Animation: Another Computer Media Venture

Animation: Another Computer Media Venture

PLEASE READ BEFORE WATCHING VIDEO

Over the last few months, I have decided to take up Computer Animation. People tend to take for granted its difficulty and tediousness. In order to properly build an Animation, you have to organize your original still graphics and a script.

The Animation Below is the "Battle of Cowpens" an American Revolutionary War battle fought in 1781 between the American Militias and Army and the British Army. The Americans are Blue, the British are Red. Daniel Morgan commands the Americans while Banastre Tarleton commands the British. The actual animation involves a voiceover of me explaining the battle setup and fighting while it is happening. The generals speak through humorous text bubbles. If you would like to skip me showing what's happening and seing the battle at the same time, a voiceover-less version of the battle can be found at 1:31, however you probably will not understand what is happening.

PLEASE READ AFTER WATCHING THE VIDEO

You may notice that during the animation, a part with 3 dimensional soldiers. This was created with a video game "mod," a downloadable 3rd party plug-in that allows the player to adjust certain elements, like in this case, turning a Napoleonic War Era into American Militias. The strategy of recording a video game's elements for use in a story or other purposes other than tutorials and walkthroughs is called a "machinima."

The still graphics used here were pretty abundant. In this case, all of the squares, circles, and stars were still graphics as was the background, the title, the arrows and the explosion animation. (The subtitles were added later) The actual animation work coupled with drawing the shapes, background and arrows, not to mention the voice over and subtitles together took me about a weekend to do, with about 2-5 hours of working each day. It took about 6-7 hours to put together.

I do have another animation that I'll probably post in this week sometime, however I can't access it right now. Stay tuned!

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor Published

Recently, I wrote a letter to the editor about Governor Jack Markell's Education Policies. It was published last week! Here is a screen shot of it on the Internet.

The Higgs Boson

THE HIGGS BOSON

Physics is as exciting as ever. The latest exciting event is the discovery of the Higgs Boson.   It was discovered on the 4^th of July but was confirmed by peer review recently. Well, so what’s so special about this “God Particle”?

            First of all, the “God Particle” is a very misleading name. It has nothing to do with religion or creation and only served as a catchy name to sell a book. The Higgs Boson is simply the missing final piece of the puzzle that is the Standard Model. The Standard Model is literally a theory of everything. This theory describes the results of a particle collision or what keeps the sun burning or what the Earth is made of.  The Standard Model predicted most of physics, and each time a new particle was discovered, the physics community wasn’t surprised, as the Standard Model had already predicted the possible existence of such a particle. The only particle that hadn’t been discovered until now that was predicted by the Standard Model is the Higgs Boson. Now since the Standard Model accurately predicts electrons, protons, particle collisions and most of physics, we can assume it is accurate about the Higgs Boson, so in reality, proving the Higgs Boson exists is just “Scientific Fact Checking.”

            But what is the point of the Higgs Boson, what does it do? Nothing. The Higgs Boson does nothing. So why do we care? Because it’s an indicator that the Higgs Field exists. The Higgs Field is what we care about, as it is the Higgs Field that helps with the Weak Nuclear Force and gives mass to all matter. But what is the Higgs Field? Well first we have to figure out what a field is. A field is just a way to spawn particles. Think of the field as a line or plane with squares randomly placed. The more squares there are in one place, the more concentration there is on that place. So if you have the electron field, then where there is concentration you find electrons, where there is no concentration, there are no electrons. What makes the Higgs Field so different from all the different particle fields is the fact that it is super concentrated at every point. This super concentration is the mass of the universe. Sometimes, after a particle collision, a Higgs Boson may appear, as a leftover from the Higgs Field. The Higgs Boson is the proof of the Higgs Field.

            The Higgs Field provides everything in this universe its mass. But what is mass? That’s a very difficult question. So let us ask, what is something without mass. A massless particle, like a photon (a particle of light) travels at the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second. In reality, the speed should be called the speed of massless particles, but light was the first massless particle observed so it remains the speed of light. Massless particles can only travel at the speed of light, but on the other hand anything with mass, like you and me, cannot travel at the speed of light. However, objects with mass can travel at any speed and have the luxury of staying still.  On a different note, massless particles can bounce off of other particles. And since a concentration of the super-concentrated Higgs Field is a particle, a massless particle could bounce off of the concentration. Since it is constantly concentrated, the particle could keep on bouncing and bouncing at the speed of light, but would appear to remain still. And this imparts mass to the particle. Congratulations Higgs Field! So everything, even you, are just high-speed particles constantly bouncing and gaining mass. The Higgs Field also participates in Weak Nuclear force (one of the four fundamental forces along with the Strong force, electromagnetic force, and gravity) and powers stars, causes nuclear decay enabling carbon dating and can cause nuclear explosions.

This Diagram is a visual representation of the Higgs Field in action.
If you want to use the image, please link back here. By Rumi Khan.

                    

            The confirmation of the Higgs Boson is very important as it adds another puzzle piece to the Standard Model and may lead to more discoveries. Its most important contribution is its explanation of how mass is generated in the universe.

           

            

My new app!

I again, haven't posted in a while, But I would like to announce that my latest app has been released! There is a new website over here : http://www.grabbyarmgames.com
Here is a link to the app in iTunes!
Dare to be square

Enjoy!

Hello Everybody!
I would just like to announce after a few days of struggling, I finally got my website online!
Here is the link to my new website!
http://grabbyarmgames.comoj.com/

The Red Square, my first app!

Hello audience!
I haven't actually posted in a while so this post will probably come as a complete surprise.
Most people haven't really known that the whole reason for my low activity is a project I've been working on. I'm in the process of publishing my first app for the appstore. I programmed everything and drew all the graphics. I've been working for it for that last 2 and a half months, all day. Its still in testing, if you have an iPhone and you would like to beta test it, just email me. Here is the game trailer!


I will post again once I publish it!

All About AM Radio

This time I am taking a break from Astrophysics and I am going to talk about AM Radio. This is a simple but exciting project using Snap Circuits.



I hope you enjoyed the post and do comment if you did. Bye.

Chapter Six: Black Holes

A black hole is an often a misunderstood term. It is not really a hole. A black hole is just a really tiny star whose mass equals ∞ and volume equals 0. Let me explain. A Black hole is formed when a star of reaches 30 solar masses collapses. A solar mass is 1,988,920,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms or 1.98892 X 10³⁰. Thirty solar masses are known as Chandrasekhar’s limit. Anything that is above that collapses before it can throw off enough mass or explode (Supernova) will become a black hole. During the time of Chandrasekhar’s, the 20^th century, people thought that a star shrinking down to one point was impossible, even Einstein thought so. But Chandrasekhar was right.

As the tension of the uncertainty principle and gravitational work against each other in big stars, gravity wins and reduces the star to one point. Because the mass is pulled to one singularity, which is impossible, all the laws of science break down. Time slows down. Light, which is both a particle and wave, gets pulled towards the star making it look like a blank spot in space. The light and matter pulled toward the star forms a one-way tube into the black hole that also blocks the singularity from view and is called the event horizon. If anybody were to be on the star at that time they would experience a process called spaghettification. Since the pull on their legs is always stronger than on their head, the person would be pulled apart.

It was often wondered what a naked singularity (without an event horizon blocking out the view) would look like. But before I can explain what it would look like, you must understand gravitational waves. Imagine a cork bobbing in water. The heavier the object, the more gravitational waves would be let out carrying away the energy to make the object a stationary non-rotating object. Just like the cork. When it hits the water it first bobs as water waves carry its energy away. Eventually it will sink as the water waves have carried all its energy away. For a real black hole to form, it should be exactly spherical according to Werner Israel. He said all black holes had to be spherical which meant that the original star must have been exactly spherical. That is impossible. Roger Penrose and John Wheeler said that while the star was becoming a black hole many gravitational waves would carry so much energy away that the black hole would end up perfectly spherical!

There has been many doubters of the black hole theory but there is proof in stars such as Cygnus X-1. The star seems to be rotating around some unseen companion, which is assumed to be a black hole. There exist giant amounts of red-shift energy sources that are just too powerful to be black holes. They are called quasars and are supermassive black holes in the center of a galaxy, which is on the path to destruction. But it might actually be easier to detect small black holes than the supermassives and you’ll find out why in chapter 7!

Forces of Nature

Today's Blog post continues with the discussion of the forces of nature based on chapter six of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

Chapter Five: Elementary Particles and Forces of Nature

This is the summary of chapter five of The brief History of Time. This time I decided to use the medium of video for our discussion. Hope you enjoyed it!

What is Quantum Mechanics?

This is a review of chapter four in A Brief History of Time: The Uncertainty Principle. By the way, if you haven’t read chapters 1-3, you should read them in order first.

Newton’s success with gravity and other theories let the Frenchman, Marquis de Laplace around the early 19^th century to argue that the universe was made in a way such that if we knew the position and velocity of every object at one time then we could predict the future. It is understandable in the case of predicting a planet’s rotation, but predicting human behavior, that’s hard to believe. In early 20^th century, two British scientists, Sir James Jeans and Lord Rayleigh said that a hot body must radiate infinite amount of energy. To avoid this ridiculous result, German scientist Max Planck suggested in 1900 that waves were emitted in packets called quanta and making each quanta required a certain amount of energy that is higher than the frequency of the wave making the energy emitted being finite. This suggestion lead to a bigger discovery. In case you forgot, light is a wave. This suggestion about quantum made a German scientist, Werner Heisenberg to say that the longer the wavelength of an object, the easier it is to tell it’s velocity and harder to tell the position and vice-versa with a high wavelength. Because of this, Laplace’s argument might be true, but will never be used since it impossible to tell and objects’ position and velocity at the same time. This became known as the Uncertainty Principle. If you multiply the uncertainty in the position of a particle times the uncertainty of the velocity of the particle multiplied by the mass of the particle your product will always be less than a certain amount known as the Plank’s constant.

Because of the Uncertainty Principle, a new theory called Quantum Mechanics, led by Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac, sprang up in the 1920’s. This theory stated that objects did not have specific positions and velocity but rather a quantum state, in which they had a combination of both. In general, Quantum Mechanics didn’t predict a single observation rather the probability of that observation. This received a lot of criticism, especially from Einstein but most scientists agreed with it. Quantum Mechanics tells that things can’t be particles or waves, but it is the observation that is a particle or wave. A result of this idea is that when two wave crests and two wave troughs occur at the same time, the wave is reinforced and in phase. If the crests happen at the same time as a trough then both waves cancel each other out and the wave is out of phase.

A good example of this is the two slit experiment. This experiment is shown in the picture above. Say you have a partition with two narrow slits. There is a light source shining at it. Behind the slit is a screen. On the slit, the light creates a pattern of light and dark fringes. How is that possible? When the light passes through the slit the distance of the screen for each photon traveling through the partition is different. Because of that when the light reaches the screen, some of the light will be in phase, and some will be out of phase. The light out of phase will cancel each other out making the dark pattern and the light in phase will reinforce each other and create the light fringe. This results in the pattern of light and dark fringes. Now the remarkable thing about this experiment is that if you replace the source of light by a source of particles which have a definite speed, like an electron, you’ll get the same light and dark fringe pattern. If the partition had one slit, you would have a uniformly amount of electrons on the screen. This whole experiment is proves that waves can interfere with each other.

Before Quantum Mechanics is that the electrons should lose energy and spiral into the nucleus. That means all matter should collapse into a very high density. That can’t be true because it has not happened to all matter! A partial solution was discovered by Danish scientist Niels Bohr in 1913. He said that electrons could only orbit from certain distances form the nucleus. The problem with this is that it was seemed very reasonless. This was fixed in Quantum Mechanics because it said that the electron would travel like a wave.

Quantum Mechanics has helped in technology, creating circuits, building computers and televisions, chemistry, and even biology. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have not fully been combined, but will have to work together with other forces of nature to create a single unified theory of the universe.

Chapter Three: The Expanding Universe from A Brief History of Time

The third chapter in A Brief History of Time is called The Expanding Universe. This chapter first begins to talk about "fixed stars" and how they really aren't fixed. It's just that they move so slowly, they appear fixed. The book continues by talking about how small Earth is in comparison with our solar system, our galaxy, and even our Local Group. The book talks about how people know so much about stars. Scientists look at a star's luminosity and color to learn about it. If a star is brighter, it is closer, darker means farther. The scientist also use color to determine which elements a star is made of. Light is a type of wave. The largest waveleghnths to the shortest in order are: radio waves, about a meter, microwaves, o.1 meters, infared, 0.00001 meters, visible light, 0.000001 to 0.0000001 meters, ultraviolet, o.ooooooo1 meters, x-rays, 0.0000000001 meters, and gamma rays, 0.000000000000001 meters. The longer the wavelength, the more "redder" it is, the more shorter, the more " bluer" it is. If a stationary object is giving a certain wavelength, you will recieve the same wavelength. If an object is moving away, the length will be longer, if it is moving to you, it will be shorter. This is called the doppler effect and it is explained in the picture above. Edward Hubble, who was currently using wavelenghths to measure the movement of the stars, discovered that almost all stars were on the red side of the spectrum. In 1929, he published a paper saying that the entire universe must be expanding.

If the universe was expanding, shouldn't it eventually collapse? General Relativity Theory supported that the universe must be in motion. Einstien, who liked a static universe, introduced an " antigravity force" that keeps the universe in balance. The only person willing to take Hubble seriously was Alexander Friedmann. Friedmann made two assumptions about the universe: It looks approximatly identical in whichever direction you look and that this would be true wherever you were. In 1965, two American physisist, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were working with a sensitive microwave detector. The detector detected an almost equal amount of microwave energy outside the atmosphere. They had accidently proved the first of Friedmann's assumptions! As for the second assumption, there has been nothing to prove or disprove it. Friedmann, seeing that the galaxies are moving apart theorized that they must have been at the same place, long ago. This led to the first Friedmann model of the universe, saying that the world began with the Big Bang and will begin to expand, and eventually contract into the Big Crunch. They're actually two other models, one stating the universe will expand forever and the other saying the universe expansion force will eventually become smaller and smaller but never quite reach zero. No one knows which model represents our universe.

A lot of people didn't like the big bang theory but it was became generally accepted. In 1965, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician said that General Relativity Theory predicted the Big Bang. He said that a star's gravity might pull all the mass into zero volume. This space-time bending phenomena is called a black hole. In the next few years Stephen Hawking used this theory, reversed it and removed technicality with complex mathematics. In 1970, Penrose and Hawking wrote a paper that proved the Big Bang. This paper used general relativity as proof, but in turn saying that general relativity is a partial theory. This therory will have to combine with the quantum theory of gravity.

Chapter Two: Space and Time

10.02.10

The second chapter of A Brief History of Time is called Space and Time. In this chapter Hawkings talks about the fact that, in zero air resistance, any 2 objects will fall at the same time. Say you have one lead ball. And then you have another lead ball that is twice as heavy. Gravity will pull on it twice as hard on it as it will on the other ball. Then how do they both land at the same time? I'm getting to that. If you have 2 cars, one 50cc and another 100cc and the 100cc one is exactly twice as big as the 50cc, they will both go at equal speeds. Same with the balls. The fact that the second ball is twice as big as the other one cancels out the fact that is being tugged by gravity twice as much as the other one giving both balls an equal acceleration.

The chapter explains how this is relevant to Newton's First Law and gravity. If the sun is twice as big, the force is twice as big. The book then explains that measuring space is not absolute. Huh, how is that possible? Say there are 2 ping-pong matches. One takes place on the sidewalk, and one takes place on a bus. Say, according to the people on the bus, the ball on this match is going at 4 miles per hour. According to the the people on the sidewalk, the ball is going 44 miles per hour. Neither of them are wrong. The ball could have moved 9 feet for the people on the bus and 39 feet for the people on the sidewalk. Therefore, space is not absolute. But time is, right?

Wrong! In 1676, a Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer noticed that their seemed to be a delay in the timing of Jupiter's moon. He argued that this was because light seemed to have actually taken time to reach Earth. Until then, everyone thought light had an infinite speed. In 1865 a British physicist James Clerk Maxwell made a theory of electricity and magnetism which predicted that light should have a fixed speed. But absolute space and speed were gotten rid of because of Newton, as mentioned above. It was then suggested that a substance called "Ether" that was everywhere, even in "empty space." Light would travel through the ether like sound waves through air, and the speed should be relative to the ether. Earths was orbiting through the ether so the speed of light in the direction of our revolution should be higher than if measured in the right angle of the revolution.

In 1887, the Americans Albert Michelson and Edward Motley timed light in the direction of the revolution and of right angles and found out that the times were the same! A bunch of ether supporters tried to say why they turned up with these results, but in 1905, Einstein created the death blow to ether. He said that ether completely unnecessary if we abandon the idea of absolute time. He said that the speed of light is fixed, regardless of the viewer. This idea lead to the famous e=mc². It means that energy is mass accelerated to the speed of light. It also means that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more mass the object gains and the more energy you need to feed in. Say when you reach 10% the speed of light the objects mass will increase by 0.5 but when you reach 90% the mass will double, including all the mass accumulated till 89%. When the object reaches the speed of light, it will have infinite mass so you will need an infinite amount of energy which is impossible. Therefore all regular objects are limited and cannot go the speed of light.

Then the book talks about the four dimensions and how you can graph the relations between them: length, width, height, and time. You can use time-space graphs and light cones. Einstein explained that gravity is a result of the fact that space-time is not flat. It can be bent if an object's mass is big in enough! It can even bend light. For an example, if a distant star's light is shining close enough the sun, Earth will see the star in a different place than it really is. This was proved during a solar eclipse in 1919 by a British team. Since light is a wave that gets weaker and weaker the farther away from it's source, Einstein predicted that time appears to be slower the closer you are to the ground. This was proven in 1967 when a tower was built with a clock on the bottom and a clock at the top. The upper one slowly became ahead of the smaller one. If time and space are not absolute, this brought up questions like, did the universe have a beginning, or will it have an end.

Our Understanding of the Universe

Saturday| 9.25.10

From now on, every week, I'm going to post a summary for each chapter of the book A Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking. The book explains the universe for those of you who don't understand it. Some topics include black holes, the hunt for the grand unification theory, the arrow of time, the expansion of the universe, quantum mechanics, the beginning and the end of the universe, the uncertainty principle, the forces, and, in the newest edition, wormholes and time travel. You can buy the book here.

The first chapter is called Our view of the Universe. It mainly tells the history of the scientists trying to explain the universe. First it reports two reasons why Aristotle thought the Earth was spherical. He said that Earth has to be spherical in order to get a full shadow on the moon, unless if total eclipses only happened when the Sun is directly above the Earth. Otherwise, if the Earth was flat, all eclipses would have elliptical shadows on the moon. He also saw that the North Star was lower in the sky in the Southern Hemisphere which proves this theory.

Then, the book goes on and describes the Ptolemac version of the universe and compares it with the Copernican model. Next, the book briefly describes Isaac Newton's idea of gravity. But if Newton's ideas of gravity are true, and if the universe is finite, then eventually everything would be pulled into one single point -- singularity. Newton countered by arguing that the Universe must be infinite. But in 1823, a German philosopher, Henrich Obairs, said that if the universe was infinite, almost all lines of sight would end in a star making the night sky as bright as the sun. And any intervening matter would heated up by the light until it too, would be glowing as bright as a star making the Earth a very hot place.

Then Hawking talks about theories that explain what happened before the universe began, saying it depends on your religious belief. Then he talks about how Edward Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. He then explained that physic's goal is to create a unified theory that explains the universe in one go. Since it would be really hard to do that, we have separated it in two partial theories: the theory of relativity (e=mc² ), and quantum mechanics. We hope to combine both theories into this great theory. That theory should determine everything, even the outcome of the search for this very theory! Then, he tells that this search will might not even affect our lifestyle, but will quench our thirst for knowledge!

See my new video on Eduation Reform