Kinetic Energy

Kinetic energy is just the fancy scientific way of saying movement. And I mean that. If something has a store of kinetic energy, then it is moving, or in motion. Kinetic energy is probably the most common store of energy, in the sense that it is happening all the time, all around us, and every time you move or move something, then other stores of energy are being transferred into kinetic energy, whether it be you using chemical energy to move your arm, or pushing something off a table and transferring gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy, everything you do is somehow linked to movement.

Kinetic energy can come in different forms, such as thermal energy and sound. Why? Well because thermal energy is measured by the energy and movement of molecules in an object, and sound is the movement of molecules through a medium, with the keyword being movement. Kinetic energy can also be very helpful in transferring other stores of energy into usable electricity. I will go into more detail in another post, but the basic idea is that you heat up water using a fuel and the steam rises and spins turbines which are connected to a magnet. You may or not know that when you spin a magnet inside a wire, it creates electricity. This whole process is made possible by kinetic energy, and without it, you would not be reading this right now, or at all.

Thank you for reading this post, and as always, please visit other, more official websites that will give you a better, more detailed explanation.

Energy

Energy is one of the fundamental concepts of physics and allows us to do, well, everything. First of all, lets clear a few things up. There are two main things that you need to know about energy. Firstly, it can not be created or destroyed, only transferred. Secondly, there are no types of energy, only stores, and each store does different things with the energy transferred. For example, thermal stores of energy convert stores such as electrical energy into heat (this is how a radiator works). The different stores of energy are as follows: Thermal, Electrical, Kinetic, Elastic, Chemical, Nuclear, Magnetic and Gravitational Potential. You may be thinking “WHAT IS THIS, IS THIS GUY CRAZY!?!?!?”, but don’t worry, all will be explained.

If you are confused, think of energy as the money of the universe; It is not lost or made, only traded between people. Then the people choose to do certain things with the money they possess, and trade again, and again, and again. Think of the people as the different stores of energy, and think of the money as energy itself. When energy is transferred, it is transferred by pathways. These pathways are heating, mechanical, electrical and radiation. Pathways allow energy to be transferred from one store to another. For example, if something fell off a table, gravitational potential energy would be transferred into kinetic energy via a mechanical pathway. Energy transfers occur every day, all day, and all around us. every time you eat, chemical energy stored in the food you eat is used when you complete activities, or work. In science, work means something different to what you may be used to. It means to use a force to move an object. In science, work (measured in Joules) is calculated by multiplying the force (in Newtons) by the distance (in metres). This can then be used to calculate the Power (measured in Watts), which is the work done per second. This is calculated by dividing the work done by the time taken. For example, if I used a force of 10 Newtons to lift a book 1 metre, then the work done would be 10 Joules. If it took me 1 second to do that, then the power would be 10 Watts.

If you wish to find out more about energy, and in further detail, please read my other pots that explain the different stores of energy in more detail, or go to a website such as BBC Bitesize, where they explain a range of topics with diagrams and simple, easy to understand explanations.

Light-Part 5

For a basic introduction to this series of posts go to light part 1.

 

The Spectrum

 

The spectrum is the range of colours that are within white light. There are many different spectrums for different species, e.g. there are certain birds (such as the peregrine falcon) that can see ultraviolet light, whereas we humans cannot see UV or infrared light. This is all to do with the way we see light; in our eyes, different parts pick up different colours, and humans haven’t adapted to have those parts that see UV or infrared, we simply don’t need to. But birds, especially birds of prey have UV vision because it helps them to pick out their prey a lot easier. As Newton discovered, one of the easiest ways to show all the colours in the visible spectrum is to use a prism. He did this by shining a light at a glass prism: the light was separated by the triangle so that all the colours are separated. To prove this, there have been several experiments where there are two prisms and a light, and you can clearly see the separation and reformation of the colours in the light. Humans can only see what we call the visible spectrum, but there are many more colours out there that are undetectable to the human eye. There are only certain things that reflect ultraviolet light, and often can only be seen under UV.

Light-Part 4

For a basic intro to this series, go to part 1.

How Does Light Travel?

At 300,000,000 metres per second of course! But there is more to it than that, for example, how does it bounce off things, and how does it come to be so fast, but venture no further fellow scientists!, for I have the answers! Wait a minute, google’s buffering so I haven’t got the answers yet but, um yeah. Anyway, when it is emitted from, well, wherever it is emitted from, it has so much energy that it just shoots out at the speed it does. If you can’t process that then think of it as a 5-year-old after having cookies, they have lots of energy, momentum and just go crazy before being absorbed by the wonders of Tom and Jerry. Except instead of the 5-year-old, think of tiny, nearly massless photons, and instead of the telly, think of our own eyes, and voila! You have the way light travels! But if you want the real science behind it, then read on! When hydrogen and helium and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and all the other stuff in the sun react, they make really powerful reactions that send photons flying nearly as fast as virgin media broadband! Get your free membership today and be part of what we are claiming to be the fastest broadband in the UK and in the process for some reason comparing ourselves with Usain Bolt playing football in a garden! I mean come on virgin! But let’s get back on track ( get it? Usain is a runner, not a footballer so he should get back on the track!). The reactions are so powerful that they allow nearly massless particles to travel thousands of light years! The fact that they are nearly massless also explains why they don’t obliterate us when they hit our eyes, I mean imagine the 5 years running into you at that speed! Now that is what you call a timeout! Especially of they have lots of mass (if they fat). When photons do hit our eyes, they are processed by one of the parts of our eye and transmitted to the brain as signals which are why we see certain colours and whatever nonsense goes on, I mean physics and chemistry, please! But there is another reason that is not to do with the nature of our eyes – as you may know, light is white and can be split into every colour on the visible spectrum using Newton’s prism. And also, certain objects are certain colours, so absorb all light apart from the colour they are, so we only see the reflected light.

Light-Part 3

For a basic intro to this series of posts go to part 1.

MASS

Mass has a very different effect on light than it does to us, partly because photons have an immeasurably small amount of mass, and they are the fastest thing in the universe, but that is not to say that mass doesn’t affect light at all. As we know, black holes affect light by slowing it down and bending it, and black holes have lots of mass. But it isn’t just black holes that can affect light, thanks to the Schwarzschild radius, anything can affect light if you compress it enough (theoretically). But let’s not just repeat ourselves shall we? Well, why does mass create gravity? It is because all mass emits something called gravitons, tiny particles that are the physical form of gravity. The more mass an object has, the more gravitational pull it has. An example is, if you were to shrink the earth to the size of a tennis ball (NOT it’s Schwarzschild radius) the moon would actually stay in the same place moving at the same speed as last time. But if you were to move the moon close it would speed towards the tennis-ball-sized-earth and once it reached the surface the Earth the speed needed to escape the earth’s atmosphere would be close to light speed(not light speed or it would be a black hole).  

But why does it affect light, surely the principle of gravity involves the mass times the gravitational pull? So if the mass is so tiny, then surely the gravitational pull will have to be huge!? And yes, it does have to be, which is why only black holes and some other stuff with millions of billions of quintillions of kilogrammes of mass can affect the way light moves. Think of as if you had 1 pizza and 10000000 people, they would all get very small bits. You would have to have 10000000 pizzas for them to all get a pizza (sorry, it’s the best I could come up with). And even then, it doesn’t affect it too much. But if you were to look at a black hole, it would look really weird, with a big black bit in the middle, and everything else squished up close to it around it. This is because of the way the light is bent.

Light-Part 2

For a basic intro to this series of posts, go to part one of this.

Black holes

When someone says black holes they usually think of stars collapsing and a giant hole that is sucking the life out everything within a light year radius of it for all eternity, which is one way to think of it, but theoretically any mass can become a black hole if you compress it enough.The Schwarzschild radius (the size a certain mass needs to be to become a black hole) for the earth is 9mm.

But which is more dangerous,  a big one or a small one?

Well, surprisingly the smaller one would kill you faster, because of this thing called Hawking radiation, discovered by Stephen Hawking and the fact that if you were affected by the black hole, you would closer to the centre of mass than in the big black hole, but back to hawking radiation Ironically, the smaller the black hole is the more radiation it emits. This is because it emits more than it takes in, because of the interaction between antiparticles and particles that we won’t go into the hole, it emits masses of radiation, like in the hadron collider, but bigger, stronger and much, much more dangerous.

Because we were too lazy to research about it. I’ve been using a lot of “because” recently…

But anyway, yes a small black hole will kill you faster than a big one but the bigger one would do more destructive damage and they would both kill you In fractions of a second so it doesn’t really “matter”  Get it? Because we are talking about mass…

Me and my hilarious jokes.

I still remember the time I tortured Mr.James at the aquarium with puns. Also, how do stars throw parties?

They Planet…

Back to science…

Ok, I can’t help it…

Do you know why photons don’t get people to carry their luggage?

Because they’re always travelling “light”.

The way black holes got their name is because they suck in all light so it is completely black.

But that is not completely true, It is true the actual black hole is black, but around it is bright.

Really bright.

The reason for this is…

Tada!!!

Hawking radiation…

The bane of our lives. (I lied but I REALLY wanted to add that somewhere)

As radiation emits energy in the form of photons, or as we know it, light.

This means there is a constant source of light so there never will be no light.  Especially, if it is a small black hole as we talked about in the last section.

Light-Part 1

Hi everyone, my friend and I (link to his google plus page at the bottom) have been working on a document about light and I thought I should share it with you. It is quite long so I will split into several parts.

What Is Light?

Light travels as a transverse wave made of photons, which means it can travel through a vacuum, unlike sound. Photons are produced in one of two ways; they can be produced by Nuclear Transmission or can be created when antimatter comes into contact with matter (e.g. electrons and positrons). They travel in a straight line, although it can be reflected and bent. An exception to this rule is black holes: they have such a powerful gravitational pull that even things with as little mass as photons are bent by it. This also breaks the rule for the fact that light travels at the same speed (300,000,000 metres per second), and it does this in the same way as it abuses the principle of light travelling in a straight line.

Link to his google+ page

The States Of matter Part 2- More Features Of The Three States Of Matter

If you have not seen the first part of states of matter then please do, as it will inform you on the basics of the states of matter. In this post, I will be covering some more features and properties of the states of matter. These properties are, things like; does it flow, can you compress it and what formation are its molecules in (see the previous post for this particular question)? I have provided a link to a helpful image below to answer these questions.

Thank you for viewing this post, I hope you found it interesting and learned, if you did, then please leave a comment on what you learned, and if you have any suggestions then do the same. Bye!

Plasma

Plasma. AKA the 4th state of matter. Plasma is a strange thing that is much rarer on our planet than the other three common states of matter (see my previous post for more information on the topic of the other three states of matter).To put it very simply, a plasma is an ionized gas, a gas into which sufficient energy is provided to free electrons from atoms or molecules and to allow both ions and electrons, to coexist. The funny thing about that is, that as far as we know, plasma is the most common state of matter in the universe.

Plasma is most often seen in a plasma ball on earth, where the ball is filled with a mixture of noble gasses with an electrode (an electrical conductor used to make contact with a part of the circuit, in this case, the glass globe, ball, or sphere, that is not metal) in the centre. Plasma is transmitted to the outer casing where electricity is supplied. Humans are electrical conductors so when we touch the glass there is more electricity on that spot, so the plasma is drawn to it, which is why when you touch the plasma ball, there are purple rods of plasma drawn to your hand.

If you read this, then I am going to do a riddle/puzzle based on plasma, so be sure to check that out! I hope you learned from this, and if you did, then please leave a comment on what you learned, or what you think I should do next! Bye!

Air and Water Resistance

Air and Water resistance are both forces that work in similar ways; they both slow down moving objects using the same principal. When a moving object is traveling through the air, it is his hitting air molecules all the time, which means that the object is being slowed down. Think of it like this; You are the object that is traveling and you are running through on obstacle course and every time you hit an obstacle you slow down or stop. It is exactly the same thing in real life but with air molecules instead of obstacles. The same goes for water resistance as well. In water, there are a lot more molecules so the object is being slowed down much more frequently than when it is traveling through the air. When a moving object accelerates, the air/water resistance increases. This is because when the object is moving quicker, it is hitting the molecules at a faster rate, which is how air and water resistance are measured, so it increases.

There is no such thing as solid resistance (in case you were wondering) because instead of slowing a moving object down, it would most likely stop it (depending on the object and the solid. E.g. a tennis ball would be stopped by an iron wall, whilst it would not be stopped by a paper wall). This is because the solids molecules are much more tightly packed and would slow down the object at a much faster rate, due to the same principle that air and water resistance use.

Thank you for reading this post, as always, I hope you learned from me and if you have any suggestions/improvements, I would appreciate it if you left a comment. Bye!