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Justin Gallagher

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  1. Justin Gallagher
    Hopefully, anyone who is reading this understands the basic concept behind walking. If not, then google it because I will not cover that topic. What I am here for is to talk about the physic defying ways to travel in Team Fortress 2, a video game created by Valve Software. The game includes nine playable characters, but today we will be focusing on only one class, the Scout.


    The Scout is fast-talking, cocky, baseball fan and street runner from Boston, Massachusetts. He is a fast, agile character, armed with a scattergun, a pistol and an aluminum baseball bat. What is interesting about the Scout is that he is capable of performing the infamous Double Jump, A move so legendary, so bold, that is has been seen in many other video games. The Double Jump defys Newton's First Law of Motion: When viewed in an inertial reference frame, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force. In this case, the Scout says screw it and jumps while in midair without the aid of an external force. When you equip the scout with a baseball bat called the the Atomizer, it magically gives him the ability to triple Jump. If you give him a pisol called the Winger, He now can jump 25% higher. This absolutely makes no sense when you try to even comprehend it. However, it gets a little better. In the Game there is a shotgun called the Force Of Nature. Its recoil is so unbelievably god-like that when you shoot it in mid air, it propels the scout in a direction that is opposite of the shot, Thus Following Newtons Third Law of Motion: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body. Here is an interesting video to see it in action:



    As you can see, the scout does not like to follow all of the rules that governs our universe, however, due to this, its allows for some very interesting game play.
  2. Justin Gallagher
    Hey PhysX students that will be reading this. Let me give a brief description of my self. I enjoy Physics, DUH, I love to play Frisbee with my friends, enjoy riding my bike, and playing Video Games, KSP being one of them. I am taking Physics this year because I love the challenge and the hypothetical theories that we get into. I can't wait to start physics with calculus, as well as play Kerbal Space Program and conquer the solar system. I am most anxious about being overwhelmed in work, but will truck on through it. I hope to have a fun year I physics. Lets have a great year and do a lot of FDcosθ.
  3. Justin Gallagher
    Inflation has become a cosmological buzzword in the 1990s. No self-respecting theory of the Universe is complete without a reference to inflation -- and at the same time there is now a bewildering variety of different versions of inflation to choose from. Clearly, what's needed is a beginner's guide to inflation, where newcomers to cosmology can find out just what this exciting development is all about.

    The reason why something like inflation was needed in cosmology was highlighted by discussions of two key problems in the 1970s. The first of these is the horizon problem -- the puzzle that the Universe looks the same on opposite sides of the sky (opposite horizons) even though there has not been time since the Big Bang for light (or anything else) to travel across the Universe and back. So how do the opposite horizons "know" how to keep in step with each other? The second puzzle is called the flatness problem This is the puzzle that the spacetime of the Universe is very nearly flat, which means that the Universe sits just on the dividing line between eternal expansion and eventual recollapse.

    Ever since 1905, when Albert Einstein revealed his special theory of relativity to the world, the speed of light has had a special status in the minds of physicists. In a vacuum, light travels at 299 792 458 meters per second, regardless of the speed of its source. There is no faster way of transmitting information. It is the cosmic speed limit. Our trust in its constancy is reflected by the pivotal role it plays in our standards of measurement. We can measure the speed of light with such accuracy that the standard unit of length is no longer a sacred meter bar kept in Paris but the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during one 299 792 458th of a second. So I ask?

    Why do opposite sides of the universe look the same?

    It's a puzzle, you see, because the extremes of today's visible universe should never have been in touch. Even back in the early moments of the big bang, when these areas were much closer together, there wasn't enough time for light - or anything else - to travel from one to another. There was no time for temperature and density to get evened out; and yet they are even. One solution: light used to move much faster. But to make that work could mean a radical overhaul of Einstein's theory of relativity.

    During inflation the Universe expanded a factor of 1054, so that our horizon now only sees a small piece of what was the total Universe from the Big Bang.







    The cause of the inflation era was the symmetry breaking at the GUT unification point. At this moment, spacetime and matter separated and a tremendous amount of energy was released. This energy produced an overpressure that was applied not to the particles of matter, but to spacetime itself. Basically, the particles stood still as the space between them expanded at an exponential rate.

    Note that this inflation was effectively at more than the speed of light, but since the expansion was on the geometry of the Universe itself, and not the matter, then there is no violation of special relativity. Our visible Universe, the part of the Big Bang within our horizon, is effectively a `bubble' on the larger Universe. However, those other bubbles are not physically real since they are outside our horizon. We can only relate to them in an imaginary, theoretical sense. They are outside our horizon and we will never be able to communicate with those other bubble universes.



    Inflation solves the flatness problem because of the exponential growth. Imagine a highly crumbled piece of paper. This paper represents the Big Bang universe before inflation. Inflation is like zooming in of some very, very small section of the paper. If we zoom in to a small enough scale the paper will appear flat. Our Universe must be exactly flat for the same reason, it is a very small piece of the larger Big Bang universe.

    The horizon problem is also solved in that our present Universe was simply a small piece of a larger Big Bang universe that was in causal connection before the inflation era. Other bubble universes might have very different constants and evolutionary paths, but our Universe is composed of a small, isotropic slice of the bigger Big Bang universe.
  4. Justin Gallagher
    While I visited the Rochester Institute of technology over the break, I talked to a Junior who was majoring in Physics. He was explaining to me what he was working on and theorized. He was currently working on the Grand Unified Theory. This interested me quite a bit so I did some research into this subject.

    It all starts with the Fundamental forces and their Interactions.

    There are 4 fundamental forces that have been identified. In our present Universe they have rather different properties.


    Properties of the Fundamental Forces:

    The Strong Nuclear Force is very strong, but very short-ranged. It acts only over ranges of order 10-13 centimeters and is responsible for holding the nuclei of atoms together. Since the protons and neutrons which make up the nucleus are themselves considered to be made up of quarks, and the quarks are considered to be held together by the color force, the strong force between nucleons may be considered to be a residual color force. In the standard model, therefore, the basic exchange particle is the gluon which mediates the forces between quarks. Since the individual gluons and quarks are contained within the proton or neutron, the masses attributed to them cannot be used in the range relationship to predict the range of the force. When something is viewed as emerging from a proton or neutron, then it must be at least a quark-antiquark pair, so it is then plausible that the pion as the lightest meson should serve as a predictor of the maximum range of the strong force between nucleons.



    The Electromagnetic Force manifests itself through the forces between charges (Coulomb's Law) and the magnetic force, both of which are summarized in the Lorentz force law. Fundamentally, both magnetic and electric forces are manifestations of an exchange force involving the exchange of photons . The electromagnetic force holds atoms and molecules together. In fact, the forces of electric attraction and repulsion of electric charges are so dominant over the other three fundamental forces that they can be considered to be negligible as determiners of atomic and molecular structure. Even magnetic effects are usually apparent only at high resolutions, and as small corrections.


    The Role of the Weak Nuclear Force in the transmutation of quarks makes it the interaction involved in many decays of nuclear particles which require a change of a quark from one flavor to another. It was in radioactive decay such as beta decay that the existence of the weak interaction was first revealed. The weak interaction is the only process in which a quark can change to another quark, or a lepton to another lepton - the so-called "flavor changes".



    The Gravitational Force is weak, but very long ranged. It is by far the weakest of the four interactions. The weakness of gravity can easily be demonstrated by suspending a pin using a simple magnet (such as a refrigerator magnet). The magnet is able to hold the pin against the gravitational pull of the entire Earth. Yet gravitation is very important for macroscopic objects and over macroscopic distances. It is the only interaction that acts on all particles having mass; it has an infinite range, like electromagnetism but unlike strong and weak interaction; it cannot be absorbed, transformed, or shielded against and it always attracts and never repels.
  5. Justin Gallagher
    With the Competition at the end of the month, I started looking at how trebuchets work. However, first we should look at why they are diffrent from Catapults

    Catapults generally used a large, springy piece of wood which would have been wound up. This then give tension to the wood and when released the arm pulls up and hits a stop then releasing the projectile.

    Trebuchets, in contrast, use a weight which pull down a lever arm, launching it up into the air. A sling is attached which then released the projectile. Trebuchets are generally capable of hurling great amounts of weight and became much more common in medieval warfare in later years.

    A trebuchet consists of five basic parts: the frame, counterweight, beam, sling and guide chute.
    The frame supports the other components and provides a raised platform from which to drop the counterweight.
    The counterweight, pulled by gravity alone, rotates the beam. The beam pulls the sling.
    The guide chute guides the sling through the frame and supports the enclosed projectile until acceleration is sufficient to hold it in the sling.
    The sling accelerates and holds the projectile until release.

    One end of the sling is fixed to the end of the beam, while the other is tied in a loop and slipped over a release pin extending from the end of the beam. As the beam rotates, it pulls the sling, with its enclosed projectile, down the guide chute. As the sling exits the chute, it accelerates in an arc away from the beam, but because the beam is still pulling the sling behind, the loop is held on the pin. The sling continues accelerating through its arc until it eventually swings ahead of the release pin. At this point, known as the release angle, the loop slips off the pin and the sling opens releasing the projectile.

    To get deep into the physics, watch this video...

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