Thermodynamics says…

Thermodynamics says that (due to probability) all of the air in my room won’t all gather on one side of the room allowing me to choke in the vacuum on the other side of the room.

But as far as my understanding of thermodynamics goes, I’m choking to death right now.

I have about 14 minutes to keep on track with my declared “frequency” of posts, but it’s been a slow day because of my lack of physics class today. So it’s all about things today that as far as I know are making me choke to death right now.

String theory is something that I’ve heard a lot about as I’ve run into people that are, like me, interested in physics. And String theory has to do with thermodynamics basically because I know just about as much of the one as I do the other (despite already having passed a college course in thermodynamics).

So today I’ll let an expert do the talking, and if you’ve never seen a TED talk before, be fore warned: They can be incredibly entertaining and intriguing, but they last from 10-30 minutes so you can waste a lot of time on them.

Oh and my favorite discussion involving extra dimensions is absolutely this explanation of the 10 dimensions.

Looks like I just barely made it.

A word about frequency

Frequency: it’s really just something quantifiable per unit of time.

A lot of the problems that I encountered when blogging before was I was unsure of how frequently I should post updates. And while it is something that is completely self-determined, I could post as frequently as I wanted, something felt wrong about the lack of structure. So I’ve decided to start by setting a frequency that I will follow and then moving from there. I might have a lot to talk about at the beginning and then lose steam in a couple of months if the frequency of posts is too high, and if I post too infrequently to start I may just stop altogether and I kind of get the posting itch in the back of my mind which is irritable, so I’m going to say one post a day is a good benchmark.

And I could say that I’m posting one update per day and the frequency of updates would be 11.57mHz, because frequency is usually measured in seconds, but that doesn’t look very pretty in SI units so we’ll just leave it at one per day.

Frequency kind of pops up all over the place but recently for me we’ve been doing waves and sound waves in my physics class and the professor has been demonstrating the difference between low and high frequency sounds a lot, much to the enjoyment of the class.

But with relation to sound we’ve been talking about frequency in a whole new way in physics, or at least a way that wasn’t really presented in my high school physics class. It’s all about fundamental frequencies and overtones and tuning of pianos which as a musician (with even just a tiny understanding of music theory) is a very cool way to think about waves and how they relate to our everyday life. And if you don’t really have any musical background just think about a barbershop quartet, which have been pretty much immortalized in pop culture I think.

A Wondrous Place

About a week ago a “facebook friend” (someone who I interacted with in person at some point in my life and then added on facebook, but I wouldn’t expect them to take a bullet for me or some other ridiculous situation that would display true affection) posted a link to the most personal and emotional blog post I have ever read. I’ve never felt more connected to someone that I had never met, and will never meet, in my life.

I’ve tried blogging a few times before, but I’ve never been able to stick to it, the old insecurities always got to me and I’d stop after a few posts. But just reading that one post by Derek made me want to give it one more shot. Particularly the part in the section entitled “What was at the end” where he states with absolute conviction that “Derek doesn’t exist anymore”. And I believe him. Derek won’t share his photos or music or life experiences with the “blogosphere” anymore, and as far as I believe that means that he no longer exists. But it made me want to blog in his place; not as a replacement, but as an effect to the cause of his post. Because even if Derek is gone, what he did still effects us today. And what better afterlife could you wish for?

At the conclusion of the post Derek says that “the world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place” which is where I got the namesake for this blog. And above all I’d really like this blog to be about that wondrous place. But to not get too big for one blog, I’ll just shrink it down to what the universe is to me, which will hopefully be interesting for you.