Newton Reading

Throughout the reading, I noticed that Newton didnt show his ideas right away. Why was he so hesitant to show his work ? Did he have a fear about being wrong? I think that it's interesting that Newton is now known as one of the great minds, but at the time he didnt show his work. I wonder what he thought of his work when he first created it. This relates to my last QQC about how Thomas Jefferson didnt believe in dinosaurs because at the time an idea seemed like it wasnt feasble, but today both ideas are valid.

QQC Chapters 5 &6

This section of the text made me laugh a little bit. I thought it was funny to read about a great mind like Thomas Jefferson would doubt the existence of dinosaurs. Of course now this seems very trivial and silly, I can only imagine the controversy when the bones were first discovered. My question from this part of the text is; why hadn't people begun discovering bones from dinosaurs sooner? How did scientists first hypothesize about these new bones being from per-historic creatures?

Bryson Reading Chapter 4

"This was the suggestion that the Earth is not quite round. According to Newton's theory, the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin should result in a slight flatting at the poles and a bulging at the equator, which would make the planet slightly oblate. That meant that the length of a degree wouldn't be the same in Italy as it was in Scotland. Specifically, the length would shorten as you moved away from the poles. This was not good news for those people whose measurements of the Earth were based on the assumption that the Earth was a perfect sphere, which was everyone."

I thought that this quote from chapter 4 was very interesting. It is almost similar to my quote from last week because both talk about changing the publics belief. Its very interesting that people have been spending years just trying to figure out Earth's exact shape. What sort of things can we learn from the exact size and weight of our planet? Will those exact numbers relate to the creation of Earth and the Big Bang?

Bryson Reading Chapter 2 & 3

Quote:
"Such are the distances, in fact that it isn't possible, in any practical
terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out
pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you
wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth
reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand
feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size
of a bacterium, so you wouldn1t be able to see it anyway)."

I found this portion of the reading extremely interesting. People tend to make those perfectly scale maps of our solar system that show everything in a nice proportionate way. I always had a hunch that things in space werent this linear and proportionate. I had no idea that everything would still be so far apart. Pluto being the size of a bactirum is pretty small! I remember in chemistry class, our teacher did a demonstration where she made a scale diagram as to where everything in an atom is. I think teachers should do the same with the solar system! Why do we put the solar system in such simple terms? Why dont teachers explain the vast amounts of space and the enourmous size of planets? I think that this weeks reading helped me learn that I still know so little about the vast world out there and that not everything is how it always seems. After reading this text I am more curious about space and our solar system.

Bryson Reading

Pg. 2- "The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently dissemble, and god off to be other things. And thats it for you."

This passage struck me because Bryson broke life and death down so such simple terms. It truly makes our time seem short. 650,000 hours doesnt seem like a long time at all, and when we die our atoms just move on. This passage made me think a lot about the role of atoms in our lives. How can atoms make up so many different things? They even make up so many different body parts due to the different kind of cells. When you die and begin disintegrating does everything break back down into atoms? And then what happens? How do they know where to go? How do they even get there? This reading left me with many questions that are aspects of our human makeup I had never thought about.

Another thing that struck me is that atoms arent alive. I knew that, but it caused me to think about our existence. We are made from cells, cells are alive; cells are made from molecules I believe, and molecules are made from atoms, which arent alive. Where does life begin? How can we be made up of something that's never alive?

Essentially, this article left me mind boggled, especially about the role of atoms in our existence. There were several new ideas and thoughts that caused me to think a lot about our world, the big bang and what it is made up of.