fairly typical, but every day I enjoy the beautiful campus and casual conversation with my friends. I arrived at class and enjoyed saying hello to all of my fellow students who I now know almost all of. In class, Bill began to lecture us about modern physics. We went over the ideas of special relativity and prepared for our guest speaker. In preparation for our guest speaker, we watched a documentary of the speaker who is named Mark Trodden. The video showed the last 8 years of Mark’s work which began with an idea for how to research the cosmic microwave background. For those that don’t know, the cosmic microwave background is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. After the Big Bang which was extremely hot, huge amounts of very high energy waves were emitted. Because the universe is expanding, these waves hit the Earth as microwaves. The problem that Mark had to overcome to research these waves was that microwaves can’t travel through the atmosphere without being significantly altered. Therefore, Mark either had to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars for a satellite microwave telescope, or find some other way to get a telescope above the majority of the atmosphere. The idea that Mark had was was to use a weather balloon to carry his telescope to 135,000 feet above sea level which is above 99.5% of the atmosphere and therefore the microwaves strike his telescope with very little interference.

Mark’s story about his attempts at scientific discovery truly taught me about perseverance and why people always say that failing and learning from your mistakes is the most valuable thing you can do. Mark’s first attempt at launching a balloon was from Sweden where the balloon circled the North Pole for a few days and then parachuted back to Earth. While the launch went smoothly, the worst case happened and they found out right away that their telescope was not properly focused and therefore the trip was a bust. Mark’s next attempt was in Antarctica where the winds were more favorable and they redesigned the telescope from their mistakes. This time, they designed the telescope so that they could refocus it after launch and they redesigned the primary mirror which had fractured on the last launch. This time, 6 years after he began the project, Mark’s team finally got the data they were searching for. The telescope was perfectly focused and the data box with their hard drives full of their precious data parachuted down to Earth. Everything went perfectly until the data hit the ground where the parachute acted as a dragchute and dragged the entire several ton telescope for 120 miles and destroyed everything. On a stroke of luck, Mark found the data box which was white and nearly invisible on the Antarctic ice. The project was saved, and the data turned out to be extremely high quality and useful. I enjoyed Mark’s talk very much because he truly showed us what it can be like to be a scientific researcher. Who knows if it’s what I’m cut out for, but I really enjoyed the insight into such an interesting and progressing field.

Black Holes Burn Bright

Week three of Summer Discovery at Penn has begun. We began class today with Craig lecturing about modern physics and relativity. He told us that modern physics is when the perspective of physics changed completely. The lecture today was half history and half concept. First he discussed how Einstein questioned some of the basic principles about light and time. Craig explained that the laws of physics are the same for all observers moving at steady speeds with respect to each other. He also said that before modern physics, people believed that time was a universal constant. Einstein proved that light, not time, is the universal constant and that time is relative. This transitioned into the conceptual lesson of the day, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the resulting equation E=mc^2, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. I really like Craig’s style of lecturing. He’s very energetic and he teaches almost as if he’s telling a story, which makes it very engaging. All of the TAs have great lecture styles, but I think Craig’s is my favorite.

After lecture, we watched a documentary called BLAST, which was about a Penn cosmology professor, Mark Devlin, and his research into other galaxies. He and his team constructed a telescopic satellite, which they launched from Antarctica, and were able to capture photos of distant galaxies. Eventually, the satellite crash-landed, but the data survived, so it was still a success. Our guest lecture was interesting as well, especially since it was given by the same professor that we just watched a documentary on! Mr. Devlin told us that BLAST stood for Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope. He also mentioned that if you want funding from NASA, you need your project to have a good acronym (which if you think about it seems to be the case). He told us a lot about cosmology and explained some of the phenomena that are occurring in the nearby galaxies. For instance, the Whirlpool Galaxy is currently colliding with one of its neighboring galaxies. He also explained that the universe is a fluid that is coalescing and being drawn together. However, the most interesting tidbit of information he gave us was that black holes are some of the brightest things in the cosmos because of all the matter they suck in, which in turn gives off light and energy. He gave a fascinating lecture.

After lunch, we returned to class and were assigned new groups for this week’s lab work. I was mistaken before when I said that this week would be dedicated to studying Newton’s Law of Cooling. Instead, we were put into groups based on what we chose when given a choice of five topics to research. I was hoping to study Ooblek, which is a mixture of corn starch and water that changes properties depending on how force is applied to it, but I was given my second choice, radio telescopes. I am glad I was given radio telescopes though because I am one of the few groups who has the opportunity to study with another Penn professor. My group, which consists of Onur, Berke Tezcan, Faith Waldron, Danielle Ziaja, and Shreya Jain, will be studying under James Aguirre. James has been a professor at Penn for a number of years and recently returned from researching in South Africa. Unfortunately, we did not have time to discuss this at great length, but I plan to ask him about it at some point this week. He gave us a brief introduction to studies involving radio telescopes and we even did a mini-experiment using one he had in the lab. A couple of the advantages to using a radio telescope over a visual one are that you can measure things such as temperature and electrical properties with them. He demonstrated this by observing a fluorescent lightbulb using a telescope he constructed using a Direct TV satellite he hooked up to a frequency scanner and oscilloscope. All the craftsmanship and ingenuity I’ve seen here thus far has really inspired the scientist within me. Today we had a great session with James and I look forward to working with him and the rest of my group as the week progresses.

After class, Onur and I ran to the Penn bookstore and I helped him pick out some music. I let him listen to a couple of my favorite bands on my phone and he actually bought one of the CDs I recommended. Hooray for cultural sharing! I only wish I understood Turkish so I could listen to his music too. Once we left the bookstore, we made our way back to the quad so we could go to the Penn Admission Information Session. This meeting was a great way for prospective students to learn about Penn. The speaker gave an extensive speech about how applying to apply to Penn She then opened the floor to questions. Most of the information was basic stuff and I already knew a lot of it, but I was still able to glean some more information about test scores and other details about the application process. I took extensive notes so anyone who is interested can learn a little more about Penn.

· When you apply to Penn, you apply to one of four schools: the College of Arts and Sciences, the Wharton School of Business, the School of Engineering, or the School of Medicine.

· For the School of Engineering, there is a graduation requirement that all students in that school must design something. The idea is to create something (anything really) that shows ingenuity and innovation using what one has learned as an engineer.

· Each of the schools has its own core curriculum.

· In the application process, Penn reviews GPA/class rank, transcripts/rigor of courses, test scores (ACT/SAT I and II), and extracurriculars.

· Penn values well-rounded students AND well-lopsided students, as long as lopsided students are heavily invested in an area of their interest.

· Penn IS NOT a score choice school, which means they ask for all of your test scores, no matter what the score.

· Penn requires the SAT I and two SAT II Subject Tests OR the ACT with writing.

· The median SAT score is around 2000-2200 and the median ACT composite score is around 32-33.

· Interviews are not required, but they help.

· Penn has many study abroad programs (none were listed specifically, but I’m sure the information can be found at Penn’s website).

This is only the tip of the iceberg regarding admission to Penn, so for anyone interested in applying, I strongly recommend checking out the Penn website or contacting an Admissions Official via phone or email (they love it when you do!).

The rest of our night was spent relaxing and talking about our respective days. Since Brian was assigned the Ooblek group, I had a lot of questions about what kind of experiments he would be doing. Today was another excellent way to start off the week, and I am looking forward to my studies. My only regret is that my time at Penn becomes less and less as the days pass. I just have to make my remaining days count, and that is certainly what I plan to do.

An Intro to Quantum Mechanics

Today was an especially exciting day in the physics classroom for a number of reasons. First of which was that our morning lecture was on a particularly fascinating and thought-provoking realm of physics: the Theory of General relativity. It was only a few moths ago, towards the end of my physics course at El Cerrito, when I first started really understanding the concept of motion bending time and space. The explanation I was given back then was that it was impossible to go faster than the speed of light and that the speed of light never changed, which allowed me to understand the vague concepts, but didn't offer any real-world explanations as to how we know that or why that is.

The morning lecture today discussed some of the experiments that were performed with rotating mirrors and other methods of diffraction that measured the speed of light and proved that it is a constant. We also watched a video depicting one of Einstein's thought experiments that explained that things that are thought of as simultaneous from the viewpoint of a stationary observer are not perceived that way from one who is in motion. It was all very fascinating and it definitely helped to further re enforce my understanding of relativity.

Another reason today was particularly exciting was that we heard from a guest speaker named Mark Devlin, a graduate from Princeton who did graduate work at our very own UC Berkeley and is now a major player in the UPenn faculty. He studies cosmic background radiation, energy left over in the universe from the big bang. Before he came to talk with us, we watched a documentary about some of the research he has done in the last ten years. The film showed Delvin and his crew of fellow researchers and grad students launching extremely sensitive microwave detectors with huge focusing parabolic mirrors and a Helium 3 refrigerated heat sensor. They launched BLAST (Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope) using a huge balloon that inflates to the size of a football field instead of launching it with rockets because it allowed them to perform the experiments using only 1 or 2 percent of the funds. They chose to do most of their launches in Antarctica where there are fewer thing to hit and the winds are circumpolar so after a week or so, if all goes well, the balloon should drop the telescope back off where it was launched.

That's in theory. However, the movie described the mechanics of actually launching the thing, and showed the perils and possible disastrous situations involved on attempting to collect data in Antarctica. It turns out, it's tricky business and the methods used to reduce error are really quite amazing. I recommend checking out the movie "BLAST" it is very entertaining and informative and definitely worth an hour of your time.

The talk given right after the movie was even more so. While the film focused of the mechanics of the experiment, Delvin himself talked to us a little bit more about the physics behind the data collection and the implications of the analyzing that they were able to do with it. He discussed how we can learn about the formation of stars by recording images of galaxies billion light years away, and therefore studying light that is reaching us just now but was originally emitted billions of years ago. It was really cool hearing about what Delvin did from the formation of his experiment to the collecting and analyzing of data.

It was especially cool because after lunch, we got a taste of how we are going to be experiencing that process first hand this week in the first day of our special interest groups (which is the third reason why today was particularly interesting). I ended up in my third choice which was quantum mechanics where we will be studying the diffraction patterns of electrons and singular photons and discussing what those patterns tell us about the way the world works on a sub atomic level. Even though it was not my first choice, it is clear that I am going to learn a lot and that every day of the four-day course will be packed full of interesting material and experiments. Today we set up a laser beam in a photon multiplier and we could hear the electrical signals hat were being sent as singular photons were interacting with the electrons. It was very cool and I was actually sad to return to my dorms.

I only had a few minutes after class to gather my things and tidy my dorm before we all met in the quad to go the the admission session regarding Undergraduates at UPenn. The admissions councilor who came to speak to us was very friendly and told us very useful information about the four undergraduate colleges, the admissions process, what specifically UPenn is looking for in perspective students and other useful and interesting information. I'm surprised how many of these information sessions I can go to and still learn something new. It's incredible.

Afterward, we ate dinner in a particularly crowded dining hall and threw a football round. I went back to my dorm and looked over some of the information about what we will be doing tomorrow in our photon/electron lab before I went to sleep. I can honestly say I am excited for class tomorrow.