Daily Archives: April 17, 2008
We Will Create A Black Hole Which Will Swallow The Earth
The NYT has recently run two articles (one, two) on the fear that exists (among some) that the Large Hadron Collider — when started — will destroy the earth through the creation of a black hole. Interestingly, this was exactly the topic my undergraduate thesis (in STS) was on, except instead of being about the LHC, it was about the particle accelerator being built at Brookhaven National Laboratories.
But when you delve into the history of it it, it isn’t all that surprising. The guy who is making the black-hole-possibility claim about the LHC is exactly the same guy who made the black-hole-possibility claim at Brookhaven: Walter Wagner. The newspaper stories take the same tenor now that they did back then too.
Although my thesis isn’t awesome (I’ve read some of my friends’ undergraduate theses and I know mine doesn’t stack up) nor well written, I can say it’s timely, so I’m uploading this PDF version of it. I was just trying to find a choice paragraph to lob off and stick up here, but I figured: hey, why not? Unfortunately, in this particular electronic version, some of the websites cited in the footnotes have disappeared (“ERROR!”), and this is the only electronic copy I have. (One of many consequences of the many Great Computer Crashes which have befallen me.)
As an added enticement for those on the fence, I spend a whole “chapter” talking about the fear that the atmosphere would ignite when the atomic bomb was set off for the first time.
Calculus and Chaos Theory
On the same blog, God Plays Dice, I learned two important things today:
(1) The Napkin Ring Problem, which basically says if you take a sphere, and cut out a cylinder from the center (and take off the two caps at the top and the bottom of the sphere), the volume of the remaining solid will not depend on the radius of the sphere at all!
In totally unrelated news, today we wrapped up our initial foray into finding volumes by slicing, by revolution, and by washers in calculus. I wonder what I’ll be doing with them tomorrow. I dearly wish I had an interesting problem for them to work through. Sigh.
All those years ago (okay, not so long ago) I was at MIT getting my first taste of chaos theory. I took this course with Daniel Rothman, who is an amazing teacher, and who taught from an amazing textbook (Strogatz). I loved the class so much that when I was asked if I was interesting in grading the problem sets for the following year’s class, I jumped at the chance.
It was in that course that I was first introduced to Edward Lorenz and his paper on weather (!) which launched a whole phenomena: chaos. But I also got so into the subject that I tried to fix a broken chaotic waterwheel that was being left unused in the basement of MIT. (I was unsuccessful, though I still wrote my final paper for a class on a modification of the Lorenz equations.) And when I was in graduate school, I was asked to write a “history of chaos theory” article for an encyclopedia that never really got published (to my knowledge). Also when I was in graduate school, I traveled to Beijing for a summer school (4 weeks) on complexity and chaos, thinking that I might want to do my dissertation around the topic of complexity and chaos in the sciences. And now that I’m teaching in high school, I wanted to introduce some of the budding mathematicians to the topic, so in math club, I gave a 3 part mini-lecture on chaos and the logistic equation.
Needless to say, chaos = cool. When I took that initial class with Prof. Rothman, Lorenz came to give a guest lecture. I’m sad that he’s gone. He is partially responsible for a really interesting part of my life that keeps recurring, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.
If you want to read my encyclopedia entry on the history of chaos theory (which is okay, but I’m sure has a number of problems with it), I’ll post it below. It talks about Lorenz’s contribution, if you don’t know.
