Advanced Physics
As Far As I Can See, There’s Only Midnight “Are you going to eat that?” Kalanie coughed in surprise, choking slightly on her breakfast. “Hey, I know the rations taste like garbage, but that’s a bit of an overreaction, don’t you think?” Her breathing returned to normal, and she looked up at her unwanted visitor. Irritation painted her face. “Yes, I’m going to eat it. Heat up your own-” She coughed again. “-damn ration, Huan!” Huan gazed at her slyly. His eyes were dark with mischief. “Give me some! I need to get to Deck B soon. The Sulaco crew and I are going to watch the migration from the window.” “...Migration?” “The Bellum magna? They’re passing by the station in thirty minutes or so.” She sighed. “Huan, you know I don’t care about aliens. I’ve lived here for twelve years now; they don’t interest me anymore. I know you’re new and all, but I promise, they aren’t that impressive” She took a bite of a biscuit. “Besides, I’m a geologist, I have better things to do.” “But they’re huge! They only come by every eighty years! I know you haven't seen them up close. Take a break and join us! And give me some of your food…?” Kalanie sipped on her coffee. “I’ve seen pictures. That’s enough for me.” Huan looked at the floor, letting his dark locks impair his view of the woman. In a moment he had looked up again, brushing the hair out of his face. His expression radiated disappointment. “You’re such a buzzkill, K. You’re missing out, you know.” Kalanie gulped down the last of her beverage and waved him away. He huffed and turned from the kitchen, and began walking towards the elevator. A click signaled his departure towards the B Wing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Minutes of silence passed. She held her head and flipped through the crumb-covered storage plans for the Sulaco. She had to figure out how many seafloor samples she wanted to donate for the return trip. There was plenty of free room, but people wanted new data from Europa, not old news. She would get an earful if she sent too many familiar mineral samples back to home base on Mars. Then again, if she found even one new European microfossil the scientists at NASA would lose their minds. They have to keep the public interest in Europa high if they want funding. And yet, the Sulaco crew just want to take a trip to the ever-present xeno zoo instead of working. She waited six years for a bunch of spry young biologists in a gigantic party ship? Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten her hopes up in the first place… Yells erupted from Deck B. The hollers of the Sulaco crew echoed past the insulated walls and straight into her annoyance. She flipped page again, aggressively ignoring the noise. Loud, celebratory cheering started once again. She slammed her coffee mug against the table. Her brown eyes reflected on the glass surface of the kitchenś exit door angrily as she stood up. “Goddamit.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kalanie trekked down the hall to Deck B. Her feet, clad in white boots, stomped ever faster in the underwater corridor. As she passed, the mechanics and engineers laid flat against the paneled walls; the colonists speaking in conference and recreation rooms hushed at the sight of her. She paid them no mind. Deck B, barely ten meters ahead at the turn, erupted with awe-filled gasps. She walked faster, breathing in, readying herself for a harsh scolding. She turned the corner. Deck B was filled to the brim with not only the Sulaco crew, but colonists from across the entire Europa base. Their eyes were wide, smiling with joy, eyes trained on the glass outside. The elderly head xenobiologist closest to the glass turned to his controls, training the seabed lights upwards to get a better glimpse of the passing leviathans. Delight echoed from his voice as he turned back to his waiting disciples. “Despite the thirty kilometers of ice blocking incoming sunlight, Europa’s waters are filled with complex life. Radiation on the surface, far too strong for humans to bear for any amount of time, is lifeless. Tidal friction, at around 7.3*10^17, heats the ocean to quite tolerable levels. So, as you can see with Bellum Magna...” He adjusted his glasses and raised an arm to the audience. “ ...It was enough.” Kalanie entered the Deck B auditorium silently, her anger dissipating. As she approached the glass, her peers gave her a clear path. She stood at the front, glass inches away. In the inky blackness were massive creatures illuminated by artificial light. They dwarfed the base, so massive that the force of their gyrating cilia could be felt echoing against the floor under their feet. Their cylindrical, thickly armored bodies spun in unison, slowly, deliberately, in a midnight liquid. Through cracks in their pale armor, lights of whitish blue cascaded down their lengths. One of the beasts rubbed its carapace against another’s; through the speakers of the auditorium came a sound sweet, sorrowful, musical. Kalanie could only stare. A hand gently grabbed her shoulder, and she turned. It was Huan. He was smiling at her. “You made it. Do you see them?” Her eyes were filled with an unfamiliar, youthful spark. “I see them.” Flash Fiction Reflection 1. The purpose of this project was to exercise our knowledge and mathematical prowess using a theme of space exploration. We studied the possibility of leaving Earth and traveling to other worlds to colonize. These could be quite varied, from Europa to Venus! We were to discuss and discover what humans would need to survive on these exotic locales, and calculate how they would get there.
2. By working together! By working with my partner, Jen, we were able to split the work and figure out our calculations. It took us multiple tries but with a little guidance we were able to do it. The equations on the board were also a very helpful asset in our work. We get along quite well and that was helpful in establishing what we wanted to do. 3. I was completely unaware of how complex even simplified space travel calculations were. The rigorous nature of the math involved was a great surprise and I felt very accomplished while completing it. As far as bodies in space go, I am quite familiar and wasn't surprised by much in that regard. 4. I think space travel is extremely important to our future if we can't force ourselves to conserve our planet's resources. A lot of people think space travel is a waste of money; I find that to be a short-sighted assessment. The pursuit of knowledge will always be a worthy endeavor in my mind, and worth our funds and time. Not to mention that space is extremely fascinating! Despite all of our experiments and rockets, we still know very little, and that's exciting.
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1.) This experiment was an attempt to understand motion one one dimension rather than in multiple. The laws of the natural world dictate that objects will fall with the same acceleration due to gravity; if we ignore air resistance and other factors. All objects are forced to the ground by gravity in this way. This experiment had us dropping items in relation to a ruler and discovering how fast the objects arrived at certain points on the ruler. In the end, we would have dropped a predetermined object 10 times and finding our data's standard deviation and average. We would then compare what we found to the actual force of gravity, 9.8 m/s^2. 2.) This experiment was surprisingly challenging. We had trouble fitting all of our tests into the time limit, for one. However, we tried our best to make it work. Our experiment had to be easy to see and test, and as such we could get our data just as easily. We set up our ruler and timer on the whiteboard. Halfway through our experiment, we also realized that placing a marker where we would drop our object(a penny) from would be an ideal situation, and would give us better results. We also brought plenty of paper to write down our findings, and, when something seemed off, we would recalculate and take another set of data and see. 3.) Our procedure was convoluted purely on the fact that we did not use a spreadsheet, which I am currently regretting. We did the brunt of our work on paper, which I will show below. W first started out by having our ruler propped against the whiteboard, and dropping a penny at approximately the same height. We would record the time it took for the bottom of the penny to reach 2-inch intervals on the ruler, and record it. We started seeing some strange numbers that seemed wholly inconsistent, but at the time we felt like we didn't have enough class time to redo them for potential accuracy. When we first started interpreting the results, we were unsure of how to harness the given equations to find our acceleration. It now seems as if we started incorrectly, or did not quite fully understand it. It was also difficult to interpret all of our answers when we were all writing on the same paper. Foresight at its finest. Keep this in mind as I explain what we found from our data. We started off by using an equation given to us to find the acceleration of each different interval of two inches and the time it took to get to them. Our equation was our distance(D) times two and divided by the time to receive our acceleration(d*2/t=a). We determined the acceleration of each interval in relation to one another. This took multiple tries to get right. Our average acceleration appeared to be a massive number, 340.421 m/s^2. There was likely an error, but we decided to stick with the number to see where it took us. We then plugged this into our equation to determine the percentage of error in our calculations. Needless to say, it was kind of a total mathematical disaster. Practice makes perfect? 4.) Please keep in mind that there appears to be some big errors in our final numbers, making some strange results. Hopefully by going over this in the future we can determine what went wrong step-by-step. Our average acceleration was found to be 340.421 m/s^2. Our standard deviation was 516.4. Our percentage margin of error was a unsurprisingly large number, at 33%. 5.) Clearly we had some big errors in our calculations that affected the final quality of our answer. It was definitely way off. This can be attributed to several things: None of us consider ourselves particularly gifted in mathematics. This is a mental barrier, and we had a lot of trouble understanding the concepts. Also, misinterpretation of our equations led us to have to redo steps again and again, and even then we still had issues. Finally, our data was a bit whacked out from the start. I'm attributing this to human error. It is impossible to drop things at the exact same height or time, there will always be error when people perform data collecting. There's only room for improvement.
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AuthorLucas Kebow's adventures in advanced physics are documented here. ArchivesCategories |