75th Birthday for the Transistor - making modern life possible

 As far as we're concerned, the transistor is one of the greatest discoveries in human history...completely serious about this! It allowed for the creation of an electronic world, which literally everything is now dependent on. Learn a bit about it! 

Climate and Humanitarian issue - Landfills and Methane gas emissions

 We all know 8 billion humans are going to produce A LOT of waste everyday that goes to landfills in every country around the world. In a place like India, where human population density within cities is among the highest in the world, and combined with millions living in extreme poverty, some horrific situations can develop, such as landfills that are over 200 feet tall (as tall as the Taj Mahal). Hundreds of thousands of people live in the shadows of these literal mountains of trash. 

But an additional consequence is the decay of much of that garbage, and one of the gases released in decay is methane - a greenhouse gas many times worse than carbon dioxide. The amount of methane leaked from a single landfill this large is the same as the annual release from 350,000 cars in America. It is a humanitarian health emergency for those who are already extremely poor, but also a larger climate contributor. What is the answer to these situations??? The photo is from New Dehli, India, in April of 2022.

Perhaps you'll be inspired by this - bringing Mars samples back to Earth

 Check out a plan by NASA and others to bring back Mars soil and rock samples to Earth, using multiple spacecraft and vehicles. Would you ever want to be involved with something like this? It is very ambitious and innovative, to be sure. But also, what are the "unintended consequences" of doing this? Are there any we can and should think about? Very interesting, regardless, that humans have this sort of reach and capability to even consider doing this.

Movie of the early evolution of the universe, up to 100 million years after Big Bang

 An amazing animation coming from a supercomputer simulation of the evolution of the universe following the Big Bang has been published. This movie shows how it took tens of millions of years for the first gas atoms and molecules (almost entirely hydrogen) to begin to come together under gravity to form the first stars. What this new simulation does for the first time is include the interaction between radiation from the Big Bang and the first stars and matter (gas clouds). Filaments of gas formed in a web-like pattern, which are the white strands that develop in the movie. It is along these massive strands where more stars and eventually the first galaxies formed. We see web-like patterns of matter forming a superstructure to the universe to this day! Very cool! This is part of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which attempts to understand the birth and evolution of the universe.

The Proton - FAR from the basic, boring particle you've been taught

 Protons are incredibly complex quantum critters, it turns out! Most learn they are particles stuck in the nucleus. A few learn they are not fundamental particles, but instead made from quarks (2 ups, 1 down). And basically no one learns they are complex, changing bags of gluons and quarks, in a quantum world where just about anything goes! The theory of what happens in the nucleus and nucleons is quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is a difficult mathematical theory, to say the least. 

Check out this article from Quanta Magazine (which I also highly recommend)!

UN Adaptation Report

 This U.N. report looks at adaptive strategies around the world for climate change that is already here and what's coming. Adaptation to climate change is one of two necessary pathways running in parallel - the second is direct mitigation efforts to reduce the effect of climate change. Projections for costs of each are staggering, and it's not clear whether much of either will be able to get done without the committed financial backing of developed nations.

Evanstonian article about EMPATHY Project

 A big thank you to Ethan and the Evanstonian staff for the nice article about our EMPATHY Project. This is the effort to raise money for friends in Malawi, in order to ensure children have enough food for an entire school year so they can remain in school. With this becoming a national model, we hope that some 10,000 children will benefit from this program! 

If willing and able, donations can always be made here. 

Two AI sites you may want to try

 A couple AI sites, courtesy of Luca:

Drawing one: https://www.craiyon.com/

You need an account for this one, but it will write whatever you prompt it to: https://beta.openai.com/playground.

Some Money for Malawi!

 THANK YOUs go out to everyone who helped either in school or online, where we raised a quick $1020 to send to our friends in Malawi! This is equivalent to 1.042 million kwacha, and will be used by some new schools to prepare land for planting crops as they go into their spring and planting season. Our model will help over 10,000 children once the couple dozen schools harvest their crops towards the end of their summer in 2023. Each harvest will feed the kids at the school for an entire year, and this model has largely been adopted as a national model to avoid famine and kids missing school due to hunger.

See our EMPATHY Project site for details. We also have a GoFundMe site to raise money any time. 

For those who like the MATH in Physics: REAL Quantum Mechanics, the Hydrogen Atom

 Back in 2013, a student who was in multivariable calculus wanted to apply the math to something in physics. She was a real go-getter, so I suggested she try to do REAL Quantum Mechanics and use her MV to figure out the hard-core derivation of a hydrogen atom's energy states and wave function. Katie took that challenge and ran with it! 

Check out her paper!! She hand-wrote a ~30 page paper as a 'how to do QM' guide for other students. She derived everything, learned the solutions to different partial differential equations (using things like Legendre polynomials, spherical harmonics, Laguerre polynomials, etc.). It is beautiful, impressive work! Katie is presently working on her PhD in physics, and continues to be amazing. 

This paper shows the power of higher level mathematics in physics, as well as the level of difficulty of QM and how impressive the scientists who discovered all this were. 

Storing energy using a "Sand Battery" - very clever!

 Here's an interesting idea that is working in Finland:

Use SAND to store energy from sources like solar and wind energy! Called a sand battery, excess energy not being used in real time from, say, solar cells, can be stored in the form of heat for future use (such as when the sun goes down). Sand batteries are being used in towns in Finland with great success, so it will be interesting to see if this catches on in other places. 

Clever ideas like this will only help with the transition from fossil fuels to 'clean' energies around the world. 

Hurricane Ian Storm Surge - devastating power of nature

Thanks to John B. who found this video: This video is from Hurricane Ian in south Florida. This is a storm surge, where the 150 mph wind blows the top layers of water from the Gulf of Mexico, and pushes it up on the land. Keep in mind that the coastline is just a couple feet above sea level, and the surge was anywhere from 8-16 feet high depending on where you look. Disastrous flooding results, and as seen in this, small buildings and homes are removed by the water.

Sea level rise - new study concludes at least 10 inch rise from Greenland melting

 A new study of Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheets concludes, using a conservative model, that oceans will rise at least 10 inches over the coming years/decades. While no timeline was given, this melting will occur regardless of what humans do to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The reason is that the melting cycle has already been put into motion, and the combination of warming ocean temps, water from melted ice (that then melts more ice...sort of like pouring liquid water on ice cubes in a sink will melt the ice), and the fact that warming water expands in volume, means this rise is inevitable. Also, using sophisticated radar techniques, dozens of lakes below the surface ice have been discovered - this means there is melting happening underneath the ice that we had not observed before. Often some computer models were underestimating the rate of melting, and as further research is done more mechanisms for melting are being discovered to help us understand why the rates are quickening.

What's significant about Greenland's ice sheets is that they are land-based. They are not icebergs already in the water. If an iceberg melts, there won't be any rise. However, run-off water from land is new water in the ocean, and makes sea levels rise. 

Atoms and how we can literally take images of them

 This is a video showing some of the microscopes and techniques used to get images of INDIVIDUAL ATOMS!! Incredibly cool!!!

Status of rivers around the world - drying up in northern hemisphere

 The world's rivers have had a very hard and bad summer around the world. Many are becoming impassable for shipping because they are so low, and also these are water sources for tens to hundreds of millions of people. It is clear they are drying up from so many droughts that have been in progress, especially in the northern hemisphere where most of the land-mass of the earth is located. And those droughts have been accelerated and made worse through human-induced climate change. Check out this link where you can see satellite photos of 6 major rivers in the past compared to today. 

This photo is from 2019 in India - the Narmada River in the Narsinghpur Province. There's little left for this and many more farmers along that river. 

Welcome, Juniors!! Check out before school if interested!

 This is meant for the incoming juniors for 3 Chem/Phys Mechanics. For those who want to see the slides from our Chem/Phys Boot Camp, here they are.

I can only hope you've had a wonderful, restful and fun summer! We are so looking forward to meeting you and working with you this year. We tend to have a lot of fun as the next two years progress!

While we have no summer assignments for the course, some students like to get a preview of the first week or so of the course, and in particular reviewing some of the mathematical concepts and topics we will need from here on out. This generally boils down to remembering how to do vector algebra, and starting the process of learning basic calculus (derivatives and integrals). Just about everyone will be in the same boat if you have not yet had any calculus, whether in BC/AB calculus or Pre-calculus. Don't worry, if you know how to graph and find slopes, you can begin to understand and do calculus!! 

Below are some links to videos that introduce some of the math, as well as a welcoming video for the program. 

Vector addition is most important for vectors. Vector multiplication we won't need for a while.

Derivatives are important in STEM from now on. These re-define things like velocity and acceleration, and MUCH more as time goes on. We'll worry about integration once school starts. 

Here's a summary of the program.  And for anyone who might have an interest in independent research, this summarizes our CABS site. We'll talk about this and so much more the first couple days of school! 

All our videos are listed at http://docvphysics.blogspot.com/p/list-of-all-how-to-videos.html. If you want a sense of how I think about education in general, feel free to check out my new TED Talk, released a couple weeks ago (we'll talk a lot about this over time, as well as SO many other topics!). Here's my experiment from back in graduate school, one of the giant detectors at Fermilab: 

TED Talk - Quantum Revolution of Education

 If you're interested, it may be good for a few laughs! #TED #TEDx #TEDtalks

Netlogo - learn to program and use it for any type of gent-based research!

 Northwestern University researchers created a programming platform called Netlogo some years ago, and it's likely a million students, graduate students and even professors have used this to learn how to program, run its hundreds of prewritten simulations in just about every STEM field for assignments, or used it for actual, high-level research that is agent-based. 

By agents, we mean individual objects or even organisms. Netlogo is designed to, as easily as can be done, develop programs and simulations where individual entities interact with each other by some set of rules or mathematical law. You can do orbits, for example, since this is just individual objects interacting through Newton's law of gravity. You can do growth of bacteria, since those are individual organisms that follow some statistical rule for reproduction. You can simulate forest fires since each tree is an individual organism (an agent), and the spread of fire follows a relatively simple rule (if a neighboring tree catches fire, those trees next to it will catch on fire). 

It is worthwhile to check this out. You can download it, or run it on the Web, so even ChromeBooks can use Netlogo. There is a library with hundreds of examples, and you are free to modify the code for any of them to learn the language and create your own versions of the original simulation! 

STEM Research for ETHS

 Check out some videos that focus on how and where to find reliable STEM information for research, research contests for high school students, and what's up with a science research report for a project you might do. Watch each on YouTube and find the links to the Slides in the video description. 

Series about the Quantum Revolution of Education!

 Check out a 5-part series describing the gist of what I call the Quantum Revolution of Education. The idea is that we need a new MINDSET for students, which is actually inspired by Particle-Wave Duality found in quantum science! I call it the Quantum Mechanical Student. This is also the topic of my TED talk, which will be linked once published on the TED platform. 

The first episode is linked below, and links to the other 4 episodes are in the description of this video (must watch it on YouTube to see the description). Here are the links for convenience: 

Episode 2: Inspiration from particle-wave duality: https://youtu.be/MNfRYM2eawY Episode 3: Newtonian education - where we are and have been: https://youtu.be/SwG6oV4-VVA Episode 4: The Quantum Mechanical Student: https://youtu.be/OymOFEg8Jck Episode 5: What Quantum Education can look like: https://youtu.be/xL30Lhw9gt0

CONGRATULATIONS, CLASS OF 2022!!!

 Today the Class of 2022 officially graduated!! I am SO PROUD of each and every one of them I had in my classes, and it is such a talented, compassionate group who will do wonderful things in their futures!! While I'll miss them tremendously, I am also thrilled they have the chance to go into the world on their own terms and figure out what they want to do with their education and careers. All my best wishes to them, always!!

TEDxNorthwesternU conference article

 This is the Daily Northwestern article on the TEDx conference at NU on May 18. Just a few days afterward, this commentary article was published and distributed in the NSTA journal The Science Teacher, about the quantum mechanical student, a central theme and change in mindset for the TED talk. 

An inspiring scientist - Templeton Prize Award winner

 The Templeton Prize is given to inspirational people, in any field, who has helped humanity with big, fundamental questions and has inspired generations to improve the human condition. This year's winner is Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize winning physicist who thinks deeply about 'what it all means.' Get inspired in a few minutes of watching this announcement: 

CubeSat team places 2nd in nation!!

 Congratulations to our CubeSat team! They finished 2nd in the nation after the final presentations were given!! 

They were one of 20 teams selected from across the country to participate in the first CubeSat Challenge developed by the Beaver Works group at MIT, and one of 6 to be included in the final presentations at the national (online) conference. 

The team consisted of members: 

Connor McGuire, Luca Zerega, Rohil Bose, Meris Goldfarb, and William Comess. 

Nicely done! This was a highly technical project involving learning about, through online coursework, space science, satellite systems, electronics built around a Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth platform, and computer programming to make it all work. You can watch final presentations here. ETHS's begins around the 33:25 minute mark of the finals. 

JPL's Basics of Space Flight

 NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, is the nerve center for all space missions throughout the solar system. If you are interested in astronomy, aerospace or aeronautical engineering, space mechanics and dynamics, or just think it's a cool topic, their site for the basics of space flight is good and understandable to a high school student. Check it out! 

THIS is what EMPATHY Project is all about!!

 Our EMPATHY Project is our partnership with friends on the ground in Malawi, Africa. As one of the top 10 poorest countries on Earth, Malawians occasionally experience periods of hunger, and even famine (such as in 2014-15). In order to keep children fed and in school, we developed our model where schools purchase land and grow their own crops. We fundraise in Evanston in order to help fund this process. Here are results from the past few days...kids with food and water!! 

We're always open to and accepting donations. Relatively small numbers of US dollars can be a small fortune in Malawi. And, several more schools/villages want to adopt this model. Thank you to all who have helped over the last five years to make this happen!!

EARTH DAY: If only we could get everyone on the planet to watch this TED talk...

 If you can watch this video and still deny something weird is not going on with our planet, then I would likely conclude you have intellectual issues. A wonderful classic TED talk by James Balog, showing what is happening to the world's glaciers and ice sheets through time-lapse photography. Check it out. It is pretty convincing. Happy Earth Day, and let's never stop trying to make change for the health of our planet and future generations...

What is Quantum Science & Why Should we Care in K-12 education?

 I was honored to be asked to be on this panel and state webinar to discuss the importance of including more quantum science (QS) into K-12 education, especially in HS, if for any other reason to increase the exposure of students to QS. Keep in mind that the quantum revolution began 120 years ago!! This is NOT new material, and there is a lot we can do to improve awareness and some basic level of knowledge to young students so they have opportunities to participate and work in countless fields and industries that rely on QS. This is projected to be a trillion $ sector of the global economy in the near future, and we are already short on the workforce. 

The webinar was recorded on World Quantum Day, April 14, and run by the Illinois Department of Innovation & Technology - thank you for the invitation! Here's a quick quantum introduction! 

Earth Day 2022 on Friday, April 22

 Earth Day is on Friday, April 22. Consider the U.N. SDGs again - are there little things you can do this week, and then perhaps every week, to help. Reducing time in the shower. Recycling. Turning lights and other electrical devices/appliances off. Composting food waste. Buying food you need, and reducing food waste and excess. Put some plants in the ground. Pick up litter in the neighborhood. Donate to and/or volunteer at a favorite organization doing good work. Post these types of actions on your social media platforms, encourage others to do the same (remember the multiplier effect on impact!). Be kind, compassionate and empathetic to others, while being grateful and respectful for what we have in our lives compared to most on the planet. 

Thanks for considering!! This is the only home we have, let's respect it and take care of it, always. 

The String Theory song

 This is just phun!! 

Torque - what is it, and how do we find it?

 For objects that can rotate, it turns out that applying a force to it doesn't necessarily mean the object will rotate. It also depends on where the force is applied, and at what angle it is applied. This combination of force, distance and angle is called torque. 

This video introduces how to find the magnitude of torque, Frsin(beta), and provides numerous examples of how to find the torque due to various forces. Check it out, and see if it makes any sense. 

What cosmic radiation can do to electronics

 An interesting effect that does happen from time to time on earth, and frequently in satellite electronics, is cosmic radiation coming through and causing damage to electronics. This Veritasium video gives a number of real examples, as well as the science behind it. Some of you may be interested in this! 

A good General Relativity video about what GR is all about

 Check out a good intro to what General Relativity, Einstein's masterpiece, is all about. Thanks to MinutePhysics for this description. 

A curiosity post...what do you think about this one?

 Here's a link to check out, and see what you think. This link is for parents of younger children.

What is the Earth's inner core made of?

 New studies of simulations of what the Earth's most inner core is made of suggest a strange form of matter - superionic matter - could exist. Superionic matter is a type of matter that has behaviors of both solid and liquid states. The inner core is at such ridiculous pressures and temperatures, no one has been able to confidently deduce what's there. 

Studies of earthquake waves passing through the core have some strange characteristics that have not been explained, and simulations with superionic material seem to be a better match to the recorded data. It seems that iron in the material would stay fixed in a lattice, like a solid, but then other types of atoms such as oxygen and hydrogen would flow through the lattice, more like a liquid. I would imagine this all could have some relevance to better understanding the earth's magnetic field production, depending on the nature of the flow and how ionic it may be, so we'll see in coming years what research shows. 

Fermilab Online Open House, February 9-13

 If you want to check out the schedule for some online, virtual sessions for the Fermilab Open House, check out this site and you can register for them! 

UIUC Engineering Open House, in April

 The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has one of the elite engineering colleges in the world, with 39 Top-10 ranked degree programs for undergraduate and graduate levels. I don't think any other school can say this. Anyhow, they put on a pretty good show each year with their Engineering Open House. This year it is on April 8-9, 2022, and will go back to in-person. 

If you want to check out the engineering programs, that would be the weekend to see so much and talk to people from literally every department within the engineering college. It's about a 2.5 hour drive to UIUC, so check it out if you have a chance!! The photo below is of the Bardeen Quad on Engineering Campus (a small portion of the engineering campus). John Bardeen is the professor I've mentioned who is the only person to win 2 Nobels in Physics, for the transistor and theory of superconductivity. 

Malawi Fundraiser for 2022 Under Way! Help out if you can

 We have begun out fundraising effort for our friends in Malawi! The money we have raised over the past five years have helped schools in Malawi, Africa, one of the top ten poorest countries in the world, purchase land, seed, fertilizer, pesticides, tools, and an irrigation system for dry season and future droughts. This has allowed the schools to feed over 1500 students for an entire school year with each harvest! This model is in response to the last famine the region experienced back in 2014-2015, and we refer to it as our EMPATHY Project.

We are thrilled that more schools will begin this process, so we literally need seed money for them to begin! Help out if you are able to through our GoFundMe site.  

This video provides some more detail about this work. THANK YOU for your consideration!!!

James Webb Telescope nearing operational phase

 The Webb space telescope, a marvel of modern science, technology, and engineering, has reached its home for years to come, orbiting the sun at a point known as L2, one of the Lagrange points of the Sun-Earth system. This is around 1 million miles from earth (4x's the distance to the moon). See this article for more information about Lagrange points in a 2-body gravitational systems, which are points of balance between the two gravitational forces on a small object at the Lagrange point and the 'centrifugal' force on the object at the Lagrange point (since objects moving in orbits want to be flung outward if they had their way due to their inertia). 

This is the next-generation telescope for astronomers around the world, and soon the Webb team will begin to focus this unique telescope and begin to calibrate its various detection systems to do highly anticipated science! 

Our World in Data - Amazing site!

  Looking for data and trends in countless areas of life? The Our World in Data site, run through the University of Oxford, is amazing! It has thousands of interactive graphs on everything from world hunger to electricity accessibility to education to war to agriculture...

It is also a site used in teaching for the world's best universities and sponsored by the top scientific and media-based organizations on the planet. Use it when writing papers for school or doing your own research. 

It is difficult to solve the world's big problems if one does not know the extent of the problems, and this site helps address that issue! 

Get beyond the politics of big problems, and go after the actual data to help figure it out!