ADVENTURES IN SPACE AND TIME: Writing Assignment Due November 20th
Have you ever heard of a maglev ("maglev" is short for "magnetic
levitation") train? Some years back, Floridians voted to have such a
high-speed train (well, possibly a maglev) for Florida. A maglev zips its
passengers along by creating a powerful magnet that sucks passengers forward
or backward along the rails at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.
Of course, lots of details have to be worked out before Florida
actually gets a maglev train.
Imagine a train like this--but even faster--in space, that lets
you travel to other worlds, other galaxies, possibly other universes
or points in time.
If you've seen the movie, CONTACT, perhaps you'll remember
how people in that movie travelled. Do you think such travel is
really possible?
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LINKS
Go to NASA's "Ask the Space Scientist," click on "Black Holes,"
and then look at the answers to the various questions about black
holes being used as inter-universe tunnels, or as ways to travel
through time! What do you think? Could we travel through
these or not?
Try looking at some of the movies showing relativity's
predictions for black holes, at "Spacetime Wrinkles"--try either:
"The Relativistic Universe"
or "Movies from the Edge of Spacetime"
(If your computer will not download the whole movie, try looking
at the "thumbnail images," and reading the accompanying "text!")
You might also like to read about the neutron star streaking
across space and related "exotic matter" ("exotic matter" just means
stuff we're not used to around Earth) at NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope site. Or perhaps you'd like to see the bent light waves
left by a black hole--called the black hole's signature.
For more information about black holes--which were used to form
inter-universe tunnels in the movie, "Contact"--and how powerful
these are, go to the "Amazing Space" site, and click on "Black
Holes." Find out how fast matter travels near a
black hole!
STORIES
A number of stories have been written about travel through time
and space. R. L. Stine usually writes mysteries, but he has written
a story called "The Beast" (1994) in which children travel through
time. (See Stine [1994], The Beast [New York: Pocket Books--Simon
and Schuster/Parachute Press].)
In Arthur C. Clarke's (1968) "2001, A Space Odyssey," the hero
meets a new kind of being in the Universe, and learns about new ways
to travel in space--by taking on new forms. And just think--2001 is
only a few months away! (See the videorecording, or look at Clarke
[1983], The Sentinel [New York: Berkley].)
Perhaps space and time have warps with secret passages through!
In Jules Verne's (1959) "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth,"
a scientist and his nephew travel through the hollow passages of a
volcano (a volcano that is not supposed to erupt), and, after taking
this shortcut through the earth's interior, come out through a
volcano somewhere else on Earth. (See Verne [1959], A Journey
to the Centre of the Earth, illustrated by the author;
introduction by Arthur C. Clarke [New York: Dodd,
Mead & Company].)
Do you think that a traveller--a light beam, a space ship
(perhaps a special kind of ship), a strange type of extraterrestrial,
or a ghost, perhaps--could take a similar shortcut through a hole in
space and time? Do you think it would be possible to create a
gravitational warp to carry people through space with moderate,
controlled gravitational fields (none that accelerate us to the speed
of light, or switch direction suddenly!)? (Creating manmade warps in
gravity for travel through space is discussed in Marcus Chown [23
March, 1996], Planes, trains and wormholes, New Scientist: 29-33.)
TWISTING SPACE
George Gamow (1961), in "One two three . . . infinity" describes
ways space can be twisted--for example, in "Mobius strips" and "Klein
bottles." It's fun to make a Mobius strip. Cut a strip of paper.
It has two sides or faces, right? Now, twist the paper once and
paste the two ends together. Trace your finger around it. How many
sides do you think there are now?
Do you think space and time could twist together to other parts
far away in the universe?
WRITING ACTIVITY
Use the links above--and perhaps also read some of the fiction
about travel in space and time--to imagine what travel would be like
in an inter-universe tunnel through space and/or time. Would it even
be possible? Then, write a story about such a trip. If you want the
story to focus on the traveller, you might write a collection of
several adventures that your character might have on such trips.
(This is called a "character cycle.") Your story is due next
Monday, November 20th!
You might try publishing your story, too--at Kids' Crunch or at
PBS' Kids' Zoom!
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FOR FURTHER THOUGHT--try reading the following verse and thinking
about the accompanying questions!
1).
Do you think that some matter might travel faster than light in a
super-high gravitational field? (See NASA's "Ask the Space
Scientist" question about what happens to a photon in a black hole.)
LIMERICK
There was a young lady from Wight
whose speed was far faster than light.
She set off one day
in the usual way,
and returned on the previous night!
2).
A poet, Morris Bishop wrote the following poem, "E = MC Squared," in
response to Einstein's work with relativity. The poem was first
published in the New Yorker in 1946.
While working on relativity, Einstein discovered that gravity could
even affect something without any mass like light. He also worked
out a new formula in which mass could be converted into energy--where
the energy produced in a reaction equalled the mass lost times the
speed of light squared. Einstein's theories predicted the existence
of gravitational fields in space like those of black holes!
(Since "E = MC Squared" was written in 1946,the poet was probably
thinking about the debate going on in the U.S. as to whether 'we
must' or 'must not' use the atomic bomb on Japan during World War
II, too, as well as about his work with relativity.)
Why do you think that the poet says that "[l]ife is a tangled
bowknot" in this poem?
E = MC2
by Morris Bishop
What was our trust, we trust not;
What was our faith, we doubt;
Whether we must or must not,
We may debate about.
The soul, perhaps is a gust of gas,
And wrong is a form of right;
But we know that Energy equals Mass
by the Square of the Speed of Light!
What we have known, we know not;
What we have proved, abjure;
Life is a tangled bowknot,
But one thing is still sure.
Come little lad; come little lass;
Your docile creed recite:
"We know that Energy equals Mass
by the Square of the Speed of Light!"
(Cited in Louise Rosenblatt [1978], "The Reader, the Text, the Poem:
the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work" [Carbondale, Illinois:
Southern Illinois University Press]: 73-74.)
3).
Another poem on this subject is George Gamow's LIMERICK!
There was a young fellow from Trinity
Who took the square root of infinity.
But the number of digits
Gave him the fidgets;
He dropped Math and took up Divinity.
(From George Gamow [1961], "One two three . . . infinity: Facts and
Speculations of Science," illustrated by George Gamow [New York: the
Viking Press].)
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Relativity: the speed of anything is relative to the current speed you're
going; likewise, a charge is really a charge difference, relative to another
charge.
Wave and Particle Theory: sometimes matter can take the shape of particles,
other times it takes the shape of waves.
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Incorporating Science into Your Writing:
Energy and Gravity: Some Equations: You Make Sense of Them
Energy = Mass times Velocity Squared
(note: for the release of energy and particles--electrons in electricity,
electrical waves; neutrons and protons in fission, the velocity is the
escape
velocity of the speed of light, the escape velocity of the photon, of the
energy in the electrical wave; thus Einstein's equation is: E (Energy) = M
(Mass) C-squared (Where C is the speed of light)
Force = Mass times Acceleration
(note: the above equation is also the equation for gravity; some people
think that while it is the photon's energy that holds the particles together
in the atom, it may be gravity that holds an individual particle to itself)
Gravity is believed to be a spiralling wave. Centrifugal force is believed
to be a related
force. Also, electrical fields are associated with a gravitational field,
that is where you see a gravitational field, you also tend to see
electrical
fields, and an electrical current can cause a gravitational field.
Gravity on the earth = 1 G
(note: that's at the Earth's surface only. If you were inside of the
earth,
only the mass located between you and the center could still pull on you.)
Gravity decreases by the square of the distance as you get farther away.
(Question: If the earth were compressed to the density of a neutron, and
you
were located at a distance from its center
equal to that of Earth's current radius, what would the gravitational pull
on
you be? How many G's?
Another question: why in your opinion might gravity decrease by the square
of the distance and not simply the distance?)
Now back to the forces that hold things together. What about molecules?
What holds them together? Is any electrical
charge involved? That is, how do the atoms in molecules join together?
Now, what do you think holds together the nucleus of the atom?
Note: a neutron-one of the particles in the nucleus--is equal it seems to a
proton plus an electron!!!! Minus of
course a photon (but a photon of energy is always released whenever two
particles combine; and it is absorbed whenever particles split; I think it's
just one photon; I'll have to check).
Hydrogen has several isotopes: the
common hydrogen, which is just a proton and an electron; and a rarer isotope
called "deuteron," which is a proton, a neutron, and an electron. No other
isotope goes without a neutron in its nucleus; in fact, normally, the number
of neutrons must equal the number of protons--which of course must equal the
number of electrons in the shell, or else you have a very conductive ion.
So why does hydrogen often go without a neutron, in your opinion?
What keeps the electrons from falling down into the atom, into its nucleus?
What kind of force?
An interesting force to learn about is torque or angular momentum; see the
article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque
Also see the tutorial put out by the University of Guelph's Physics
Department:
http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/torque/Q.torque.intro.html
Check out also angular momentum at Georgia State University's Department of
Physics and Astronomy:
http://230nsc1.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/amom.html
and at the University of Guelph again--"Introduction: Torque and Angular
Acceleration"
http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/torque/Q.torque.intro.angacc.html
(angular momentum gets faster as the distance to the center, to the fulcrum,
decreases--like the pendulum that speeds up when you bring the string in
closer to you; so angular momentum seems to be different than torque, but as
you can see, angular acceleration and torque are related!)
It's different than gravity--it seems--because the force acting on an object
to cause its
rotation about a fulcrom increases according to the object's distance from
the fulcrom.
Or is it different than gravity? And what about centrifugal force?
Torque is the force you need, for example, to open a door.
According to the University of Guelph,
"[t]he closer you are to the hinges (i.e. the smaller r is), the harder it
is
to push. This is what happens when you try to push open a door on the wrong
side. The torque you created on the door is smaller than it would have been
had you pushed the correct side (away from its hinges)."
Read also especially about "Rotational
Equilibrium" in the Wikipedia article on torque.
Is there a way that gravity and torque might be
related? (Remember, gravity decreases by the square of the distance as you
get farther away; torque increases according to the distance as the rotating
body gets farther from the center. Torque "is the cross product between the
distance vector (the distance from the pivot point to the point where force
is applied) and the force vector, 'a' being the angle between r and F,"
according to the University of Guelph.
How might the equations for gravity and torque be related?
This is complicated to think about, but
if you are really interested in physics, might be interesting.)
Finally, do you know what a web is??? In the natural world, life, microbes,
animals,
plants, are said to be linked into a single eco-web; thus they
interconnect?
Could you think of the physical world as a web--the world of atoms,
molecules, chemical bonding?
Many physicists talk about the warp of space, or space-time. High
gravitational fields warp space-time, they say. How would this make the
more massive particles in the atom, those in the nucleus (the proton, for
example)
end up in the center of the atom and the lighter particles end up at the
periphery, in orbit around the center?
Black holes are supposed to be locuses of very dense matter. It is their
density that makes the gravitational field near them so high, supposedly.
There may be other explanations as well. Why would high density lead to
high gravity?
Do you think there is a limit to how dense matter can be?
One more thing. Why do tiny particles, without mass or charge,
called "neutrinos," seem to pass right through the earth? Why aren't they
absorbed? Do they really pass through? Or do they generate mirror images
on
the other side of any g-field? Would a theory of gravity need to account for
the failure of Earth's (and others') G-fields to absorb the neutrinos?
* * * * * * * THE END. HAVE A GREAT WRITING JOURNEY! * * * * * *
RESOURCE for helping you visualize the sky around you:
Astronomical Society of the Pacific's "Earth and Beyond" (the solar system,
plus a mini-planetarium showing how the sky looks from earth's perspective,
that is relative to earth--remember, how the sky looks, the speed things
seem to be travelling at, everything, is relative to the
observer!):http://www.astrosociety.org/cgi-local/SoftCart.exe/online-
store/scstore/p-KT136.html?L+scstore+qmqd4173ff572857+1206034840#large