Monday, July 23, 2012

BOOM! Goes The Dynamite

What's the best way to start the day? Well, I say the best way is with breakfast. Like everyone else, I was getting bored of breakfast at McClelland's. I needed something new, yet wanted to spend all my meal points. I was in a deadlock, didn't know whether or not to go somewhere else. But then Alec came, talking about the second breakfast, Einstein Bros., spot that accepted our meal points. This was a bagel heaven, with bagels of all flavors, and best of all, it  was cheaper than McClelland's. I filled up on two blueberry bagels, which I say were some of the best bagels ever. This was the best beginning possible.

As I entering the lecture hall, I was amazed with all of Bill's toys he had out. I knew today's morning lecture was going to be entertaining, then he started. The seemingly harmless college classroom was transformed into a demo lab. He used bubbles to show buoyancy, shot a monkey and a Barney ( Note: No Animals Were Hurt In Today's Lecture) to show gravity, swung from the ceiling to show oscillating waves, and to top it off he blew up a house to show how effective lightning rods are. Bill claimed that the morning lecture was an early grand finale, but to say the truth, if we were to have the same lecture on Friday, it would still the best grand finale.
Bill Prepping Barney For The Shot

Bill Playing On His New Swing
After the exciting morning lecture, we had another cosmologist guest speaker, Justin Khoury. Since he was the fourth cosmologist, most of his lecture was a mere review, but then he started to talk about inflation and ekpyrotic in the universe. Things got strange, yet interesting, with talk of the multi verse and a time before the Big Bang. Then I learned about gravity waves. I always thought gravity was more of a field force, but turns out that in space, its can be viewed as a waves.

After lunch, we  started our two day project on finding the speed of light (Google was not used for this experiment). We had to fiddle around with the infamous oscilloscope, wires, lasers, and diodes. It was a very complicated process, because our set up looked right, yet somehow it was wrong. Luckily, Craig, Bill, and Ryan were all there to help us. After an hour and a half of fiddling around, we were finally able to get the system to work. Tomorrow is Stage 2, where we will be finding the speed of light, I am so excited.

I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands in the evening. I decided to go to the bookstore, so that I can get some gifts from Penn for my family. After a gruesome hour of deciding whether or not I should this person this or that, I was able to walk out. Then I called home, which just like last time, made me feel homesick. I know that I will be able to pull through because with in an hour, I managed to defeat the homesickness. Come on now, how couldn't with all the fun things happening around the quad.

Tomorrow, I have set my alarm a bit earlier, so that I have more time in the day to savor Penn (getting chocolate chip bagels at Einstein Bros. may have also affect this bold move). I will be going to lazer tag tomorrow, which is something I have never done before, but have the feeling that every other guy has went it comes to guns, they are a terminator. From what I hear about lazer tag, tomorrow is guaranteed to be memorable.

No comments:

Post a Comment