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My Knowledge of Physics and Chemistry
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My Knowledge of Physics and Chemistry Since I was a little in the 1960s, I sort of noticed that all the matter around me is composed of materials in 3 states, solid, liquid and gas. When I was 6 years old in 1966 I think, I went with my father on an all day fishing trip to Bear Mountain State Park just north of New York City and west of the Hudson River. He rented a small fishing boat and we went fishing for sunfish, bass and perch with live bait and lures using a nylon line reel fishing rod. I distinctly remember that me and my father were standing on the rocky shore of one of the lakes there in the afternoon and I was looking at the shallow lake water covering the flat rocks on the lake bottom and being a very curious little , I asked my father as to just why at the same temperature, the rocks were composed of solid matter and the water above was in a liquid state of matter. Of course, I also noticed that I am surrounded by air composed of 80% nitrogen gas, 20% oxygen gas, 1% argon gas, along with water vapor. Later, I read books about chemistry and learned about the naturally occurring chemical elements ranging from atomic number 1, hydrogen gas all the way the atomic number 92, uranium with a usual atomic weight of 238. I used to melt and burn table sugar on the kitchen stove in our small apartment and noticed that as the sucrose sugar burned, only the brown carbon remained on the metal spoon as the hydrogen and oxygen molecules of the sugar molecules were released as carbon dioxide and water vapor from the chemical reaction of the fire. Then I often noticed the brilliant light of the sun shine overhead on sunny days in the spring and summer months. I later read that the sun is actually a G type yellow star, a 864,000 mile diameter wide gaseous sphere of mostly hydrogen and helium gas which is 330,000 times the mass of the Earth, usually 93,000,000 miles away ( 1 astronomical unit), I also read that the sun shining in the sky is not a chemical fire at all like those we are familiar with seeing on Earth, but is actually powered by the nuclear fusion of 657 million tons of protons in its core being fused into 654 million tons of helium nuclei with the release of 4 million tons of gamma radiation every second. Our tiny planet Earth only receives a mere 4 pounds of light energy every second which is two billionth of the sun's total output of radiation. The process of nuclear fusion and nuclear fission is based on energy derived from the nuclear strong and gluon forces which are entirely different and much more powerful from energy derived from the familiar chemical combustion on Earth and the chemical energy derived from the biochemical and organic chemical reactions taking place in living things on Earth I learned as a that all matter is composed of atoms in the form of pure elements and compounds. The elements on the periodic table are divided into nonmetals on the right side and most elements are metals on the left side with some in-between the semiconductor elements, germanium and silicon used i n electronics technology. The alkali metals on the far left and the halogen gases on the far right are the most extremely reactive elements and never, ever found in their pure form on Earth. By contrast, the noble or inert gases on the right side of the periodic table are completely chemically inert and consist of monatomic single atoms which are the elements Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon. I have studied geology and mineralogy and know about elements found in their pure form on Earth, including of course, the gases found in air, carbon, sulfur, copper, silver, gold and several others. Actually helium gas was first discovered by analyzing the spectrum of sunlight before it was discovered existing in natural gas deposits on Earth. The word helium is derived from helios, Greek for sun. Most people are very familiar with table salt, sodium chloride, but actually the term salt designates a whole class of compounds which are an ionic chemical combination between an alkali metal and a halogen gas. When I took biology class in high school and college I learned that the plasma membranes that surround all the cells of there life on Earth are composed of soap like molecules with have a hydrocarbon covalent bond interior while the ionic bonded polar ends face the surrounding water. I kept a couple of aquariums and became very familiar with water chemistry that all the fish and other water animals are very sensitive to changes in the water's pH which is the extent that the water molecules are divided into hydrogen ions and hydronium ions as are our own body cells being very sensitive to the pH of our blood. When I took High School chemistry in 1976 I observed some sulfuric acid which is used in car batteries. When you look at the planet Venus in the dawn or dusk sky, the yellow color you see is actually the sulfuric acid droplets dissolved in its thick carbon dioxide. In chemistry, I studied the gas laws which state that the pressure of a gas at a given volume and pressure is actually dependent on its absolute<b> temperature </font></b>above absolute zero, 0 degrees Kelvin or -273 degrees Centigrade or -454 degrees Fahrenheit. By contrast in the interior of stars like the sun, the<b> temperature </font></b>must be in the orders of like 20 million degrees Fahrenheit, but actually it consists of hydrogen ion protons moving around constantly at high velocity and to use the concept of<b> temperature </font></b>to describe it like the matter on the Earth's surface really makes no sense at all. The surface of the sun is around 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit which is twice as hot as any fire produced so far on Earth. I took physics in high school and college and became familiar with the basic laws of mechanics as Sir Isaac Newton figured out back in the late 17th century as he did with the basic laws of gravitation. First the principle of inertia, that all bodied tend to remain at rest or in a constant state of motion unless acted upon by an external force and second that the acceleration of motion of a material body is directly proportional to the force applied to it. Then the law of rocket propulsion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Even as a little , I sort of noticed that objects tend to fall to the ground when you drop them. I have since learned in physics that gravitation is indistinguishable from the acceleration of moving bodies, on Earth at the rate of 32 feet/second squared or 9.8 meters/ second squared. In the early 20th century, In one second, an object will fall 16 feet, the second second 64 feet, etc, not counting for air resistance. Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity reasoned that gravitation is really the curvature of space/time by the presence of material bodies and that a sufficiently powerful gravitational field could bend light rays, thus he predicted the existence of black holes which weren't detected by astronomical observation until much later. The gravitational constant of Newton's law of gravitation has been used to figure out the mass of planet Earth at a little less than 6 sextillion tons. Then the mass of the sun and other planets can be derived from that. From the moment I began to see with my eyes as a , I have always wondered as to what exactly light is. I have since learned that light we observe in the 7 colors of the rainbow is actually just an extremely narrow band in the range of electromagnetic radiation ranging all the way from extremely short wave gamma radiation produced by atomic nuclear processes all the way to very long wave radiation of electric alternating current. In the first decade of the 20th century, Albert Einstein figured out in the Special Theory of Relativity that in fact the speed of light at 299,792.458 kilometers/second or 186,282.3971 miles/second is in fact the absolute and ultimate speed of the universe. As any material body in the universe approaches to as close to the velocity of light, even to within 99.9999% of it, the basic laws of physics including the rate of time flow, physical length and the mass will increase to compensate for it as to make the measured observed speed of light always exactly the same no matter what. I read that in a imaginative book about science that light and other electromagnetic radiation is actually caused by vibrations in the fifth dimension of the universe. We three dimensional contemporary human beings going through the fourth dimension of time passage can have absolutely no way of being able to visualize in out finite three dimensional brains, the whole concept of a universe in more than three dimensions. When you watch the Star Trek and Star Wars space operas you will very blatantly notice that they will utterly and completely ignore the theory of Relativity as well as other basic concepts in physics like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principles as well as most principles in biology, etc. In the summer of 1994, I became interested in quantum mechanics. The basic principle is that on the subatomic level, both matter and energy possess a wave/particle duality, which is a totally different thing to those of us human beings on the macroscopic level. In 1900, Max Planck figured out from analyzing black body radiation that when a piece of matter is heated up, the emitted electromagnetic radiation is only in specific wavelengths and no intermediate values are possible. Niels Bohr's analysis of the hydrogen atom proved that the single electron orbital of the hydrogen atom only shifts in specific increments. The basis of chemistry is that in every atom from hydrogen to uranium, no two electrons within the atom can ever possess the exact same quantum state, the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Actually, every atom we are familiar with on Earth consists of a central nucleus on the size order of a fermi in length or 1 x 10^-15 meter in size. The nucleus is composed of hadron particles, protons and neutrons which can be further subdivided into three smaller quark particles which are held together by the gluon force, which is very weird as no individual quarks can ever be isolated as the gluon force becomes stronger with increasing distance. The protons and neutrons are held together in the atomic nucleus by the strong nuclear force. The electrons which are lepton particles are held together in wave/particle shells around the central nucleus by the electromagnetic force or electroweak force. Atoms are on the size order of Angstroms in length of 1 x 10^-10 meter in size, vastly larger than the central nucleus. When I took chemistry in high school in 1976, I learned about Avogadro's number or that 1 mole of an element or compound is composed of 6.02214179 x 10^23 atoms or molecules which is the atomic or molecular weight of the substance measured in grams. If a drop of rainwater were blown up to the size of the planet Earth, the water molecules composing it would be the size of marbles. In the early 20th century, the physicist Ernest Rutherford did an experiment in which he used a very thin piece of gold foil, still thousands of gold atoms thick and then place a piece of the radioactive element radium which emits a stream of alpha particles or helium nuclei, beta particles or electrons and gamma rays our very short wavelength electromagnetic radiation. What he discovered is that the vast majority of the alpha rays went through the gold foil which must mean that the gold atoms composing the thin gold foil must actually be very empty space, but very rarely some of the particles would be deflected backward by the positive charge of gold atomic nucleus. Werner Heisenberg proposed the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states that on the subatomic level, it is completely and utterly impossible to know the exact position and momentum of a subatomic particle at the exact moment of time as any type of electromagnetic radiation we would use to "look" at a subatomic particle would only serve to deflect its measured position. Now, this is very unlike the way we observe the familiar macroscopic world as in using a camera to take a photograph of something. Actually, as atoms increase in size going up the periodic table, they do not significantly increase in size as the stronger positive pull of the central nucleus serves to pull in the outer electron shells tighter and closer to the nucleus, going up all the way from hydrogen gas to uranium metal. I saw a television PBS documentary on uranium metal and it is interesting to note that until the discovery of elements including radium and uranium being radioactive was discovered in the late 19th century, uranium being colored green was primarily used as a green dye in stained glass. One way that radioactivity was discovered was that it was realized that ordinary photographic film would be exposed and react to the emitted gamma radiation as it would be to visible light. Most radioactive elements will emit alpha rays or helium nuclei, beta rays or electrons, sometimes neutrons and protons and high energy electromagnetic radiation or gamma rays. The clicks of a ginger counter instrument used to detect radioactive material actually detect the ionization caused by the emitted alpha, beta rays or emitted protons but not the gamma radiation. It is only the emitted gamma radiation which is very harmful to humans or animals and not the emitted atomic particles which are completely harmless. I have studied about radioactivity and the basic principle is that certain atomic nuclei of radioactive elements will have this tendency to be unstable and thus spontaneously break apart into the nuclei of 2 lighter elements with a certain mathematical probability of an amount of time called a half life. The half life of some uranium isotopes is extremely long on the orders of several billions of years and thus can be used to determine the age of the Earth and the solar system at around 4.54 billion years old. No igneous rocks found on the Earth's surface are that old, but iron meteorites which have crashed onto the Earth are fragments of the original solar nebula from which the Earth formed from and thus can be accurately aged by radioactive dating. The lengths of the half lives of some isotopes including Carbon-14, Potassium 40 etc. can be used to accurately age a lot of artifacts found in archaeology and human evolution. I have studied a lot about organic chemistry and biochemistry. That is actually what all the life on Earth is based on. The whole principle is that the carbon atom is able to form 4 covalent bonds with other elements and thus provide for a great variety of organic compounds. The French scientist Louis Pasteur discovered in the late 19th century that all carbon based compounds possess a chirality or that all organic carbon compounds can possess mirror images of themselves. I have studied biochemistry and found out that the biochemistry of all living cells is actually very complex which involves the processes of nucleic acid DNA and RNA synthesis and the coding process for protein synthesis in all living cells. Our entire knowledge of the whole process is still in its early infancy as in fact, the structure of the genetic coding molecule, DNA was only figured a little over 60 years ago in the 1950s. Before that the whole process of how genetic traits were passed from one generation to the next was a completely mystery, even after Gregor Mendel figured out the basic principles of genetics and Charles Darwin figured out the basic mechanism of evolution in the mid 19th century.      |
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