Akron Physics Club

Newsletter

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT: NOVEMBER 23, 2009
(Yes, it's Thanksgiving week)

Tangier, 532 West Market Street, 6:00 PM- Dinner at 6:30

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, November 19th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

    Speaker for our October meeting will be our own distinguished physicist, Dr. Georg Böhm, who has an interesting bio: After graduating in physics from the University of Vienna, Georg joined the Max Planck Institute, working in solid state physics. To learn more about polymers, he came to the U.S., accepting a visiting scholar position at Northwestern University.  But before returning to Germany he got an offer from Firestone to build a radiation research laboratory at Radiation Dynamics, Inc., on Long Island (which company Firestone later purchased).   Firestone brought him to Akron as assistant director of its Central Research Laboratories, and when Bridgestone purchased the company, he eventually became Vice President for Research. 

    Georg attempted to retire several years ago, only to be lured back as a consultant and given a new office one floor above to provide guidance for establishing the company’s creative objectives for the future.  Eventually escaping from that position, he has just formed a start-up company, admitting, “I just can’t let go.”  Georg has over 60 patents and about an equal number of publications.  The title of his November presentation is:   

NANOPARTICLES

    A nanoparticle is a particle having at least one dimension of the order of 100 nanometers or less — an extremely small object that behaves as a whole unit in terms of its transport and properties; and about which Georg has said, “Nanoparticles exist in nature; but the last decade has seen much research on producing, investigating and finding applications for synthetically produced particles of different composition, shape and properties ranging from semiconducting nanoparticles for quantum dot use to biodegradable nanoparticles for drug and gene delivery to cells and tissues. After a brief overview of the field and emerging applications the focus will be on the design and use of polymeric nanoparticles for the tuning of new materials.” (Darell Reneker has given us several introductions to the subject.)

 

VISITORS ARE WELCOME - COLLEGE STUDENTS are FREE

(But everybody needs a dinner reservation!)

    

 

Minutes for October 26
          

    Our Chairman, Ernst von Meerwall, opened the meeting, by asking if there were any guests or other new arrivals in the audience.  As it turned out, there would be a few minutes later when Georg Böhm arrived, bringing his wife, Marga, and son, Alexander  – which led Treasurer Dan Galehouse to give his report on the fly, estimating that we had gained eight dollars in our treasury for the evening.  Dan’s estimate turned out to be accurate within half a percent, his hard copy subsequently verifying that the club’s total wealth now comes to the staggering sum of $347.60.

    Called on next, Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell was pleased to announce that he has had received confirmations for his last two tentative speakers, February speaker Dr. Mahmoud Assaad of General Tire, whose subject is “The Lunar Rover Vehicle Tire, ” and for May 24, Dr. Rama Gorla of Case Western University, “Development of Aircraft – Wright Bros to the Present” thus locking together a complete schedule for the club’s 2009-2010 season.   Thank you, Sam!

    Bob Erdman then had a contribution.  He is now the Akron Physics Club’s representative to ACESS (Akron Council of Engineering and Scientific Societies), which has welcomed us into its midst, despite our not paying the organization’s customary dues, since our super-loose organization doesn’t charge dues to its “e-members.”  Other members of ACESS include local chapters of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Society of Professional Engineers, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers, the American Society of Safety Engineers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the Society of Plastic Engineers.  So it would seem that when it comes to ACESS’s perspective, the addition of the Akron Physics Club will improve the balance slightly in favor of science.

    This brought Ernst to the introduction of our Speaker, Dr. George W. Collins II, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy, Ohio State University.  Author of more than 70 research papers and five books, Dr. Collins continues to lecture as an Adjunct Professor of Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Geological Science, and other courses, including Political Science (which he has “never regarded as a science!”) at Case Western Reserve and other universities. 

    The title for his presentation was Precision Cosmology, about which he has said, “In my youth this title would have been an oxymoron.  [But] in this talk we shall look at how cosmology had emerged from an elegant philosophy to a falsifiable science.”  Indeed, there has been so much work in the field of cosmology in the 21st century that our speaker believes he has graduated from an astronomer to a cosmologist  — as he proceeded to demonstrate.  The scope of Dr. Collins talk inspired Founder Charlie Wilson to write, "I couldn't have imagined that there was so much about cosmology that I was completely ignorant of!!!"

    Prof. Collins began by reviewing what happened in the field during the 20th Century— during which, he pointed out, “cosmology certainly wasn’t a science, and wasn’t even very good philosophy.”  He described the two conflicting models of the universe which existed at the time:  the “steady state” concept championed by Sir Fred Hoyle, and the revolutionary hypothesis he scornfully called the “Big Bang” theory, popularized by George Gamow (it was a name that stuck). 

    Our speaker went on to list major advances in cosmic field during the 20th Century.  And these were testable ideas:

    1905: Einstein’s Special Relativity challenged Newton’s view of the universe
    1926: The universe was shown to be expanding (Hubble, Sipher)
    1950: George Gamow and others predicted the existence of cool microwave background radiation resulting from the Big Bang
    1964: Penzias and Wilson discovered evidence of same  – weak, annoying background noise they had in the high-gain amplifier they               were trying to perfect
    1980: Alan Guth suggested an early inflationary phase of the universe
    1995: Two separate groups showed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating

    Thereafter, we learned, quantitative work in cosmology shifted into overdrive  – although the laws in effect at the very beginning of the universe, our speaker said, “remain shrouded in mystery.”  As one pioneer put it, “new laws of physics emerged higgledy piggledy” after the Big Bang concept became dogma.  Plotting distance vs. velocity of objects in the expansion results in essentially a straight line, whose slope turns out to be the Hubble constant, H_o.  There is no findable “special” place in the universe from whence the expansion began.  The relationship between the dispersion of celestial bodies is always the same no matter where you start measuring from. 

    Much work ensued to establish the value of the Hubble constant.  One of the brand new concepts that emerged in order to make subsequent “universal” laws work was the “inflationary” period of the universe, a moment occurring right after the Big Bang, during which the expansion of space itself, crammed with incredibly dense matter [what Gamow called “ylem” or “nuclear fluid”] occurred at a rate much faster than the speed of light. 

    “How long did inflation last?  Not long,” our speaker declared.  “About 10^–33 seconds,” adding that, for the following three minutes, as things cooled down enough for nuclear physics to work (from the millions of degrees temperatures of the interior of stars to the thousand-degree temperatures of their outer layers), individual atoms began to form  – particularly hydrogen, helium and deuterium nuclei.  Indeed, all of the deuterium in the world today was formed in those three minutes.  “There are no known stellar processes that produce deuterium,” Dr. Collins said,  “If it’s in the ocean, it was produced during the Big Bang.”  For the next 380,000 years, he explained, we had an expansion of these hot gases, and as things cooled down enough for nuclear physics to work, electrons began to hook up with the nuclei “and photons got loose” — which we recognize today as cosmological background radiation. 

    There are alternative hypotheses to the inflation theory, varying from changes in the velocity of light over the years to concepts focused on the String Theory  – which, our speaker pointed out, “has yet to make any testable predictions  – which are the hallmark of science; and if you can’t test  it, it ain’t science.“  Thus, the existence of deuterium, he believes, is the best evidence of inflation.

    Prof. Collins confessed his personal amazement at the products of 21st Century efforts in astronomy, e.g. deep sky surveys that, in just five years, have mapped 200,000 galaxies and 200 million celestial objects, ranging from asteroids and nearby stars, to studies of the structure of the entire universe.  Instead of making one sky photograph at a time, developing the it and studying it over a light table, we can gather data a thousand times as fast with “emulsions” that are fifty times as sensitive. “One astronomer can do more in his lifetime than all the astronomers in the 20th Century!”  In less than a century, cosmology has gone from philosophy to science.  We know the age of the universe 13.7 billion years (± 0.2 billion years) with a precision unimaginable 50 years ago.

    Recent work in the 21st Century has made it possible to examine the long-debated alternatives of whether the universe is spherical or saddle-shaped or flat — and again, to Dr. Collins surprise (“I never thought I’d see anything like this in my lifetime”), it’s flat!  This knowledge, together with many other factors, including a mist of calculations, observations and tentative conclusions — even an equation for the state for dark energy — made it possible for our speaker to present a pie chart that graphically showed what we know (and don’t know) about “the stuff the universe is made of:”

            Radiation                                  0.005%
            Ordinary visible matter              0.5%
            Ordinary luminous matter          3.5%
            Exotic dark matter                  26. %
            Dark energy                           70. %

    [P.S.:

    Since I’m the oldest member of the Club (except for Leon!), I can’t resist including my first encounter with the Big Bang concept 63 years ago. 

    Having returned to engineering school after my Army service, it was on a weekend in 1946 that I hitchhiked to Bradley, Illinois, where my fiancé, Vicki, was teaching. Under my arm, I had a copy of cosmologist George Gamow’s new book, Atomic Energy in Cosmic and Human Life, intending to read it between rides.  But because I had worn part of my Army uniform (on purpose), I arrived at Bradley High School so early that classes were still in session, and I waited for Vicki in a tiny “teachers’ lounge” tucked under a stairway, where faculty members could sneak half a cigarette between classes.  Seated at a small table with my book, I was the only occupant in the room for nearly an hour.  I was just starting the chapter that was Gamow’s first public revelation of his (and, earlier, LeMaitre’s) “Big Bang” theory of cosmological evolution.  He related how our entire universe was born from a single nuclear explosion of a baseball-size ball of what Gamow called “ylem” — nuclear fluid.

    Overwhelmed by the magnitude of the concept, I put the book down on the table as I began to absorb the immensity of the primordial cosmic event — creation itself!  Cupping my hands around my own imaginary ball of ylem  – which was producing trillions of stars, galaxies, solar systems, comets, and interstellar dust, my hands were driven apart by the cataclysmic explosion — my arms spreading above my head.  (The cosmic detonation was accompanied by an inaccurate sound track:  a loud, extended guttural noise created in the back of my throat.)

    I was so hypnotized by the spectacle I was perceiving that I hadn’t noticed the door open.  A male teacher had entered the room and was watching the performance.

    “Oh, ah . . . ” I stammered,” arms wilting, “I was just thinking about . . . the universe exploding.”

    “Oh, I see,” he responded a little unevenly as he cautiously backed out the door and quietly exited

    Fortunately, I never saw him again.]

Jack Gieck