The Real And The Virtual

I took a shower yesterday at night, so that I didn’t have to wake up extra early to beat the morning rush for showers and breakfast.  Yesterday, I didn’t get to eat breakfast due to the rush, but I wasn’t going to let that happen again. My cohort had the same mentality, get breakfast, so we decided to meet up at 7:15AM. The food was satisfying and felt so great in my stomach. It was the perfect way to start my day of physics, friends, and adventure.

Luckily today, we found a couple of shady short cuts, so that when we walk to class, we don’t have to suffer from the sun’s horrible rays. In class, we talked about the smallest of the smallest and then the smallest of that smallest… atoms, quarks, and so on. Then Professor Bill applied what we are learning to a current event, the Higg's Boson, which will be announced tomorrow and prove the standard model of the atom and weak force. The conversation was very intense, about how scientists have always claimed that they discovered the smallest, then are proven wrong, and this process has been happening for ever. We went back to optics after a 10 minute break. This time we called about real and virtual images that we get while using lenses and mirrors. After the short lecture we had our lab. The problem: read the fortune cookie message that is at the bottom of a pipe. It was some what difficult because are group was able to build the telescope, yet unable the make words out of the letters.

Telescope

After lunch, went through the usual order of things, lecture and then a lab. Professor Bill gave us a lecture on refraction, reflection, and critical angles. In high school, my teacher only lectured on this with sound waves and not light waves. Once again we used lasers, one of my most favorite  learning devices, to show how light bounces off walls. We did three labs today, which were really similar to yesterday's lab, just a bit different. I felt some what sad because we got out really early and I expected a little bit more. Hopefully, it gets more difficult.

Waiting for Ian Lawrence

After dinner, Ian Lawrence, the best chaperone, came to campus to check up on us. We decided what the plan was going to be for tomorrow, so that we can get the most out of the East Coast. Our cohort then went on explore the campus. I had a lot of fun exploring Penn and can't wait for tomorrow so that we can go exploring more.



Blog Party Continues!!