Ignorant Ben Compendium  

I love being able to write whatever the hell I want. Today’s post is a motley collection of questions I’ve sporadically been recording in Evernote. This began at the Science World in Vancouver I’m fairly certain.

It’s mostly going to be an exposition on how ignorant I am of physics and science at large. If anyone has answers I’d love to learn them.

9/24/12 Questions:

• Why does light move?
• Why does water have waves?
• How are photons created?
• Why does light travel at exactly the speed it does and what causes that?
• How does light carry/transmit information in a fiber optic cable?
• Why are plants green? Why do they prefer to reflect green light?
• Why do plants turn brown from green? (wrote these questions without access to the internets)
• How do clouds form?
• How does rain occur?
• How does a combustion engine work?
• Why do trees invest in many small leaves and why do some choose small leaves and others large leaves?
• How does fusion occur?
• How does our mind make spontaneous connections and come up with novel notions?
• How is the perceived slowing of time in an emergency triggered? (e.g. right before a car crash)
• Why is the sky blue?
• Where does all the nitrogen in our atmosphere come from?
• Why are creatures smaller now than they were in previous periods?
• How do dyes bind to clothing and other products?
• How do stem cells differentiate?
• What signals the formation of a wound and creates inflammation?
• What are roads made out of and why?
• What causes the wind?
• What are the primary factors in day to day temperature fluctuation?
• How do cathode ray tubes work?
• How did grass become the default landscaping plant?
• What is concrete made of?
• How is glass manufactured?
• How are manmade bodies of water formed?

10-10-12 Questions

• How do speed waves propagate and why do they do so at such a slow and specific speed? Shouldn’t the speed of sound vary with the strength of the wave? Or are all waves the same strength and just different frequencies/wavelengths? No such thing as the strength of the wave…just how long the wavelength is and unfrequent it is? Whoah…wtf. How does it propagate through medium? Is it just pure energy? What is the wave made out of?Sound is just the disturbance of matter…sound does have energy? Why
• Why is there synaptic pruning and if there is an evolutionary benefit what is it? Everyone who can engage in metaphor has a bit of synesthesia, we’re just in denial about it . See end of Ramachandran’s talk here

11/25/12 Question

Why is there so much evaporation? Is it true for all liquids? Why do some liquids escape at an earlier energy/why is energy not very evenly distributed throughout? Is it surface tension? Figure it out later.

12/4/12 Question

Why do thin pieces of paper become transparent when saturated with water?Is this because the water expands the paper, causing the molecules to spread more widely apart and thus allow more light through?If so, is there any way to make this into a technology for making things oblique and transparent on demand? Some more resilient material that also expands with water or some other substance.

12/5/12 Question

Where does the energy for nuclear fusion come from?Does it come from energy from the conversion of mass that is lost during the fusion process?

1/26/13 Questions

• How does light transform into energy? Such as when sunlight heats up a black thing more than a white thing.

Also, do brown eyes see better than blue eyes in low light conditions since brown absorbs more wavelengths than blue? Does the brown affect vision at all? Do brown eyes get hotter more quickly than blue eyes due to heat energy from the light?

Apparently according to that article, ‘light from the sun excites electrons in the atoms which constitute the brick wall’.

How that electronic energy gets converted to heat is through ‘radiationless transitions’

Atoms of the brick are perpetually vibrating

Some of the atoms vibrate at the same vibrational energy as the electronic energy (photons) absorbed from the sun – this means that they are in resonance with the solar energy

So according to this,

Resonance occurs when a system is able to store and easily transfer energy between two or more storage modes (such as kinetic and potential energy, or in this case, electronic and vibrational energy)

Resonance is the tendency of a system of oscillate with a greater amplitude at a certain frequency – that frequency is known as the resonant frequency.

At that frequency I’m assuming the electronic energy of the photons is able to be transferred to the atoms – at other frequencies for some reason it’s not able to be transferred – why not?

And so at the right resonance the solar energy is able to be transferred into vibrational energy

And the atoms then make a quantum transition from being ‘electronically excited’ to ‘vibrationally excited’, meaning the photonic energy (electronic energy) has been converted to ‘vibrational energy’ for certain atoms since they were at the right resonant frequency to absorb the energy.

Since vibration is heat (interesting as always that heat is just atomic motion – so strange. Why does it burn things and denature them etc? Just because the atoms collide into other atoms at such a great force that they separate those atoms from their original molecular configurations? And it takes a given force to separate a bond between atoms…but with enough heat, you can do it, yes?),

then the atoms that are excited will eventually collide with nearby atoms, thus dispersing their increased vibrational energy equally throughout the brick, making it evenly hot throughout. Fascinating.

How does heat denature proteins and burn things/make other chemical changes?Current hypothesis: since heat is just atomic kinetic energy, vibrational energy among atoms, increased heat is just increased kinetic energy per atom.When some of these atoms collide with others, say hydrogen bonds in a protein, they hit them with enough force to break them from their molecular bonds, or hit them with enough force to create a new bond, and thus destroy their previous molecular configuration.
So perhaps all bonds require a certain amount of force to break or form, and that force can be imparted through the kinetic collision of an excited foreign atom/molecule.

Hence at low temperatures, things will never denature since there will almost certainly not be an atom with sufficient kinetic energy (heat) to break a bond or enough bonds to really degrade things in a significant fashion.

However, at high temperatures almost all the atoms can break bonds and will.

To break a bond, is there an element of ‘chance’ or is it just a precise amount of (kinetic) energy required?

On denaturation

• Why is it more cooling if a person who is warmer than the ambient temperature runs instead staying still? Is it because the person is increasing the # of collisions between his own over heated atoms and the under heated atoms of the surrounding air, thus causing more of his own atoms to even out their vibrational energy with the surrounding air?Simply by increasing # of collisions.
• How does evaporation cool the body? Hypothesis: it cools the body by transferring heat energy from the body into the water, which then uses it to break free of the other liquid water and make the transition into becoming a gas.So essentially sweating provides a way to expend the excess heat energy created by the body – by using that energy to turn the liquid sweat water into gas

I really, really, really need to learn more about physics.