May 30, 2018 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Some Important Conservation Laws
We were talking about conservation laws in
physics and how they form the bed rock of the description of nature.
Some of the main conservation laws of
classical physics are:
Conservation of mass-energy
Conservation of linear momentum
Conservation of angular momentum
Conservation of electric charge
I am sure you must be all vaguely familiar
with some of these laws if not very well versed with all of them.
These are only some of the conservative
laws and are both exact and absolute, which means as claimed earlier, that they
apply to all the processes in the nature.
Even more interesting than this truth is
the Noether’s theorem which is a very interesting result that was arrived after
studying these various laws of conservation.
Before going into this theorem, let me tell
one very important implication of the conservation of angular momentum.
Today no one questions the fact that days
and nights are caused by earth’s rotation even though it is a fairly new
knowledge considering the amount of time sapiens as species have lived through
not knowing this.
But I find it very odd that very few people
raise the question that why does earth spin or rotate about its axis, and goes
on to do so endlessly, at least endlessly as far as we as species are
concerned.
It is today also fairly well accepted fact
that there surely was a Big Bang in which a primordial cloud was formed
consisting principally of the simplest elements of the periodic table, hydrogen
and helium which I had discussed in some of bedtime stories of last year.
What happened before that is a question for
research and today some interesting theories have come up with alternatives to
what could have happened before.
Heavier elements as we know are “cooked up”
inside massive supernovae and spitted out all over when these super bombs
explode.
All these interstellar dust along with the
omnipresent gravitational force allows that magical process known as accretion
to set in.
Accretion is the process that is
responsible for the formation of almost all astronomical objects ranging from
galaxies to planets.
Strangely enough, it is the least taught natural
process that gave rise to our existence taught in High Schools.
What also accompanies this accretion
process is the imparting of relatively low degree of angular momentum to this
slowly gathering cloud of interstellar dust matter because of its heterogeneous
nature.
As time goes by and the process of
accretion continues, the central part of the nebula undergoes fast compression
and a forms a hot hydrostatic core which is actually the seed of what will in
future become a star.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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