By Caroline Bao and Samantha Zhu If you have had the misfortune of skiing during seasons of sparse snow, you may be familiar with the horrifying sound of scraping skis combined with a terrifying sense of losing control on steeper trails. Paired with low visibility and aggressive winds at higher altitudes, the experience can be unfavorable for many. Particularly in southern California, the slippery snow in several resorts can create harrowing sensations of skiing, or rather skating, down ice. Warmer day temperatures melt the snow and cool night temperatures resolidify the snow, packing it into an unpleasant, firm brick, leading to the coinage of the term “California concrete” - describing its hard and icy texture.
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![]() By Jasper Chen Have you ever wondered about the mechanisms that govern the behavior of the world around you? Theory has it that about 13.8 billion years ago, an infinitely dense and unimaginably small entity expanded into an extremely hot state (10,000 million degrees, 1,000 times the temperature of the center of the sun) that grew unimaginably fast: a few light years across in one second of time (this rate is continually increasing). This is known as the Big Bang, and it marks the start of time. Current theories cannot handle the infinite density of the entity, a mathematical singularity (or simply an undefined object), and the theories are therefore unable to “predict” certain properties of the era before the Big Bang. It also gave rise to the four fundamental forces that act as the basis of virtually every single phenomenon that human kinds have managed to discover: the weak force, the strong force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They all have crucial roles in shaping the world around us. During the first 10^(-43) seconds, or one ten-million-trillion-trillion-trillionth of a second of a second after the Big Bang, the four fundamental forces of nature were united into a single, grand force. This period of time is known as the Planck Epoch, named after the German scientist Max Planck. However, as time moves past this miniscule amount of period in time, the gravitational force separated from the grand force, then from the Strong Force and lastly from the electromagnetic force. The four fundamental forces started to take forms in the way we experience them today as the universe starts to cool from the blazing state. By Emily Zhou “You’ll never find a rainbow if you’re looking down,” quotes Charlie Chaplin, the famous silent film comic actor. Indeed, the rainbow has developed over the centuries as a symbol of happiness, beauty, and magical blessings. However, many are unaware of the involvement of physics with the creation of these displays of light; by understanding the workings of science behind them, you may be able to see one every single day. Why are rainbows colorful?Rainbows usually result from refraction of light through suspended water droplets. In the 1660s, Isaac Newton conducted his prism experiments, which isolated a single beam of sunlight to shine through a glass prism and create a visible color spectrum as a multi-colored band of light. When Newton placed a second prism in front of the first, he was capable of combining the colors back into the beam of white light. His findings proved that the sunlight, which usually appears white to our eyes, is actually a combination of a range of all colors that are detectable to the human eye. Thus, when light travels across mediums of different density, (in this case from air to water), beams of light at different wavelengths are deflected at slightly different angles, bending to separate into individual colors. For example, red light, which has the longest wavelength on the spectrum of visible light, will be refracted at a steeper angle than blue light, which has a shorter wavelength. Difference in angle after refraction allows the human eye to distinguish the bands of light by color.
By Annie Lu Gravitational TheoryGravitational theory is the idea that any two particles of matter attract one another with a force directly proportional to the produce of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them (generally credited to Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravitation). GeocentrismWhy was geocentrism inherently attractive to people? These believers are mainly of antiquity, but this is not to discount the roughly 20% of Americans in 2006 who still claimed to believe the sun revolves around the Earth (Berman). Religious institutions have argued there is biblical support for a geocentric model. World-renowned modern geocentrist Gerardus Bouw dedicated a book to the geocentric nature of the Bible, and analyzed the semantics behind certain verses. For example, Psalm 93:1 from the King James Version of the Bible reads: “the world also is established; it shall never be moved.” Psalm 104:5 reads: “laid the foundations of the Earth that it should not be removed forever.” It is evident that these lines may be interpreted one way or another, depending on the beliefs of the reader. It is more widely accepted these days, however, that the universe is indeed not geocentric, which brings us to the next point in time.
By Tompson Hsu On June 30th, 1905, Albert Einstein published the article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." The article was the first to detail his vision of special relativity, which said that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers (i.e., the person looking) and that the speed of light in a vacuum, or lack of air, is independent of how the observers are moving. Yet Einstein could not have developed his theory without the breakthroughs that came before his time—while Einstein was indeed a genius, special relativity simply could not have been theorized before his time. There was simply no good experimental foundation up until James Clark Maxwell completed his theory of electromagnetism in 1873. To trace the developments further back to their origin would be to include Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, where classic Newtonian mechanics were first introduced. (Newtonian mechanics imply the universality and absoluteness of time, which played a key role in the development of special relativity. These mechanics mean that, no matter where you are in the world, time will always progress the same. This turns out to be false for some special cases, hence the “special” in “special relativity”.) Other notable discoveries include the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, the Lorentz transformations, written by Woldemar Voigt in the same year. Let’s go into more detail.
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