Journey to
the Center of an Atom
 |
| Large Hadron Collider |
Professor Chowdhury had an amazing
presentation set up for learning about the microscopic, yet extraordinary atom. He spoke of the prediction (I believe by
Albert Einstein) that atoms would never be able to be separated. That is clearly false, however, since we have
been doing that for years. The Large Hadron
Collider, located in Geneva, is the biggest atom separator on the planet, which
I found very interesting. Just to get a
little off-topic, I remember years ago there was a very large population of
people that were terrified of this machine.
They claimed that it was so powerful that it could in fact cause a black
hole and suck the Earth into it. It
sounds ridiculous, but I remember hearing a lot about it, so it must’ve been a
pretty big concern.
Something I was also intrigued with
was when Professor Chowdhury explained that we as humans are learning to
manipulate atoms into doing specific things.
This is particularly interesting because that is basically chemistry
meeting engineering. Imagine what could
happen if we could control atoms to do anything we needed? The amount of potential energy in an atom is
unreal. We could do so much with that. It could be an alternate source of power, or
anything else. So many doors would be
open to humanity; but this is just me rambling.
The next topic covered was actually
about the movie The Hulk, having to do
with photons being shot into the main
character. In reality, that machine
measures the photons leaving a nucleus, however in that movie the photons were
being shot from the machine. I thought
it was pretty funny that they would do the complete opposite of physics just
for a movie to look “cool.” Not to
mention, the beams that were shot into him cannot actually be seen with the
eyes, so that was not accurate either.
It did get the point across, though, in an amusing way.
Two of my favorite parts of the
presentation were the demos. One was two
eggs, one hard boiled and one raw. He
spun the first and stopped it suddenly, then took his hand away; the audience observed
that it stopped dead. He did the same
with the second egg, the raw egg, however it kept spinning after because the
liquid inside was still spinning.
Apparently, this is what happens with an atom too, which was a unique
way of thinking about it.
The second demo was my personal
favorite. He had a fairly large ring
tied to the end of a string, and began moving the string in a circle, causing
the ring to also spin. Eventually, the
ring was no longer dangling but was flat, almost like it was resting on a
table, yet it was spinning in the air. His
explanation for this was (roughly) as follows: “the ring uses energy to rise
up, and the ring changes its course of spinning. The gravitational system can recognize better
or worse scenarios o its own. Nature likes
to minimize things.” I think that
gravity realizing that one path could use less energy than another in
fascinating. How can something without a
mind, without any way of thinking, control something like that? How could it choose the best way of completing
something? Nature is a ridiculously complex
being which I personally don’t believe we will ever completely understand.
I thoroughly enjoyed Professor
Chowdhury’s presentation on the atom. It
approached the subject from a lot of different angles which kept things very
interesting and made it easier to understand what exactly he was talking about. I have never been particularly interested in
chemistry and atoms and things like that, but it definitely gave me a new
appreciation for it.
