Name: Norman Anthony Aguero
Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
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That singular sensation you're feeling is the very fabric of spacetime disintegrating around your ears.
If you ask an astrophysicist what a singularity is, he'll likely say it's a point in space where matter has become infinitely dense and the resulting gravitational field has dramatically warped space and time.
If you ask a mathematician what a singularity is, he'll tell you it's an uncomputable point for which you can compute all the surrounding points. It's the hole in the piece of graph paper.
These two definitions mean pretty much the same thing, but neither conveys how a singularity epitomizes the mind-bending funhouse atmosphere of the collective oxymoron we laughably refer to as "reality."
The physical idea of a singularity is intimately tied to the mathematical concept. An uncomputable point in space invariably represents the most extreme conditions known to science. Singularities are arguably the best available evidence that the universe is made out of math, because it appears that reality breaks down at the same place that math breaks down.
Around the start of the 20th century, people began to realize that the universe was a lot weirder than previously thought. Physicists began to speculate about what would happen when a dying star collapsed, and in 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder put forward a model of the star collapsing to a "single point" -- compacting to infinitesmal size and reaching a measurement of density which is mathematically infinite, at which point the equations to describe the interior of the object break down, creating a singularity.
Physicist John Wheeler first used the phrase "black hole" to describe this phenomenon, which warps the very fabric of space and time into strange shapes. A black hole is a singularity so dense that it absorbs virtually everything around it, even light. Even space collapses, and the spacetime distortion creates an "event horizon" -- the point of no return.
Science fiction writers and physicists have speculated that black holes might be a gateway to other universes, parallel worlds, higher dimensions or some commbination of all three.
In sci-fi, this theory offers the possibility of cheerful jaunts in which daring adventurers somehow fly their spaceships through the event horizon and pop out on the other side, ready to explore strange new worlds.
While some physicists do believe black holes transport matter into another universe, traveling through a black hole is not unlike travelling through a wood chipper. All your parts end up on the other side, but not in their original configuration. And you won't enjoy the trip. Under this theory, the black hole purees all the matter that falls into it and shoots it out in a jet somewhere else in this universe or an entirely different one.
Anything that falls into the event horizon is gone forever, pulverized into a subatomic paste and trapped in a web of frozen time. There are no fancy shields or clever tricks that could possibly ease the way. There is no loophole for adventure, unless you consider entering the afterlife an adventure. By definition, a black hole disassembles anything caught in its web and reduces it to component parts so small they cannot be observed by even the most exacting microscope.
Because of the event horizon, black holes cannot be directly observed and no information can emerge from inside. Like a reclusive rock star, you can only spot a black hole by the disaster scene it creates in the neighborhood. Typical effects include a giant spiralling swirl of matter falling into the singularity. As the matter is pulverized (but before it falls into the event horizon), it emits X-rays, highly energetic radiation that moves fast enough to escape the black hole's gravity.
By studying these X-rays, scientists have been able use radio telescopes to spot several likely black holes, including a super-massive one in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is devouring stars at a phenomenal rate. This phenomenon may be related to the formation of galaxies, as well as their spiral structure.
Black holes can also create strange effects in their immediate vicinity. Quasars, the brightest objects known to astronomy, are believed to consist of a super-hot vortex of gas and material detritus rapidly spinning around a supermassive black hole. This notion is extremely hypothetical, however, since the closest quasars are billions of light years away from our own galaxy.
This distance also suggests that quasars are very old, possibly forming shortly after the Big Bang. There are many theories about exactly what we mean when we say "Big Bang," and none of them are 100 percent certain (or anywhere close). Many of these theories propose that the entire universe began as a singularity -- the ultimate black hole -- which then exploded/expanded/inflated into our universe for reasons which are entirely unclear.
Black holes may come in some exotic flavors, such as the hypothetical "naked singularity," which could theoretically be directly observed from the outside (unlike a black hole singularity, which is hidden by the blackness and the holeness).
Naked singularities have been proven mathematically feasible, which is not to say that you're especially likely to pass one while driving home from work.
All black holes are singularities, but not all singularities are black holes. A singularity simply refers to the point in a physical process where the equations break down. There are theoretically other non-black hole singularities which can occur in quantum physics, at the very small scales where reality gets weird.
One possible singularity was observed recently in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, New York. Whilst scientists were smashing tiny particles together just to see what would happen, a small black-hole-like phenomenon popped up in the middle of a tiny fireball. The fireball was more or less intentional, but the baby black hole was apparently unexpected.
Scientists at RHIC hastened to explain that the black hole was not the same kind of black hole as the giant, star-swallowing, life-exterminating variety, and that no one was ever in any danger.
However, it's pretty easy to say after the fact that the mini-black-hole couldn't have swallowed the entire Earth and ended all human life -- because it didn't happen.
It's quite another proposition to suggest that nothing could possibly go wrong in the game of cosmic dice-rolling that goes on inside a particle accelerator.
Quantum physics experiments are by definition unpredictable. And the behavior of a singularity is also unpredictable -- again by definition.
So they're using one inherently unpredictable phenomenon to create another inherently unpredictable phenomenon, then predicting that nothing could possibly wrong. It doesn't take a doctorate in nuclear physics to spot the hole in this argument.
If you wake up one morning, and half the planet seems to have been sucked into a state of mathematical nonexistence, you won't even have the admittedly petty satisfaction of calling the folks over at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to see their sheepish grins. They'll be on the other side of the event horizon, from which no information can escape.
Bastards.
(From Rotten.com)
More Weirdness:
You are sitting in front of a computer that would have filled a skyscraper had it been built in 1956. You have terabytes of the world's accumulated wisdom at your fingertips via Google. You have a college education in your pocket. Einstein, Feynman, Gödel, Jung, the Wachowski Brothers, Turing, Fermi, Crick and Watson have all blazed an intellectual trail for you to follow. With all this going for you, your major contribution to society so far consists of a message board post theorizing that the castaways on Lost might be in Purgatory.
About 400 years ago, before the discovery of electricity and only 150 years after the invention of the printing press, a barely literate German cobbler came up with the idea that God was a binary, fractal, self-replicating algorithm and that the universe was a genetic matrix resulting from the existential tension created by His desire for self-knowledge.
Clearly, someone's been slacking off.
It all started one day around 1610; a young German shoemaker was looking at a pewter dish when a dazzling ray of reflected sunlight unexpectedly turned out to be a message from God.
Many people receive messages from God. However, these usually tend to run along the lines of "Kill! Kill! Kill!" Such messages are not particularly interesting unless you happen to be on wrong end of the ax.
Jakob Böhme's transmission was considerably deeper than the usual psychotic imperative. In fact, his vision (well, let's call it that) contained profound theological insights well beyond his educational level, which amounted to little more than Bible study and sole-cobbling techniques.
Böhme wrote about his experience and the strange thoughts which resulted, but he sensibly decided to keep these notions within his circle of close friends. His friends had different ideas and copied Böhme's manuscript without his permission, circulating it around the prominent intellectual circles of the day.
Böhme became a celebrity overnight -- which was not a good thing. The local religious authorities were not amused. Luckily for Böhme, he was a Protestant and not a Catholic, so he was simply threatened with exile instead of having large spikes shoved up his ass.
Inconveniently, the visions kept coming. Although he was initially deterred by the threats of the local pastor, Böhme eventually began to write again, at first in secret and later in a handful of books. The majority of his work was not published until after his death.
His ideas were radical and exciting, and Böhme began to attract adherents -- which again led to trouble. His radical and exciting ideas received the exact same reception the second time around, but this time he was actually banished. Böhme received a friendlier reception in Dresden, but the positive attention there only further infuriated the clerical authorities back home.
All the controversy took a toll on his health, and Böhme died at the age of 49. But his ideas would live on, helping to shape a vast lineage of occultists, philosophers and lunatics for centuries to come.
Böhme treatises were mostly Gnostic and kabbalistic in nature. His concepts often reflected Eastern spiritual concepts that were not widely known in Germany at the time. Böhme began with a radical rethink of the traditional Judeo-Christian God. He threw out the traditional picture of a guy with a beard and long robes in favor of an abstract, formless deity.
Prior to the creation of man, Böhme wrote, God was an undifferentiated single unity defined by the absence of everything else -- the Abyss, or "Ungrund." Creation was the result of the Ungrund dividing from its state of original unity -- a proposition completely familiar to Taoists but foreign and offensive to Böhme's fellow Lutherans.
Even more controversially, Böhme argued that God could not be omniscient and omnipotent, since He was eternal and unique. "He knows no beginning, and also nothing like Himself, and also no end," Böhme wrote, arguing that God created man in His own image so that He could learn about Himself.
To initiate this learning process, God rendered Himself into positive and negative aspects -- yin and yang to the Taoists, although the material substance of Böhme's universe is not itself synonymous with God.
Prior to the initial split, God was only a potential mind with an unformed longing to know itself. After the split, God iterated into a binary-based matrix, continually increasing in complexity as He collected more and more information about Himself. In other words, Böhme's God evolves with the passage of time, in sharp contrast to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a perfect, complete and unchanging figure who exists outside the normal flow of time.
The positive and negative aspects of creation were necessarily opposed to each other, and Böhme believed that this conflict was at the heart of the universe's logic and all of its processes. Since this tension is inherent to the design of all reality, evil and suffering are a necessary part of reality -- and both originate with God.
The tension between God's positive and negative aspects boils down to an identity crisis -- cosmic self-loathing. The positive force is the part of God that chose to differentiate itself in search of self-knowledge; the negative force is the part of God that seeks to return to its original unified state (obliterating reality in the process). Böhme characterized this negative force as "divine wrath," the eternal frustration of seeking a goal that can never be accomplished.
In Böhme's cosmology, the wrathful element of God as the Father, the beneficient element as Jesus Christ, the Son. The syzygy of the conflict between the opposite poles created a process of change -- the Holy Spirit, as the continual interaction of the Father and Son through time.
Böhme presented the universe as the product of the dueling forces of Father and Son, one bent on disordering and a return to unity (entropy), the other bent on ordering and harmonizing in the process of differentiation (organization), a formula now understood to foreshadow key concepts in chaos theory and genetic sequencing. The human body and soul, according to Böhme, were a microcosm of the divine model, akin to the holographic universe physics model first formally proposed in the 20th century.
Böhme expanded on these thoughts to develop theoretical frameworks encompassing virtually every aspect of the Christian mystical experience, covering everything from Sacred Geometry to the book of Genesis to the nature of Satan, the angels and the Antichrist.
With the basic underlying premise of creation firmly in hand, Böhme turned his attention to the details, integrating concepts from the Kabbalah and alchemy, and laying out a foundation for scientific and especially philosophical thought that exerted a wide-ranging influence on the elite minds of the Enlightenment (although the controversial nature of his assertions often kept that influence below the radar). Böhme's work reflected so many diverse spiritual concepts that he is considered to be the father of Theosophy -- a precursor to the New Age movement which stipulates that all religions are basically talking about the same thing in different words.
After his death, Böhme's writings were quietly circulated among the elite minds of Europe. His ideas were pursued by everyone from Friedrich Nietzsche to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (who revamped Böhme in a rationalist framework) to 20th century sci-fi author Philip K Dick, who had an extremely similar experience receiving an extremely similar revelation from a beam of pink light.
On the more disreputable end of the spectrum, Böhme was probably the single largest influence on the founders of modern occultism, including Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, who got a lot of mileage out of Böhme's trademark imagery, including the famed "Illuminati eye" and the Ouroboros.
Small groups of adherents began to spring up. These early groups formed first among the Rosicrucians (a secret society active during Böhme's lifetime that was a precursor to modern Freemasonry) and a few small groups which, inspired by Böhme's tale of illumination in a ray of sunlight, began to refer to themselves as the Illuminati. Later, Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati would adopt some of Böhme's principles in their quest to rule the world -- a purpose Böhme himself would have found laughable.
God created the Earth in seven days, literally and exactly seven 24-hour days. And if you don't like it, you can go to hell. That is, you can literally go to Hell.
In all the world's rich panoply of religious and spiritual pursuits, there's nothing quite so inspiring as watching people desperately tie their entire view of the moral universe to an idea that's obviously wrong. Creationism is a particularly entertaining variant on an age-old theme. (Remember when Galileo was excommunicated for the ludicrous idea that the Earth goes 'round the sun and not the other way around?)
Creationism is pretty much summed up in the first sentence of this article. Creationists like to call their belief system "creation science" and would like to have it taught in school alongside the theory of evolution.
Now, it's certainly possible that some God or other created the world in seven 24-hour days. Any sentence that contains the word "God" is pretty much wide open to debate. But is it science?
Oh, wait, that sounded like a rhetorical question. It actually has an answer. No, it's not science. It's religion. Nothing wrong with religion, lots of people have it. Often very smart and well-educated people.
But beliefs based solely on the text of the Bible aren't science. Science is the "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." There is no scientific test which will show that Adam and Eve existed. At least, not according to the commonly accepted definition of science. However, if creationism is about anything, it's about language.
Western civilization has believed the seven-day theory for about 6,000 years longer than it's believed in evolution. The weight of that history is great indeed. Although Genesis was originally a Jewish scripture, the Christians were responsible for institutionalizing its contents as the undisputed truth about the world's origins.
The original notion of evolution dates back to the ancient Greeks, but early thinking on the subject was crushed by the Church of Rome. By the 17th century, however, the Protestant revolution and the whole Galileo fiasco had given the public reason to think that the Vatican was not necessarily the best source for scientific information.
Nevertheless, the idea that people had somehow evolved from a lower life form was abhorrent to most people, right up through the Victorian era. "Man" (and specifically the white male) was considered the highest possible form of life on earth, elevated above all others.
When Charles Darwin came along in the middle of the 19th century, all hell broke loose. Although Darwin outlined a progression of primitive man through modern man, the average joe looked at his chart and made the immediate mental leap that men essentially came from monkeys. The Victorians were not amused.
A violent religious backlash arose in response to the theory. Nearly 150 years later, depressingly, the backlash continues.
The theory of evolution quickly gained traction in scientific circles, but the common man held out for a lot longer. As it does with virtually all issues of any importance in the world, the United States responded to the controversy with litigation.
The state of Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning schools from teaching any theory of human origin that conflicted with the Biblical account. A biology teacher named John Scopes defied the ban and was brought up on charges. A legal battle of historic proportions resulted, as Clarence Darrow stepped up as attorney for the defense; William Jennings Bryan came to the assistance of the state.
The "Scopes monkey trial" wrapped up with Darrow calling Bryan and staging a virtual debate over the issue of evolution vs. creation under the guise of cross-examination. It would have been great television, had there been television at the time.
DARROW: I will read it to you from the Bible: "And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?BRYAN: I believe that.
DARROW: Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?
BRYAN: No, sir.
DARROW: Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?
BRYAN: No, sir. I have no way to know. (Laughter in audience).
DARROW: Now, you refer to the cloud that was put in heaven after the flood, the rainbow. Do you believe in that?
BRYAN: Read it.
DARROW: All right, Mr. Bryan, I will read it for you.
BRYAN: Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world, I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee...
DARROW: I object to that.
BRYAN: (...) to slur at it, and while it will require time, I am willing to take it.
DARROW: I object to your statement. I am exempting you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.
In his closing remarks, Darrow conceded that his client was guilty and that he couldn't in good conscience plead otherwise, but that a higher court would have to decide the issue. These inspirational remarks led to the expected guilty verdict, which was later overturned on appeal for a technicality. Aside from the high drama, the trial accomplished pretty much nothing, since the technicality superseded the constitutional issue. The law remained on the books until 1967.
The bad publicity that came out of the trial left other states unenthusiastic about mandating creationism in the schools, but that didn't stop Protestant fundamentalists from rallying around the issue for the next 80 years.
Weirdly, although the whole issue had stemmed from an overly literal intepretation of the Bible, the second wave of creationists began madly embellishing the Biblical accounts of early man in an effort to get around some of the more undeniable evidence, such as dinosaur fossils.
The dwindling pool of modern creationists now tries to paint a picture of a Fred Flintstone-style Garden of Eden in which cheerful velociraptors traipse around with Adam and Eve like oversized puppies. According to these revisionist-literalists, pretty much any reference to a generic animal in the Bible is inclusive of dinosaurs.
The modern crop of creationists is often perceived as a bunch of harmless cranks, like Jerry Falwell and the Attorney General of the United States. Sure, harmless! They run wacky organizations like the "Institute for Creation Research" and the "Center for Scientific Creation," which contain arguments like "Evolutionists raise several objections. Some say, 'Even though evidence may imply a sudden creation, creation is supernatural, not natural, and cannot be entertained as a scientific explanation'" and "Teaching scientific evidence for creation has always been legal in public schools. Nevertheless, many teachers wonder how to do this."
If you're thinking that you don't know a lot of evolutionists who say evidence implies a sudden creation, or teachers who are wondering how to teach said evidence, welcome to the club. But then, it takes a special kind of thinking to keep ancient anachronisms alive and kicking.
A special kind of thinking of the sort perpetuated by the aforementioned Attorney General John Ashcroft, who launched a Justice Department investigation of a Texas professor for demanding that future medical students truthfully tell their opinions about the origins of human life before he would agree to write recommendation letters for them. But hey, who wouldn't want a doctor that believes women can be extracted from your ribs?
From Rotten.com
A few days ago I was having some work done at my
local garage. A blonde came in and asked for a
seven-hundred-ten.
We all looked at each other and another customer
asked, "W hat is a seven-hundred-ten?"
She replied, "You know, the little piece in the
middle of the engine, I have lost it and need a new
one.." She replied that she did not know exactly
what it was, but this piece had always been there.
The mechanic gave her a piece of paper and a pen
and asked her to draw what the piece looked like.
She drew a circle and in the middle of it wrote 710.
He then took her over to another car which had its
hood up and asked "is there a 710 on this car?"
She pointed and said, "Of course, it ' s right there."
If you're not sure what a 710 is, scroll down:
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| Denatonium benzoate | |
|---|---|
| IUPAC name | phenylmethyl-[2- [(2,6-dimethylphenyl)amino]- 2-oxoethyl]-diethylammonium benzoate |
| Identifiers | |
| CAS number | [3734-33-6] |
| PubChem | |
| SMILES | CC[N+](CC)(CC1=CC=CC=C1)CC(=O)NC2= C(C=CC=C2C)C.C1=CC=C(C=C1)C(=O)[O-] |
| Properties | |
| Molecular formula | C28H34N2O3 |
| Molar mass | 446.581 |
| Melting point |
163-170 °C |
| Except where noted otherwise, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C, 100 kPa) Infobox disclaimer and references |
|
Denatonium, usually available as denatonium benzoate (under trade names such as Bitrex or Aversion) and as denatonium saccharide, is the most bitter compound known to date. It was discovered in 1958 during research on local anesthetics by Macfarlan Smith of Edinburgh, Scotland, and registered under the trademark Bitrex.[1][2] Dilutions of as little as 10 ppm are unbearably bitter to most humans. Denatonium salts are usually colorless and odorless solids but are often traded as solutions. They are used as aversive agents to prevent accidental ingestion. Denatonium is used in denatured alcohol,[3] antifreeze, nail biting preventions, animal repellents, liquid soaps, and shampoos. It is not known to pose any long-term health risks although exposure may be irritating and unpleasant.
An amusing anecdote relates how one of the researchers at Atomergic Chemetals Corp. in Plainview, New York, went home without realising that he had a tiny trace of denatonium saccharide on the outside of his lip. When he kissed his wife, she almost vomited.
CLICK HERE TO READ CARLY'S ANSWERS TO VIEWERS' QUESTIONS.
Two years ago, working with pictures and symbols on a computer keyboard, she started typing and spelling out words. The computer became her voice.
"All of a sudden these words started to pour out of her, and it was an exciting moment because we didn't realize she had all these words," said speech pathologist Barbara Nash. "It was one of those moments in my career that I'll never forget."
Then Carly began opening up, describing what it was like to have autism and why she makes odd noises or why she hits herself.
"It feels like my legs are on first and a million ants are crawling up my arms," Carly said through the computer. Carly writes about her frustrations with her siblings, how she understands their jokes and asks when can she go on a date.
"We were stunned," Carly's father Arthur Fleischmann said. "We realized inside was an articulate, intelligent, emotive person that we had never met. This was unbelievable because it opened up a whole new way of looking at her." This is what Carly wants people to know about autism.
"It is hard to be autistic because no one understands me. People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can't talk or I act differently than them. I think people get scared with things that look or seem different than them." "Laypeople would have assumed she was mentally retarded or cognitively impaired. Even professionals labelled her as moderately to severely cognitively impaired. In the old days you would say mentally retarded, which means low IQ and low promise and low potential," Arthur Fleischman said.
Therapists say the key lesson from Carly's story is for families to never give up and to be ever creative in helping children with autism find their voice.
"If we had done what so many people told us to do years ago, we wouldn't have the child we have today. We would have written her off. We would have assumed the worst. We would have never seen how she could write these things
how articulate she is, how intelligent she is," the grateful father added.
"I asked Carly to come to my work to talk to speech pathologists and other therapists about autism," said Nash. "What would you like to tell them? She wrote, 'I would tell them never to give up on the children that they work with.' That kind of summed it up." Carly had another message for people who don't understand autism.
"Autism is hard because you want to act one way, but you can't always do that. It's sad that sometimes people don't know that sometimes I can't stop myself and they get mad at me. If I could tell people one thing about autism it would be that I don't want to be this way. But I am, so don't be mad. Be understanding."
This fish looks like the way I feel this morning.
Last updated at 21:56pm on 19th February 2008
With its razor- sharp teeth, the fish known as the giant snakehead terrorises the warm waters of south-east Asia.
Which is why an angler was particularly startled to hook a 2ft specimen from a river in Lincolnshire.
Andrew Alder caught the snakehead using a sprat for bait while fishing for pike in the River Witham near North Hykeham.
No doubt the secular humanists among you are already pissed off by this article, just because of its placement under the header of religion.
But what other classification is possible for a set of beliefs that can never be verified by direct observation? In which direct observation automatically negates the validity of the observation? In which invisible forces run counter to Newton's laws of thermodynamics, allowing for everything from time travel to bilocation to teleportation to free energy (also known as zero-point extraction)?
OK, OK, OK. It's probably unfair to classify quantum physics as religion. (Probably not, but let's just pretend it is to appease the secular humanists. Wink, wink.)
The 20th Century played host to the most amazing set of discoveries and reversals in the history of science. What was once thought to be a world of too, too solid flesh instead melted into a miasma of multiple possibilities, solidified probabilities and verifiable impossibilities.
17th century scientist Isaac Newton had defined a world view of strictly verifiable laws, everything in its place and most things definable by a series of junior high school-level math equations. Despite the fact that he spent the better part of his life obsessed with the now completely discredited "science" of alchemy, Newton defined the parameters of existence for virtually every Western scientist for 200 years.
But in the 20th Century, a new breed of scientists burst onto the scene. Albert Einstein was the most famous of these; he discovered that time and space were not the straight lines that Newton's laws demanded. Einstein put forth the radical idea that space and time were curved, and he had the math to back his ideas up.
Equally important, but less well known to the public at large, were shocking new developments by a core group of scientists studying the behavior of the universe at very small scales — at the level of the atom and even smaller.
This group of mostly men included Einstein himself, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and dozens of others. Together and often dramatically apart, these men developed the study of these very small phenomena into what we now call quantum physics.
The basic principles of quantum physics are relatively simple, but their ramifications are incredibly confusing. The following gross oversimplification is presented for your amusement:
The basic concept of the atom goes back to before Christian times, but the specific understanding of the atom (the one most of you were taught in high school) we have today didn't develop until the 19th and early 20th centuries. Unfortunately, that the specific understanding (the one most of you were taught in high school) is a crock of shit.
Take the electron. Remember how you learned that the electron orbits the atom? Crap. How about light? Remember the discussion of whether light was made of waves or particles or both? Crap.
In quantum physics, none of these things are what they seem. Despite the visceral-seeming experience of getting hit by a bolt of lightning, the fact is that electrons in a reasonably meaningful sense do not exist, let alone orbit those atoms.
The root contradiction of quantum physics is a principal called complementarity. Complementarity means that certain properties can't be measured simultaneously. Usually, this means you can't measure BOTH the location and trajectory of a particle. In fact, when you measure one of these qualities the other one more or less ceases to exist.
So if we were talking about a baseball in the air, for instance, you couldn't measure both the direction it's moving in and also measure its location. While this might seem weird intuitively, it's not actually that hard to grok. To measure the direction in which a baseball is flying, you need to observe it in at least two different locations, right? So you technically can't measure a single location and a trajectory at the same time.
What's different in quantum physics is that, according to most versions of the story, the baseball's location isn't just unmeasurable, but it ceases to be meaningful. Despite the unmeasurable location of the baseball, you can still bounce it off a bat, or your head, and it feels pretty meaningful. But if you try to measure the trajectory of an electron, for instance, as it theoretically orbits the center of an atom, the location mutates into something entirely different.
The location of an electron in this instance is described as a "cloud of probabilities." This means the electron does not exist in any one location, but it instead exists as a sort of phantom, in every possible location, all at once, surrounding the electron like a cloud instead of orbiting it like a planet.
Once you see this sort of thing happening, as you might imagine, the domino effect kicks in and the weirdnesses start to multiply.
Take the photon, a particle of light. It's a funny beast that defies all logic in its travels around the universe. The photon is a particle. We know this for sure. It's a measurable, definable particle. You know how you're reading this article? Photons. If the photon was not a measurable particle, you would be staring at a blank screen, which would be pointless because the retinas in your eyes wouldn't be working either. For TVs, computer monitors, remote controls, fiber optics, eyes, tanning booths and solar power to work at all, light has to be a particle.
Except that it's also a wave. Now if you went to the wrong high school, like I did, someone probably explained this to you by saying that light is actually a wave made of particles (in the same way waves of water are made of water molecules). This is an elegant explanation. Wrong, but elegant.
See, light's a particle but it exists as part of a wave of "probability." In other words, there's a wave shape that describes every possible trajectory that the photon can move in. That part's easy enough. The hard part is that the wave of probability isn't just an abstract concept, it has an actual physical existence — and the probabilities can affect actual objects and events even when they don't, technically, exist.
There's a famous quantum physics experiment called the "double-slit experiment," which was one of the first proofs that all this wacky shit was actually true. In the double-slit experiment, you shine a light through a piece of cardboard with two small slits that allow the light to pass through. On the other side of the cardboard, is a piece of film. When the photon hits the film, it leaves a spot, so you can measure where the individual photons land.
Intuitively, this is pretty simple: One photon, two slits. The photon has to go through one or the other slit. So what you'd expect is to find a whole bunch of photons grouped near each of the slits, since the photons obviously went through either one slit or the other. 
And if you only have one slit, that's actually what you get, a clump of photons near the slit. THERE IS NO WAVE!
But when you have two slits, everything gets insane. Instead of two clumps, you get a pattern, as if a wave had simultaneously hit both slits, passed through and became two waves which interfered with each other. THERE IS A WAVE! BUT THERE ISN'T! There are only photons, one after another.
When the photon can only go through one slit (one possible course), there is only one photon traveling in a line. When there is more than one possibility, the single photon no longer exists; it becomes a wave of imaginary photons traveling along various possible paths. Nevertheless, when the photon eventually lands on the film, there's only one photon. If you only release one photon at a time, you still get the interference pattern, even though there's no possibility of more than one photon on the path at the same time.
ARGH! Has your head exploded yet?
The wave is a real thing. It affects where the photon lands. But the only way it can be real is if the photon actually exists in every possible place it could exist at the same time, which it clearly doesn't. But the experiment works in exactly the way described, which means all this is true.
From this point, all bets are off. Once you accept the paradox that unrealized probabilities have a tangible existence, almost anything becomes possible.
As you extend quantum physics out from this central paradox, a lot of science fiction concepts become potentially real, among them:
And it gets weirder every day. Have you seen the commercial for the Volkswagen Passat where the guy gets the phone call from his future self? Just wait until you get that quantum cell phone... Sky's the limit...
In physics, entropy (from Greek εντροπία "a turning toward," from εν- "in" + τροπή "a turning"), symbolized by S, is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work.[3] It is a measure of the randomness of molecules in a system. Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics and the combined law of thermodynamics, which deal with physical processes and whether they occur spontaneously. Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how far this smoothing-out process has progressed. In short, entropy is a function of a quantity of heat which shows the possibility of conversion of that heat into work. The increase in entropy is small when heat is added at high temperature and is greater when heat is added at lower temperature. Thus for maximum entropy there is minimum availability for conversion into work and for minimum entropy there is maximum availability for conversion into work.
The concept of entropy was developed in the 1850s by German physicist Rudolf Clausius who described it as the transformation-content, i.e. dissipative energy use, of a thermodynamic system or working body of chemical species during a change of state.[4] In contrast, the first law of thermodynamics, formalized through the heat-friction experiments of James Joule in 1843, deals with the concept of energy, which is conserved in all processes; the first law, however, lacks in its ability to quantify the effects of friction and dissipation. Entropy change has often been defined as a change to a more disordered state at a molecular level. In recent years, entropy has been interpreted in terms of the "dispersal" of energy. Entropy is an extensive state function that accounts for the effects of irreversibility in thermodynamic systems.
Quantitatively, entropy is defined by the differential quantity dS = δQ / T, where δQ is the amount of heat absorbed in an isothermal and reversible process in which the system goes from one state to another, and T is the absolute temperature at which the process is occurring.[5] Entropy is one of the factors that determines the free energy of the system. This thermodynamic definition of entropy is only valid for a system in equilibrium (because temperature is defined only for a system in equilibrium), while the statistical definition of entropy (see below) applies to any system. Thus the statistical definition is usually considered the fundamental definition of entropy.
When a system's energy is defined as the sum of its "useful" energy, (e.g. that used to push a piston), and its "useless energy", i.e. that energy which cannot be used for external work, then entropy may be (most concretely) visualized as the "scrap" or "useless" energy whose energetic prevalence over the total energy of a system is directly proportional to the absolute temperature of the considered system. (Note the product "TS" in the Gibbs free energy or Helmholtz free energy relations).
In terms of statistical mechanics, the entropy describes the number of the possible microscopic configurations of the system. The statistical definition of entropy is the more fundamental definition, from which all other definitions and all properties of entropy follow. Although the concept of entropy was originally a thermodynamic construct, it has been adapted in other fields of study, including information theory, psychodynamics, thermoeconomics, and evolution.
Bioorganic chemistry is a rapidly growing scientific discipline which combines organic chemistry and biochemistry. While biochemistry aims at understanding biological processes using chemistry, bioorganic chemistry attempts to expand organic-chemical researches (that is, structures, synthesis, and kinetics) toward biology. When investigating metalloenzymes and cofactors, bioorganic chemistry overlaps bioinorganic chemistry. Biophysical organic chemistry is a term used when attempting to describe intimate details of molecular recognition by bioorganic chemistry.
In an Iranian Airport !!!
Maxwell's relations are a set of equations in thermodynamics which are derivable from the definitions of the thermodynamic potentials. The Maxwell relations are statements of equality among the second derivatives of the thermodynamic potentials. They follow directly from the fact that the order of differentiation of an analytic function of two variables is irrelevant. If Φ is a thermodynamic potential and xi and xj are two different natural variables for that potential, then the Maxwell relation for that potential and those variables is:
where the partial derivatives are taken with all other natural variables held constant. It is seen that for every thermodynamic potential there are n(n-1)/2 possible Maxwell relations where n is the number of natural variables for that potential.
The four most common Maxwell relations
The four most common Maxwell relations are the equalities of the second derivatives of each of the four thermodynamic potentials, with respect to their thermal natural variable (temperature T or entropy S ) and their mechanical natural variable (pressure p or volume V ):
where the potentials as functions of their natural thermal and mechanical variables are:
Derivation of the Maxwell equations can be deduced from the differential forms of the thermodynamic potentials:
These equations resemble total differentials of the form
And indeed, it can be shown that for any equation of the form
that
Consider, as an example, the equation . We can now immediately see that
Since we also know that for functions with continuous second derivatives, the mixed partial derivatives are identical, that is, that
we therefore can see that
and therefore that
Each of the four Maxwell relationships given above follows similarly from one of the Gibbs equations.
General Maxwell relationships
The above are by no means the only Maxwell relationships. When other work terms involving other natural variables besides the volume work are considered or when the number of particles is included as a natural variable, other Maxwell relations become apparent. For example, if we have a single-component gas, then the number of particles N is also a natural variable of the above four thermodynamic potentials. The Maxwell relationship for the enthalpy with respect to pressure and particle number would then be:
where μ is the chemical potential. In addition, there are other thermodynamic potentials besides the four that are commonly used, and each of these potentials will yield a set of Maxwell relations.
Each equation can be re-expressed using the relationship
which are sometimes also known as Maxwell relations.
