Sort of Scientific Theories

[theuncollapsedwavefunction]

It’s part physics, part philosophy, with a touch of Robert Frost for good measure.

The physics part deals with the collapse of the wave function - a concept of quantum mechanics wherein a probability curve including a range of states is collapsed into only one state. An illustration might be...

[sortofscientifictheories]

One of my own favourite posts, from a blog I abandoned happily the instant I actually got into medical school after all.

[sortofscientifictheories]

One of my favourites.

Heisenberg is driving along the freeway when a cop pulls him over. The cop asks, "do you know how fast you were going?"

To which Heisenberg replies, "No, but I know exactly where we are!"

The officer looks at him and says "you were going 108 miles per hour!"

Heisenberg throws his arms up and cries, "Great! Now we're lost!"

[sortofscientifictheories]

Getting the perfect amount of drunk is like titration in real life; too little of your reactant and nothing happens, but just a bit too much and you can't tell what happened when.

Sortofscientifictheories & bff

[sortofscientifictheories]

Getting a massive diamond on the cheaps

Time to consider a career in astronomy, guys. 

It turns out white dwarf stars are just gigantic balls of compressed carbon - i.e. diamonds that are trillions upon trillions of carats. So, if you so happen to discover a white dwarf, you can tell your lucky lady that she is officially the bearer of a rock that puts Beyonce's bling to utter, hopeless shame. She won't be able to wear it for a few trillion years, when it cools down enough not to burn her pretty face off, but hey - it's the thought that counts, right?

[whatshouldwecallgradschool]

We love you guys. Thank you for making this blog everything that it is. As a small token of appreciation, we want to raffle away 5 sets of “Lab Shot Glasses” from ThinkGeek (or something else if you don’t drink). To enter, reblog on tumblr or (like/comment on the facebook post). We will we close...

[sortofscientifictheories]

Chemistry of Beer Goggles

Ever heard of London Dispersion Forces? They are one of three types of intermolecular forces (i.e. attractive forces acting between molecules). The other two types, hydrogen bonds and dipole-dipole forces, are "built-in" attractive forces that result from the nature of the molecules and their electrons. 

However, electron orbitals are only a probabilistic representation of the electrons' positions, and so sometimes even two molecules not typically attracted may have a momentary alignment of electrons that creates a force of attraction completely dependent upon the probability of those two atoms in just such a state (and this effect can propagate to influence others around them to do the same). In chemistry, this is called London Dispersion Forces. 

In real life, we often call this beer goggles. If you've ever had that serendipitous night of deep attraction to a fellow or lady that, in retrospect, you will never understand, it's possible that you would not naturally be attracted to them, but that night you truly were. Perhaps your personalities just so happened to be in random alignment, inducing a real attraction which disappeared with time, sobriety, and hindsight. So don't blame your drunk alter-ego too much for what may now seem a poor decision; it might have been that you had chemistry.

[whatshouldwecallgradschool]

WHEN SOMEONE ATTRACTIVE IS TALKING ABOUT SCIENCE

credit: sortofscientifictheories

[sortofscientifictheories]

:D yay people like my sapiophilic post. I love WSWCGS.

[whatshouldwecallgradschool]

WORKING ON MY THESIS

AT FIRST:

BUT THEN:

credit: Joshua 

[sortofscientifictheories]

"When we're together, the entropy is positive and the enthalpy is negative so things always happen spontaneously."

- - Sortofscientifictheories to her best friend 

[sortofscientifictheories]

"This is like when you go on a bus and you fill up the seats with no neighbours before filling the seats beside other people. Electrons do not share orbitals unless they have to, because, much like us, they are repelled by one another."

- Mr. St. Aubin on Hund's rule

[the most epic chem teacher since Mr. White of Breaking Bad]

[sortofscientifictheories]

Why It's Good to Have a Conscience

We've all felt that irksome pang of guilt over some misdemeanor at some point in our lives. And we've all (perhaps secretly) resented that troublesome pang within ourselves even just a bit, since it seems to serve others at the cost of our own ease. So, given that we are evolved in a process based in self-interest, why would we have this trait at all?

Well, there is this brilliant evolutionary biology aspect of game theory known as the hawk-dove game, in which two players who each have power to be selfish at the cost of the other's welfare can choose to be either selfish (and harm the other for personal gain, i.e. play "hawk") or kind (and cooperate peaceably, i.e. play "dove"). In this model it has been mathematically shown that the worst consequences fall upon each when both choose to be selfish, and the best strategy is to be nice ("dove") until the other person is selfish ("hawk"), at which point you too should play hawk until they play dove again, and so on.

Thus it makes sense that, since doing the "good" thing and refraining from the "bad" thing is actually better for our own biological fitness and well-being (except when we are wronged, in which case the "bad" thing all of a sudden feels like justice), it would be beneficial to us to have evolved morality. In fact, given that this trait is so important for an organism's ultimate survival and fitness, you may not even be here if your millennia-old ancestors had not developed a conscience. Thus, even if it gets in the way of all the naughty things you want to do, a conscience is something to be thankful for, in the grand scale of things.

[sortofscientifictheories]

Cutting Corners

I've never really understood why people use the expression "cutting corners" like it's a bad thing, as if you're being sloppy or short-sighted. In fact, next time someone tells me I'm "cutting corners" I plan to smile and thank them for noticing my efficiency.

Reasoning? It is more efficient to cut corners whenever and wherever you can, since it means travelling a shorter distance (and therefore expending less energy) while accomplishing the exact same displacement as if you took the right-angle route:

By picking the shortest path between two points, what the hypotenuse-walker is doing is just a less extreme example of the following:

And therefore, dear neighbour, don't take it personally if I cut across your lawn. It's for the sake of efficiency and conserving energy: some people buy fuel-efficient cars; I cut corners.

[sortofscientifictheories]

Why You Should Not Clean Your Room

Situations of greater entropy are statistically favoured. Things that are statistically favoured tend to happen, especially over time. A disordered room has greater entropy than an organized one. Thus an organized room will tend to become disordered over time. The only way to reverse this is by continually putting in energy from an outside system (i.e. making the effort to clean your room regularly)

HOWEVER, at some point a disordered room will be maximally entropic. At this point, continually failing to clean one's room will not generally result in a more disordered state. Thus no additional input of energy is needed to maintain the state of the room

Therefore cleaning one's room is futile - a task for the modern day Sisyphus. It is much more energetically efficient to allow the room to stay at its natural, maximally entropic state towards which it will always tend (and to expend that energy on more interesting things)