It was so cool and to sit there listening to leading physicists talk about facts and theories and to be able to understand every single bit of it! Hooray for our recently completed "Einstein" class!
I'm going to let CJ and Annabelle share their impressions of the evening with you.
Today I will write about the Seattle Science Festival Opening of 2013. In this, I will show what I learned from going to the show.
The first thing I want to say is that instead of sorting it in completely (speaker) specific paragraphs, they all talked about some of the same things, including entropy, time, and cosmology.
Time was a big part of the presentation. One of the things about time discussed is that one of the reasons we don't remember the future is because of entropy. We also discussed that for example, if I talked to a farmer 1000 years ago and I asked him what the time was (in this example, 1:17 p.m.), he would just be able to say, "After lunch." This not only shows that we weren't very advanced back then (due to low technology levels), but it also shows that we have made it easier to tell time.
The next thing I will talk about is entropy. When I say entropy, you might think of destruction or chaos or nukes. Although it is NOT completely true, it does have some trace elements of that. One thing about entropy we talked about is this example: You are walking down the sidewalk, and while you are walking, you see a cracked egg. You start thinking about the egg's past. Did it get dropped? Did a person throw it there on purpose? You can only think so much. But then what interests you is that what is the egg's future? will it get eaten by a dog? Will it be cleaned? Will it be turned in to scrambled eggs? Will it stay there? This shows us that actually, life would not be interesting if we didn't have entropy (even though entropy will be the thing responsible for the apocalypse in 4 million years!).
One of the last things I want to talk about is the film the showed at the end called "Icarus: At the Edge of Time," written by Brian Greene. The music for the film was performed by students of Garfield High School. In the film, there is a boy named Icarus who was living on a ship called the Proxima Centari, heading towards the star Alpha Centari. The boy, Icarus, was born on the ship. His grandfather had chosen to undertake the mission. The story behind it is that some strange radio signals from Alpha Centari were sent a while ago, and that they finally decoded it and found out what it was and decided to go visit. As Icarus was on the ship, the commander - his father - noticed that they were near a black hole. Icarus refused the commander's request to get to the safe room. As the commander told Icarus to follow his commands, he noticed that the ship said a unauthorized ship was launched. He knew what that meant, because there was a prototype in the dock, the Runabout, and the Icarus was urgent to fly it. As Icarus was flying his ship near the black hole, he got slower, and slower, and slower. After 5 times of circling the black hole, (which felt like just minutes to him) he flew for a while, searching for the Proxima, feeling lonely. After a while, he saw a GINORMOUS space ship, and when he docked inside it, he asked where he was, and he was told he was on a ship 10,000 years in the future, traveling on a space highway named after the Proxima. The Icarus story reminds me of is the twin paradox and the bending of light. I am done now.
So there you have it, from CJ's perspective. Here's what Annabelle had to say. ...
Last night I went to see the opening of the Seattle Science Festival, 2013. There were three physicists, Sean Carroll, Adam Frank, and Brian Greene. There was also a movie called Icarus at the Edge of Time, which was based on Brian's book of the same name (the movie was also adapted by Brian).
Entropy, (which had a big part in last night's presentation) is the "law" of order and disorder. For instance, you have dropped your egg on the sidewalk (unintentionally). Entropy is order/disorder (order being low entropy) and it increases over time, so the un-broken egg in your hand (before you dropped it) was low entropy (order), and now it is entropy, sitting there, (cracked) on the sidewalk (which is unfortunate for you). The entropy, increasing over time, makes it hard for you to tell what will happen next.
Icarus at the Edge of Time was a good movie, and the music (played by Garfield High) was great. The plot (spoiler alert!) is that Icarus, the main character, was born on his father's ship (which used to be his great-grandfather's) headed for Proxima Centauri. Apparently Earth got signals coming from Proxima Centauri, so they sent out a ship (appropriately named Proxima) to see what was happening. This just happened to be the ship Icarus was now on, flying to Proxima. One day, the alarms went off. The Proxima was coming towards a black hole, and everyone was instructed to strap in so they could turn away from the black hole. Icarus ran up to his father to convince him to get a little closer, but his father said no. So Icarus went to escape in his pod, the Runabout, to get a closer look by skimming the edge....I don't want to ruin the ending, so I'll stop there.And so no happily ever after? Bummer.
There was one part I liked the most. Thanks to entropy, there's a "cycle of the universe". it goes like this:
1. Hot, smooth plasma2. First stars3. Galaxies/planets/more complex stuff4. Last stars5. Complete, utter darkness... FOREVER!
As I sat there last night, I sure wished I had a pad and pen to take notes. Instead, I had to soak it all in. One of the things stuck in my brain today was a slide one of the speakers showed of the grave site of Ludwig Eduart Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist who has his famous formula for entropy on his tombstone!
All in all, it was an amazing 2-plus hours, every bit as enjoyable and enriching as last year's opening night, with Stephen Hawking, Jack Horner and more. We're already looking forward to next year.
Saturday, we'll be heading to Seattle Center for the Seattle Science Festival Expo. There will be more than 150 booths featuring all things science. Awesome!
STARRY SNACKS: As has become the new norm, today the kids tuned into "Unwrapped" as their morning entertainment. Imagine our pleasure when today's theme was
First up was a segment about Milky Way candy bars. Turns out they weren't named for our galaxy after all. Rather, they're named after a malted milk drink and shake dating back to the Roaring '20s. The candy version was invented by Frank Mars, in his kitchen in 1923. The first Milky Way bars sold for 5 cents, and they were novel, as they were one of the first candy bars with a filling.
Today, Mars makes more than 12 million of the bars every year in a Chicago factory. Watching the machines there work was super interesting. We got to see the nougat
created, part of which involved a machine that made 800 revolutions a minute (!), spinning thousands of pins, which helps fluff up
the nougat. We watched the bars be cut at a rate of 5,400 per minute (!), and go through a chocolate bath (doesn't
that sound good?). After the bath, the bars are run under a decorating roller which is what
makes that pretty little whoop-di-do on top. From 1923-1999 the Milky Way
recipe remained unchanged, however, since 2000, the bars have included more caramel than in years past.
Next stop was Johnson Space Center (woohoo!), to talk about real live astronaut food. We learned astro food has to have a long shelf life at room temperature, as there are no dedicated fridges or freezers on board the ISS for foodstuff. We watched a vegetable quiche being made (it looked quite tasty!) and then loaded into a freeze dryer, where it sits in a vacuum chamber for three days. Apparently all the food must be under the magic 3 percent mark for moisture to prevent bacteria growth. When they're ready to eat on the ISS, the astronauts take the meal packet, put it in a machine where its packaging is punctured and the food is rehydrated.
Next stop was Johnson Space Center (woohoo!), to talk about real live astronaut food. We learned astro food has to have a long shelf life at room temperature, as there are no dedicated fridges or freezers on board the ISS for foodstuff. We watched a vegetable quiche being made (it looked quite tasty!) and then loaded into a freeze dryer, where it sits in a vacuum chamber for three days. Apparently all the food must be under the magic 3 percent mark for moisture to prevent bacteria growth. When they're ready to eat on the ISS, the astronauts take the meal packet, put it in a machine where its packaging is punctured and the food is rehydrated.
Photo: NASA/Expedition 32 crew member
The next segment was about good ol' Campbell's Chicken & Stars soup, which debuted in 1965 (a very good year, if I do say so myself). At a factory in North Carolina, they produce a billion (wow!) cans a year of the stuff. A worker at the factory reported that in four years, they use more pasta stars than there are actual stars in the Milky Way. The machinery in the factory was mesmerizing. Their blender holds 5,000 to 7,000 pounds of soup - a little more than my Kitchen Aid! And on the production line, cans whiz by at a rate of 600 per minute. They were going so fast, it was a silver blur. Would you believe CJ & Annabelle have never had a can of soup? Today, we bought one at the store for them to try, inspired by the show, obviously.
We also watched a segment about Dairy Queen's non dairy Starkiss bar, as well as some chocolate mousse delights from Galaxy Desserts. We'd never heard of them, but checked out their Web site and learned their treats are sold at a number of stores in our neighborhood.
Our favorite segment was about Space Food Sticks. CJ and Annabelle have both sampled those. They were originally created for Pillsbury in the late '60s, by the company's chief food technologist, Howard Bauman. Bauman and his co-workers were responsible for creating the first solid food consumed by a NASA astronaut, the small cubes eaten aboard Aurora 7 by Scott Carpenter in 1962.
Photo credit: NASA
Space Food Sticks were trademarked as a "non frozen balance energy snack in a rod form containing nutritionally balanced amounts of carbohydrate, fat and protein" in 1970.
Thanks to the magic of the Internet, we came across an original NASA press release about Space Food Sticks. It heralded "a new food" pioneered by NASA, the Air Force, and Pillsbury, and said that Skylab astronaut Gerald Carr (we've met him!) and crew would be partaking of it on their upcoming mission., launching Nov. 10, 1973.
We also found a couple of vintage commercials for them. I think I actually remember seeing this gem. ...
The snacks disappeared from the market for decades, but were brought back in 2000.
Speaking of "entropy"... Get your hands on a copy of Asimov's "The Last Question". Of all his stories, this was his favorite. BBC reads it often and it is in many Asimov anthologies. The MPA students will understand it and it will give them a real sense of the enormity of the laws of thermodynamics.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds cool, we'll have to check it out.
DeleteThe Second Law is the one Asimov wrote about in that story.
ReplyDelete