The American Heart Association has issued statements this month on research of the terrible health risks that result from Vaping. The strange conclusion so many have, particularly teens, that vaping is "healthy" is false. It may not be as bad as cigarettes, but not by much.
This is relevant and alarming since vaping has gained so many young users over the past five years, and it is on par with the negative and addictive characteristics of smoking cigarettes.
Bottom line is: DON'T SMOKE AND DON'T VAPE! You are simply putting poisons into your body over time, and on average you are taking years off your life. Photo from Roseburg Community Cancer Center.
My students know I am really into the inclusion of helping humanity into our physics classes, and also promoting the skills we ALL need and use every day of our lives, Social-Emotional Learning skills (SEL). It is to the point where ETHS, and most districts around the country, are promoting and including SEL into their district plans and goals. This is good news for everyone, and now the challenge is to all learn what SEL is (and is NOT), why we need it for our students, evidence that it works (otherwise it would be a waste of time and resources), and finally how it can be embedded within content courses.
If you are now aware of Plump Nut, here's an introduction. This is a simple mix of peanut butter, milk, sugar, vitamins and minerals, that is in the form of a paste. It can be stored at room temperature and has a good taste, especially to children. Groups like Doctors Without Borders use plumpy nut in places of extreme poverty and hunger in order to quickly build up the nutrition of their diets. This has been highly effective for a number of years with severely hungry and malnourished children, where a couple weeks of plumpy nut can revitalize their health and energy levels.
I have always loved this example as one where it is sometimes the 'simplest' solution that can solve real problems. Can you come up with simple, creative ways of solving an important problem? It is so tempting to overthink problems, and assume one needs fancy equipment, technologies or mathematics to reach a solution - and often it just take some common sense and trial and error to develop a simple solution. It reminds me of early in the space race, when the US spent all sorts of money to build pens that could write in space, whereas the Soviets used pencils. Einstein was a fan of thinking conceptually about a problem in as simple a way as possible, and then add in the math after a simple physical model was in his head.
In theoretical physics for the past 50 or so years, thousands of the world's best physics minds have dedicated themselves to looking for the quantum theory of gravity. Since Einstein, the dream has been to unify gravity with the other three forces of nature into a single theory - no one has done it, despite the HUGE effort given to this problem for decades. And on the experimental side, nothing has been found that suggests gravity comes in 'bundles' just like something like light comes in bundles of energy we call a photon.
Despite the lack of any substantial breakthrough, everyone keeps plugging away, assuming gravity MUST be quantized since the other forces are. In science, putting blinders on while looking to answer the unknown is dangerous. Part of the process of science is to be skeptical, even of things we do know! Check out this article and video about physicist Jonathan Oppenheim from University College of London, who has made the assumption that maybe gravity is not quantized as we all have been thinking - what if it is how Einstein describes it in General Relativity, where it is not a true force but rather just the consequence of curved space-time?
Prof. Oppenheim and his students are developing a theory, as well as suggestions for experiments, that could test whether gravity is simply different and is a 'classical' force rather than a quantum force. When I teach gravity and Einstein's model, and we get into the modern thinking about quantum gravity, we have over the years asked the question if gravity might not be quantized, and that's why it is so different from the other three forces of nature and why no one has found the unified theory. It is good to see this possibility getting some attention and those isolated few who question the textbooks and group think that can happen in science...scientists are still humans, and fall into the same patterns and traps as everyone else!
I look forward to seeing where this work goes, as all that matters is we make progress in understanding the true nature of Nature, regardless of whether it fits into our assumptions and expectations or not!
Over 100 years later, and we continuously seem to be testing Einstein's ideas about space, time and gravity over and over, in numerous different contexts. The latest is a test of how the passage of time has changed as the universe has expanded!
In Einstein's general theory of relativity (GR), he predicts the 'strength' of what we call gravity, which is really the consequence of the warping of space AND time, can change how quickly time passes. For someone living near a black hole, time would be passing very slowly compared to those of us living on earth, simply due to the gravity being MUCH stronger near a black hole compared to earth's gravity.
