Friday, 26 June 2009

Time Time has been the study of many physicists over the past two centuries. Einstein was the first to really understand it by saying that it was a 4 dimensional object. In this post I will write about Time Dilation and what this has to do with a theory of time travel. As in the Google Video in the last post, up until Einstein people thought that time was the same everywhere in the universe and that everything else varied according to a velocity. Then Einstein came along and said the speed of light was always constant and that time was variable. This formed Einstein’s special theory of relativity and also explains time dilation. Let’s assume that there is a man who travelled at the speed of light for eternity. Let’s also assume that you have a twin brother who goes about living his ordinary life. Your brother lives for 80 years but you live on for eternity. The obvious question to ask is why? This is where time dilation comes in. Time dilation is based around Special and General Relativity. General Relativity explains gravity. A body of some sort, in Einstein’s view, curves the Space-Time Continuum. This curvature creates the affect that we know as Gravity. Time Dilation occurs in two ways. The first is to do with General Relativity. The less affect that gravity has on you, the slower time goes by. It varies in minute amounts but it still slows down. The second explains the brother example that I gave earlier on. It states that the faster you go, the slower time goes by. However, if an object were to travel faster than the speed of light, it would travel back in time. In the brother principle, the speed of light is in the middle where time stops. Hence, the first man never ages. This is one of the many time travel theories. If man could create a machine that could travel faster than light, we could time travel. However, this is currently an impossibility as the laws of physics don't allow us to do this. According to Einstein Special relativity theory, when an object gains a certain amount of energy, this energy converts into mass as explained by E=mc2. Another way to possibly time travel would be to use wormholes. Wormholes are like a shortcut through space-time. As in the diagram on the left, space-time sort of folds in half allowing two point that would usually be very far apart to come together. It may also help you travel in time. Look on Wikipedia for more advanced reading. `

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Here's a documentary that the BBC did on Albert Einstein

Saturday, 6 June 2009

Darwin, Natural Selection and Evolution By Cameron Webb Have you ever wondered where we came from? How did we arrive on earth, was it because of god creating Adam and Eve and is this the reason why we are all here. Or did this all happen through evolution, evolving and adapting from our descendants? I am going to try and explain what scientists think and what the church thinks, and if this wasn't enough I am going to talk about the god of biology, our friend Charles Darwin and how he put forward his ground breaking theory called Natural Selection and how this single theory changed the way that we think about our past. It is thought that we all all other living organisms i.e., animals and plants, once lived in the sea and that we all descended from an organism called a Eukaryotes, This is one of the smallest living things that the earth has held and it is quite a thought to think that every living thing that we know of descended from this tiny organism which is smaller than a red blood cell(this organism cells are organized into complex structures enclosed within membranes). And from there on in we started evolving from algae to vertebrates. The first vertebrates that we think lived in our sea's was a eel shaped creature that sucked on algae for food, in the picture shown it is a lamprey sucking on to a fish, and sort of cleaning the fish but it is really searching for small organisms to eat. But the amazing thing so that this picture is really good proof that evolution has taken place as I previously said the Lamprey was the first vertebrate to swim in our sea's so there could not of possibly be any fish, so the lamprey has had to evolve and develop to change the technique for eating. And so from an eel shaped creature we then start to see the fish shaped creatures starting to develop. But it was the species called the Tetra pods that we have to thank, for they made the huge leap and started to take on off the biggest leaps that the animal kingdom has ever seen, they stepped on land, even though they could not survive on land for more than two minutes they had eventually made it onto land. So from these Tetra pods came the Amphibians Newts and Frogs, then came along the reptiles and birds and from that came the marsupials Kola's and Kangaroos and then came along the entrains and finally came along the Primates Humans and apes. At last we have arrived at the Primates but I have missed out a lot of other organism for example the insects, the fungi. This is the fascinating about eve lotion how have changed so much from an very small organism to over six foot tall, how has eve lotion mate so many other types of species? This very question is what fascinates so many people to do evolutionary science. Part two of this article will be out soon where I will talk about Darwin and the battle between science and the church!