Saturday, February 19, 2005

Esarhaddon
Not only to I have USAD and DemiDec packets, now I have the desirable and limited edition Ben packets! XD

This senior on the Academic Decathlon team wrote up Social Science packets for everyone. I've been reading about mess-o-potato mass (Mesopotamia). Esarhaddon (which I remember because it sounds like "Is her hat on") was a king from Assyria who reigned for 13 years and founded the 26th dynasty because 13x2=26!! XD

Next up is superquiz fact sheets, Art outline, and lit. I wonder how he's going to do it all. I certainly couldn't. But then again he is Ben the genius! lol. ^_^


Anyway, Ken also mentioned Quantum Mechanics in his myO, so I shall write about them here.

Quantum Mechanics proposes a duality of photons, electrons, etc., in the universe. It is not only a particle, but a wave as well. If you test an experiment to see if its a wave, it will behave like a wave, and the same thing for particle.

QM also proposes a randomness, and probability, or chance. It says that nothing is certain. An electron from your body could go to the sun and back in a fraction of a nanosecond without you ever knowing. Of course, this is highly, highly unlikely, but that's another part of QM.

Before QM and the duality of light was theorized, all the scientists believed God was like a watchmaker. They believed He created the universe in an orderly way, to watch over.

Einstein wasn't a deeply religious man, but religious enough that he believed in the watchmaker idea. He was so opposed to the idea of probability and chance based on QM (and ironically, he was the one who discovered photons), that he spent the last ten years of his life trying to disprove QM.

He made himself kinda look foolish, too, because he made a lot of errors in his calculations. But, because of his beliefs, he once said, "God does not play dice." Or in other words, God does not gamble/take a chance - everything is orderly.

Steven Hawking is a British astrophysicist who is still alive, and wrote a book I suggest you look at, called A Brief History of Time. It's really good and very easy to understand. He's supposedly as bright as Einstein.

But anyway, whether in response to Einstein's comment or not, Steven Hawking once said, "God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws the die where it cannot be seen."

*grin*