Sun Power - Energy from Matter

Ever so many years ago, people thought the sun was just a huge bonfire, chemically burning fuel.  The chemical equation looked something like this

That's gasoline with oxygen in a car engine.  Complete combustion releases only carbon dioxide and water and that's why your exhaust pipe drips - it's the condensation of a reaction product, not water in the gas or rain water from the last hurricane.

But that process  won't work for the sun.  Oxygen supply is a problem.  Fuel is a problem.  The best it could do under perfect conditions is a few thousand years.  Maybe.  But it just won't work.

And we knew it.  Scientists had no idea where the energy that powered the sun came from until about 1920.  And the average person has no clue either.

Chemical processes are all about the electrons - sharing, trading, transferring, repelling.

Nuclear processes have nothing to do with electrons.  Focus on that teeny tiny part of the atom that you basically ignored in chemistry class - the nucleus.  It has almost all the mass, takes up almost no space, and is freed from its confining electrons in the plasma at the sun center.

The hydrogen nuclei (free protons), moving at unimaginably high speeds, collide with each other constantly and sometimes (rarely) combine to form larger nuclei.  This process continues in our sun until helium nuclei are formed.  The most famous equation in the world governs the energy production since matter is converted into energy.

Without quantum physics, however, even that wouldn't happen since at the fusion core of the sun, it's not hot enough to make the nuclei move fast enough to overcome the proton to proton repulsion.

So the sun ain't no "ball of fire."  It's a huge nucleosynthesizer that fuses hydrogen into helium, converts tiny bits of mass into huge amounts of energy, and keeps us toasty in summer.

Conservation Laws? Not Always True - Freaky Fzx Friday

In Chemistry and Biology you learned all about the Law of Conservation of Matter.

 

Not quite the Law of Conservation of Matter but close.  Almost the Law of Conservation of Life - Life begets life.

But even in my high school chemistry class we calculated the mass defect since particles lose mass when they form a nucleus.  This is an example of mass loss and energy release - the energy source for our stars.

The above Law of Conservation of Mass was fundamental to a good understanding of Chemistry.  Without it there would have been no chemistry.

And the Law of Conservation of Energy?  Seriously important for the development of science

The idea that gravitational potential energy and heat from friction and energy of motion and nuclear bond energy are the same thing was a great leap forward.

The problem is that those conservation laws are not strictly true.  What's the famous equation in the world?

Most people will interpret this as shown in the picture above but that's not a good translation.  This is another Einstein idea and it's all about  matter-energy equivalence.

Every time you eat or drive a car or use electricity from a coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plant - that's energy from matter.  Chemical bond energy and nuclear bond energy manifest as mass.

Electrons are NOT tiny planets - Freaky Fzx Friday

For the last two episodes of Freaky Fzx Friday we've dealt with the fact that every kind of electromagnetic wave travels as a wave and collides as a particle.  It's a tough concept but that's why microwaves and cell phones and radar guns don't cause cancer.  They don't have enough energy when colliding as particles to ionize - knock out electrons and change DNA.

"The Big Bang Theory" - fun show for adults even if they don't understand the Fzx discussed.  Funner for a Fzx expert.  But the atom shown after every commercial break is wrong.

Here's the International Atomic Energy Agency logo

and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commision

Those symbols are wrong.  The electrons aren't planets most of the time.  They collide as particles and travel as waves just like electromagnetic "waves."

So electrons don't act as particles when traveling.  They act like waves.  Electrons ARE waves.  They only collide as the particles we think they always are.

That's a tiny peak into wave particle duality and quantum physics.  Freaky.

Cancer, Cell Phones, and Electrons - Freaky Fzx Friday on Wave Particle Duality

Back in 1905 Einstein showed us that light acts as a particle when it hits things.

Those look like waves but they're labeled "photons" - that's the name for a particle of light.  It's a problem because

and we need keep that in mind.

But we still don't really get it. Light is a form of electromagnetic energy.  Here is the spectrum.  All of these waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum and act just like light.  They have different wavelengths and frequencies but they travel like waves - electric and magnetic waves - and collide as particles.

From our equation,

we know that the higher frequency EM waves strike as particles with higher energy.

Now let's talk cancer.  DNA must be changed in the cells of an organism in order for cancer to take hold.

Only waves above a certain threshold can strike DNA as particles with enough energy to knock electrons off and change the structure of DNA and perhaps cause cancer.

I say perhaps since this kind of thing happens on a regular basis and most cells repair themselves or self-destruct.

And NO.  Microwaves cannot cause cancer any more than visible light can.  Radio waves, cell phone signals, radar guns - none have enough energy when colliding as particles to do more than vibrate particles.

But the key to all this discussion is that LIGHT WAVES COLLIDE AS PARTICLES.  And no studies have shown a real increase in cancer rate from cell phone or microwave oven use.

This video misses that point but does bring up the idea that if visible light doesn't cause cancer, cell phones can't.

This video mentions frequency but misses that essential fact of the particle nature of waves when striking matter.

And here's Veritasium's weak and somewhat unclear video on the subject - that is what science is like - sometimes weak and unclear.

The key to this discussion is truly freaky.  Electromagnetic waves act as particles when being generated -   - and when colliding.  That's why cell phones never cause cancer.  Nor can microwaves or visible light.

So the next time Grandma or your friend tells you that cell phones - or whatever - can cause cancer, just tell her all about how those waves of radiation collide as particles and only the high energy particles like UV, X, or Gamma can cause changes in DNA chemical structure leading to possible cancer.

Or just smile and change the subject.

You've been told not to talk about religion or politics since it will lead to arguments.  Add Freaky Fzx to the list - it just gets people angry.  I've tried it.

Photoelectric Effect Explained - Freaky Fzx Friday

Etna's Light Up Night Fireworks are always pretty good and we've been going since they started.  Tiny children don't like the scary sounds but they do like the colors.  On the day after Thanksgiving my Mom and Dad and our family headed over to the ball field to watch the flames of the bonfire supervised by the local VFD and await the colors in the sky.

BabyGirl buried her face in my shoulder and started screaming almost immediately - totally expected so I just walked away with her and sat down planning to cover her ears.  As I was sitting, a gentleman from the Etna Fire Police offered me his truck.  Not a bad idea so we sat in the front seat of his truck to watch the fireworks without all the sound after he cleared it of fast food wrappers.

Beautiful.

BUT

Back in 1887 around the same time that Michelson and Morley were discovering that light never changes speed in a vacuum - the basis of Einstein's Special Relativity - the PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT was observed.  only certain wavelengths of light allowed electrons to be emitted.

Here is the apparatus.

The year was 1905.  1897 saw the discovery of the electron and the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Model of the Atom reigned supreme.  Rutherford had yet to discover the nucleus and the proton.

Einstein took center stage again with his explanation of another two decade unsolved problem in Physics.

Lets' step forward to a model of the atom that you are more familiar with for this explanation.  Bohr didn't propose it until 1913 and we're still in 1905 so Einstein didn't have it but it'll help us.

When an electron is kicked out of an atom for some reason - heat or electricity or radiation - it leaves a space that must be filled.

Here is the emission.

The frequency of the light emitted or absorbed is dependent upon this equation.

It works for absorption - the photoelectric effect - or emission - fireworks.

Every atom is different so every atom emits and absorbs different particles of light - different photons.  More on that next time.

The crazy conclusion is that

And light can act as a wave or as a particle.  That had been a debate for hundreds of years - wave or particle.  Max Planck had proposed that light could act as a wave or as a particle in 1900.

Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect was an early foray into what we call "quantum theory." Einstein won his only Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, 16 years after his paper was written.  They were catching up since the Nobel Prizes started in 1901.

But remember that this is what the atom really looks like.

It was Albert Einstein
again
in 1905
contributing major ideas to another field of study.

First it was Relativity and how different mass and spacetime are near the speed of light.

Then it was Quantum Theory and how what we know as waves can act as particles.

Those problems took an Einstein.  It doesn't take an Einstein, however, to do well in this class.

Relativity and Science Fiction - Freaky Fzx Friday - Birthday Edition

Readers would get seriously bored if science fiction followed the laws of Physics.  Movies would be even boringer.

Imagine if it took months or years to reach the nearest planet.  Imagine if it would take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star system.  And remember that you would have to take everything with you.  Your fuel and your food.  Your medical supplies.  Everything.

That's the reality. Some SciFi adventures have taken place entirely in our solar system.

2001: A Space Odyssey

War of the Worlds

Event Horizon - kinda - it seems that they went to hell or hell went to them.

Apollo 13 - definitely fiction

But we know that there is no other intelligent life in this system so we have to venture far away to other solar systems in our galaxy to see other life.  BUT we have to break laws of physics and invent new technologies in order to go so far.

Dr. Who built a time machine inside a police box

You could be aboard a living ship called Moya in Farscape.

You could make the jump to light speed using the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.

You could leap from one place to another in the universe using a pair of Stargates

You could "make it so" aboard the Enterprise D at Warp factor 11.

You could get lost on the other side of the galaxy through a spacetime accident and be assimilated by the Borg in Star Trek Voyager.

You could even park a space station at the edge of a wormhole ala Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

Each of these imaginary situations depends on a warping of spacetime.  They all depend on an understanding of Einstein's General Relativity.  They do, however, warp the universe so hard as to break the laws of physics but it makes the reading and viewing so much more entertaining.

A Star Trek warp bubble

Wormholes and Stargates warp space and time

The DeLorean is real.  I've seen it in Etna.

That which  was future is now the present.

These imaginary fictional travels are great for imagination. They allow us to project our minds to other systems, other times, other  worlds.  And they allow the writers to advocate against the stupidity of racism and other social problems all around us.  Star Trek was written and produced in the mid 1960s during the cold war and civil rights movement in the US.

The Original Series included a black woman, a Russian, an Asian, and a Vulcan as main characters.  It wasn't just a science fiction series.

Whether making social statements or just telling stories of far-flung travel among the stars, science fiction twists real science in such a way that it becomes unrecognizable.  They sometimes use real science terms and turn them in on themselves like a black holes turns spacetime in on itself.  But they're fascinating.  All of them.  Where else can you get beyond cutting edge technology and interspecies collaboration all wrapped up in an adventure story?

And I didn't even include subjects like matter-antimatter drives and transporters.  I'll save that for next time.  More Einstein and the famousest equation in the universe.