Friday, June 20, 2014

Does Nothing Exists?

Can there ever be nothing?

I mean we're surrounded by matter all the time. Even an "empty" glass is not empty! I know you might think there's nothing in it, but its full of air and air is packed! 1 cubic centimeter of air contains almost 30 quintillion (that's 30 billion billion) molecules.

But if I can remove the air from the glass, I can create what is know as a Vacuum.

The challenge however, is removing all of the air!

To this day the best scientist that have been able to do is to create what they call an Ultra High Vacuum.

At this point, 1 cubic centimeter of space contains not 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules, but a mere, an amazing 100!

To put that on perspective, a vacuum cleaner, like you use at home, hardly changes the thinness of the air at all! In fact, if you use a vacuum cleaner at sea level, the vacuum created inside the operational part of the machine, only reduces the air pressure inside by 20%.

If you want much thinner air, if you want fewer particles per cubic centimeter, you gonna have to leave Earth.

But a lack of  oxygen, a lack of air, a lack of matter can even more dangerous when you go above 19,000 meters above the surface of the earth. This limit is known as Armstrong's limit.

We all know that the boiling point of water decreases as the altitude increases, and then air Armstrong's limit, the boiling point of your own blood, drops all the way down to the temperature of your own body.


If you reach that altitude without wearing a special suit, bubbles will form inside your blood. Your body will inflate twice its normal size.
All right, time to leave earth for good, let's into the space between the planets. There you can find a place where it only contains 10 particles/cu. cm. Then, if you leave our solar system into interstellar space, you only gonna find about 1 particle/cu. cm. The real winner though is the Intergalactic Space. Leave the Milky Way altogether and you can find regions where there is only 1 or two particle -- per cubic METER.

But, would it be possible to find a region of space, where there is absolutely and literally, nothing no matter at all? Well, according to quantum mechanics, NO!

First of all, you've got Gravitational and Electromagnetic fields that extends forever, beacuse the particles that cause those fields to happen have no mass whatsoever,


Now, this is what's really even more Mind-Blowing. There's a thing known as Virtual Particles thats happening all the time, even around us right now where there is no vacuum.

These Virtual Particles come into existence and then disappear, and we believe they exists for a couple of reasons. One big reason is the fact that our Universe continues to expand, even though that shouldn't be necessarily happpen. Where are we getting that extra force that pushes it? That causes it to keep expanding? Well, these particles that pop into existence and disappear maybe the answer.

Even crazier, is the effect what is known as The Casimir Force.

If you put two pieces of metal, nanometers apart, inside a vacuum, they will be pushed together!
One of the Most popular theory for why this happens, is that these Virtual Particles popping into space and dissapearing are actually reflecting off of the metal, but because the plates are so close together, particles with wavelenght longer than that gap, don't get reflected, so there's more virtual Particles pushing on the outside than the inside, then the metal plate contact!


I know these concepts have gotten pretty crazy, but rest assure that really all it means that whenever you feel down and feel like Nothing matters, you're scientifically incorrect. Nothing Matters? There CAN'T BE NOTHING! There's always matter! There's ALWAYS SOMETHING!

Monday, June 9, 2014

Why time flies so quickly as we get older?

How old can we get?
How much time we have? (Senescence)

Whats the oldest age can a person get? Well the world record for the world's longest living people belongs to Jeanne Calment, a french women who lived to be 122.

Right now, at this very moment, there are only 6 people alive who were born in the 1800's, those 6 different people have lived in 3 different centuries, but, as our medical knowledge expands, our understanding of our biology improves, people are living longer and longer.

In fact, scientist believe that based on statistics, the first person who will ever live to be 150 has already been born. It could be one of you! But according to the math, its probably someone who was born 3 years ago.

Here's the thing, as the humans get older, the likelihood of them dying increases, but there are some types of animals that have what is called Negligible Senescence also known as biological immortality, and these types of animals have never been observe to actually age. Animals like the hydra can only die because of accidents, disease or predators.

The world's oldest living individual tree  has clocked in at more than 4,600 years old. It's called the Methuselah tree, and it exists somewhere in this forest. Government official won't actually release its exact location to protect it from vandalism, but its out there.

The lifespan of an organism can be longer than that if you include Clonal Colonies.

These quaking pines all look like individual trees, but they are actually all clones of one genetic code. They all share a common root system, and the root system continues to make more trees, meaning that these trees are all part of the same organism.
Experts had calculated based on the root system, that this one male quaking pine has been around
for at least 80,000 years. They nicknamed it "Pando".

But let's get back to humans, and rather than talking what time is, let's talk about how time feels.

Intense moments of your life are remembered as lasting much longer than that were relatively dull.
Psychologists say that the reason for this, is that our brains, takes deeper and richer memories of events that are novel, or events that intense than ones that aren't.

When  your experiences are intense and novel, your not remembering more things about it, but you are making more copies, rather than just making normal memories.

During stress the amygdala gets involves and also remembers things.Many people believe that is why intense moments are remembered as lasting longer. This phenomenon becomes quite mind blowing in a macro scale.

Think about it this way, when you are a 1 year old baby, 1 year represents 100% of your life, but when you turn 2 years old, that second year was only half of your life, and the next year, you live through as a third of your life, and by the time you turn 80, 1 year represents only an 80th of your life.

These percentages are important because they may explain why your childhood feels like it took so long, but as you get older the years seem to fly by. You have more novel experiences when you are young, you first learn a language, you first see your mother, you fist learn to walk, you have your first kiss. These are deeply and richly remembered by your brain, and so later on, it feels as it took longer to happen.



Now here's what's really mind-blowing.
Let's take a graphical representation of percentage of your life that each successive year is.
1st year = 100%
2nd year = 50%
3ed year = 33%
up to 80 years old = 1.25%


Using this representation, under this model, when you turn 80 years old, and look back at your life, the point that feeks like the middle, isn't your 40's, — it's your 20's!























The good news here is that the more novel things you do, and things you see, places you visit,  and
people you meet, the slower time feels, and the more rich it feels.

So go out there and do something cool, do something weird, do something new!

Sunday, June 8, 2014

KugelBlitz - The Hottest Unfathomable Temperature!

 What is the hottest thing in the universe?
 (A point in which something is so hot, It can't get any Hotter?)
Louie John Castillo

To Find out, Let's begin with the Human Body:

The body's internal temperature fluctuates by about 0.5° Celsius throughout the day in a cycle.


The body's internal temperature reaches its coolest natural healthy temperature at 4:30 in the morning, and at 7 PM it reaches its highest!
But a dangerous fever is not good.
42°C is almost always LETHAL!
 
  •  The highest recorded temperature across all of earth has happened 4 times in death Valley, where it reaches 54°C.
  • 82°C is needed for brewing coffee.
  • At 99°C a cake is done.
  • 1090°C is the temperature of LAVA fresh out of the ground,
You can also make your own Lava in your backyard! seriously...

You can use Fresnel Lenses to focus the Sun's Energy on to whatever you want.
The video snapshot above is piece of Obsidian, a volcanic glass, which can melt into an actual lava right in the backyard.


  • The Sun although at 149,000,000 km, it affects the Earth's overall temperature.
  • The temperature on the Sun's Surface clocks in at 5500°C, but the core where fusion occurs, is ridiculous. The temperature reaches 15 Million°C (AKA 15 Million Kelvin)! 
  • The Kelvin Scale has units that are the same size as the Celsius degree, but it is an absolute Scale. Where 0, is an absolute 0.

    Celsius, Fahrenheit and Kelvin fun Comparison.


If you were to heat only the head of the pin to the temperature of the center of the sun, it would kill any person within 1000 miles out of it!
Any object over absolute zero emits some form of electromagnetic radiation, Human does not glow in "Visible light" like a candle flame, but glows in "infrared light". We cannot see it but infrared cameras can.

The man can be seen "glowing" inside an opaque plastic bag using an infrared camera.





















If you want something to be the right temperature to glow in the visible spectrum, you'll need to reach the DRAPER POINT (about 525°C), at this point, almost any object will begin to glow a dim red.

We can calculate the expected wavelength of radiation coming off of an object because of its temperature, and that wavelength gets smaller and smaller, the hotter and hotter the object gets!
It goes from radio wave, microwave, up to infrared, to visible all the way to X-rays and Gamma rays which are created in the middle of our sun.

At temperatures as hot as the sun, matter exists in a 4th state, not solid, not liquid, not gas, but instead, a state where electrons wander away from the nuclei  — Plasma.
'
You can actually create your own plasma by microwaving the flame in a candle.





















Our sun, although insanely hot, isn't even close to being the hottest thing in the universe.
Compared to the Sun's temperature at 15 Million K, the peak temperature reached during a thermonuclear explosion is 350 Million K, which hardly counts because the temperature achieved so briefly.

But inside the core of the star, 8 times larger than our sun, on the last day of its life, as it collapses on itself, you would reach a temperature of 3 Billion K! or 3 GigaKelvin (if you want to be cool).

At 1 TeraKelvin, things get weird, the electrons aren't the only thing that wander away, the Hadrons themeselves, the protons, the neutrons in the nucleus melts into quarks and glouns, a sort of soup.






















1 teraKelvin is really frighteningly hot! but whats more frightening than this?


The Star WR 104, about 8,000 light-years away from us, its mas is equivalent of 25 of our sun.




















When this star dies and collapse, its internal temperature would be so great that the energy emitted —  the gamma radiation it flings out into space would stronger than the entire amount of energy our sun will ever create in its entire lifetime. The Gamma Ray Bursts are quite narrow so earth is most likely safe. (well, maybe)

When WR 104 collapses, even though its 4,702 trillion miles away, the energy it releases would still be bad! Exposure for 10 seconds would mean losing a quarter of Earth Ozone layer, resulting in mass extinction, food chain depletion and starvation — from 8,000 light-years away!


The Large Hadron Collider lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

Inside the Large Hadron Collider, the Scientist have been able to smash protons into nuclei, resulting in temperatures much larger than TeraKelvin, they have been able to reach ExaKelvin range, but only last for an incredibly brief moment and only involve a small number of particles.

Let's Get even Hotter!

The object's temperature corresponds to the amount of energy it emits.When matter reaches temperature as high those found in the Center of the Sun, an enormous amount of energy is radiated away. The energy emitted by an object often tells us a lot about the temperature of an object.

But, if the Object reaches a temperature of 141,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 K, the radiation it will emit will have a wavelength of 0.000000000000000000000000001616 nanometer, also known as Plank length.  According to the Quantum Mechanics, its the shortest possible distance in our universe,

The Problem is, if we an add more energy to 141,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 K (Plank Temperature), our theories will not work! The object would become hotter then, the temperature would be so hot that what it is would not be considered a temperature.

Theoretically there is no limit to the amount of energy we add into the system — We just don't know what would happen if it got hotter than the plank temperature. Classically, you could argue that much energy in one place would instantly cause a Black Hole to form. A Black Hole formed from an Energy has a Special name — A Kugelblitz.

So, basically what I'm trying to say is when you want to tell someone you like, that you think they are hot, so that hot that not even science can understand, just call them a "Kugelblitz"!

Finally, here is something fun, the Sun is about 4.7 Billion years old, about halfway to its life-cycle, and so far it has burned 100 Earths worth of fuel, which sounds like a lot, but the sun is the size of 300,000 earths, because of that discrepancy, you could have a lot of mathematical fun comparing your energy output to the Sun's. The Sun is way hotter than us and it puts out more energy than us! 

Well, think back again, 1 cubic cm. of human puts out more energy  than an average cubic centimeter of the Sun! Which should make you feel quite warm inside.