AT5s #4

Hello internet. Today I will be listing the top five most well known/important constants in math. If you don't like math or don't know what a constant is, well then, sorry.

5. Tau (symbol: τ)
This number is sort of well known, I guess, but it is quite important. This constant is basically twice the amount of pi. Since pi ~3.14, tau is ~6.28. But that's not only what tau means. In greek, the greek letter "τ" means the number 300. It is also sometimes means the golden ratio (1.618...), but not usually.


4. Euler's constant (symbol: γ)
This constant is pretty well known. The constant is 0.57721566490153286060651209008240243104215
933593992 and so on (that doesn't mean it repeats, I mean that it just keeps on going). This constant is used as the limiting difference between the harmonic series and the natural logarithm. Whatever the heck that means.

3. Phi (symbol: φ)
This constant isn't just a math constant. It also appears in art, and literature! Phi [usually] represents the golden ratio. (Video to explain it ↓ Credit: Khan Academy)



2. e (symbol: itself)
e is an important mathematical constant and can be defined in many ways. Usually, it's used as a variable in the compound interest equation. Like pi, e is irrational. It never ends and never repeats. Its approximation that most equations use is 2.71828.

1. Pi (symbol: π)
Of course this constant would be the most well known. Like e, pi is also irrational. The approximation that most equations use is just 3.14. It's mainly used in the equation to find the area and the circumference of a circle. In the 21st century, we (using computers) managed to find its digits in the trillionths.

Interesting fact of the day: The US playing card company ‘Bicycle’ had manufactured a playing card in WW2. That, when the card was soaked, it would reveal an escape route for POWs. These cards were Christmas presents for all POWs in Germany.

Doctor Who - Time Travel

Hello internet. Today I will be talking about the subject of time travel and if it's possible, especially in the hit series "Doctor Who," which is a show you really should be watching. But if you don't like British sci-fi, well...sorry.

Anyways, in the show Doctor Who, the Doctor steals one of their home worlds' TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) which is basically a time machine, and crash-lands it in the earth (what a coincidence). The TARDIS is capable of moving across dimensions and through time, even to back to the Big Bang (the Doctor noted it to be "quite annoyingly bright"), and even to other universes (story for another time). So is time travel really possible?

Well...in short, maybe...maybe not. But if we ever do time travel, it's a thing best left to the time lords (the Doctor's race). This is because there are a heck of a lot of paradoxes that could potentially rip a hole in the space-time continuum, or destroy the universe itself.

An example of a paradox is The Grandfather Paradox. In this paradox, a time traveler travels back in time to the time of his ancestor, and kills him before he had any children. This would make the traveler's parents not exist, thus making the traveler not exist either. But if the traveler doesn't exist, then the traveler wouldn't have traveled back in time to kill his grandfather, so the grandfather would still be living, and the process would start all over again.

However there are several hypotheses that can solve the grandfather paradox and other paradoxes such as:

The time line protection hypothesis
This theory states that a time traveler, no matter what he had done, would not be able to create a time paradox, due to a distortion of probability. A person traveling back in time to kill his grandfather, could have appeared in a wrong place, or had his gun jammed, thus allowing his grandfather to have offspring.

Multiple universes hypothesis
This theory states that there are infinite number of universes, collectively known as the "multiverse". If a person is about to travel back in time, he will create his own different universe as he goes in the past. So if he kills "his" grandfather, a paradox wouldn't happen because the grandfather that he has killed is not his own grandfather from the universe he came from, but that of the version of himself in the universe he is now in.


The time line corruption hypothesis

This hypothesis is the one that most people make sense of. This theory states that if the traveler went back in time and did anything in the past, then the present would be corrupted.


So yeah. Time travel. Tricky stuff.

Interesting fact of the day: North Korea has banned blue jeans because they are a symbol of America.

What if the sun disappeared?

Hello internet. It is I, TheFalconPawncher, and I will talk about what would happen if the Sun suddenly disappeared.

Now don't get me wrong, the sun won't just fizzle out suddenly. Instead, it'll grow to a red giant, enveloping Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth.

Most people would say something like "Everyone would die instantly" or "The Earth and the people living on it will freeze in a matter of seconds. Even I said that before. But, fortunately, that's not the case. Since the Earth has greenhouse gases that can trap heat, if the sun disappeared, the Earth will still be warm...but not for long. First what would happen is probably mass panic enveloping the world. I mean, come on, it's kind of obvious. What would you do? Anyways, yeah. Mass panic. However, since the Sun's light takes about eight minutes to reach us, we would have no idea that the sun disappeared. Everything and everyone would be fine for eight minutes more. It also takes eight minutes for the gravitational pull to finally die out since gravity waves move at the speed of light. After eight minutes, the Earth would fly out in a straight line tangent to wherever it was.

For plants, photosynthesis would stop immediately. Without the sun, plants wouldn't be able to inhale carbon dioxide and exhale life-sustaining oxygen. However, since the atmosphere has so much oxygen, it would take us thousands of years to run out of oxygen. But what about temperature? The Earth is quite warm right now, but without the sun to keep giving us heat, the Earth would radiate away its heat exponentially, meaning that it would lose heat quick then happen slower and slower.

At the first week without the sun, the average temperature would be freezing, which is 0°C (32°F). For the next month or two, things would be okay, but by the end of the first year, the average temperature would be -73°C (-100°F). At that time, it would be best to move to geothermal areas, such as Yellowstone or Iceland. But even though there isn't any sun, the Earth still produces its own heat. Below the crust, the Earth is hot. In there, radiative elements decay, providing the energy needed to keep the Earth's core at 5000°C (9000°F). Within the next 10-20 years, things will start to get wet...with dew. But now with glorious water droplets, but oxygen droplets. The air will be cold enough for the oxygen to freeze into a liquid.

But let's go back. At 1-2 years with no sun, the oceans of Earth will freeze over. But ice is less dense than liquid water, which means that ice floats. And ice is a pretty good insulator. So, even after billions of years after the Sun disappeared, liquid water could still exist at the bottom of the oceans by being protected from the cold Earth by miles of ice, and warmed by hydrothermal vents. Instead of being a frozen and lifeless rock, extremophiles, like microbes and tardigrades (I made a pretty cool post about tardigrades, you should go check it out) will be thriving near those vents. They would be fine without ever knowing that the Sun disappeared. Honestly, they probably think that there isn't a Sun in the first place.

It's amazing to know that even without the sun, with the Earth flying through space, things would kind of be fine. The Earth would be flying through space at a pretty fast rate. After about a billion years, Earth would have traveled 100,000 light years, a trip that can potentially take it through the milky way, near billions of stars. And nothing is to say that it'll fall into orbit with another star...thaw out...and let the extremeophiles and microbes still living under there to spread life and evolve all over again...into new intelligent species...then they could uncover things that were part of our lives...maybe they could even find this very blog and post...well in that case...Hi. I'm Bryant and...you're welcome for this blog about your planets history...so thanks for reading.

Interesting fact of the day: The "message received" tone on a Nokia phone is Morse code for "SMS"!

ANTIMATTER

Hello internet. Today I will be talking about the rarest piece of the universe there is. ANTIMATTER.

An example of what antimatter is.

This item is the rarest piece of science there is to date. Here it is in a nutshell. So you know what matter is, right? It's the most basic unit of pretty much everything (with a few exceptions), and you can say that we know what they units are. Antimatter is like the evil twin of matter. It was formed after the big bang, as the big bang created both antimatter and matter. There were anti-electrons, anti-protons, anti-etc. The only difference is the anti- version of the regular matter version was that it had an opposite charge and an opposite spin, but all the other properties, such as mass and volume, were the same. And whenever matter and antimatter contacted, they would annihilate each other, creating pure energy.
If we were to control it, we would have to seal it in a vacuum so that the antimatter doesn't interact with air particles, and make it immobilized, so it wouldn't interact with the walls or basically anything that's regular matter. If you think that wasn't really nutshell, well, it's not. We more like just scratched the nutshell. If you were to have a full gallon of it, you would be extremely richer than the current richest person in the world by a long shot.

This picture depicts a positron.

However, if we actually did control it, our technology is about to jump ahead. The first thing I can think of that they would use it for is to probably make antimatter propeller systems to propel ships into space. This method is much more efficient than our current chemical systems. But that's just a theory.

 Remember when I said the big bang created both antimatter and matter? Well, for some reason, the big bang created more matter than antimatter which, by our current calculations, wasn't supposed to happen. We call this the "baryon asymmetry." We call it this because we, long ago, found that there were more baryonic particles than anti-baryonic particles. We have no explanation for this, and we may never have an explanation for this at all. The ration of the creation of antimatter to matter is approximately 1,000,000 to 1,000,001. The big bang should have (according to us) created equal amounts of antimatter and matter, and the result is total cancellation of everything, but, obviously, this is not the case. This suggests that there are different physical laws for antimatter and matter. "Why is there far more matter than antimatter baryonic particles in the observable universe?" This is one of the greatest unsolved problem in physics.

Interesting fact of the day: There was a earthquake that was so great (The New Madrid Earthquake), it reversed the flow of the Mississippi River.