June 5, 2010

HUP HUP HURRAY!!

HUP. When I first saw this on CHIP 179, I was so lost. The comic strip at the top of the CHIP ("I can tell you the time or the place, but not both") only served to bewilder me even more. Luckily, by the end of the period, it all became clear to me as I realized that HUP wasn't hard at all! It was actually an entertaining day because Bender showed us HUP in Movies, so we ended up watching short clips from Jurassic Park: the Lost World and Star Trek.

In Jurassic Park: The Lost World, one of the main characters, in the middle of a jungle searching for dinosaurs, states that dinosaurs behave differently when they know that they are being watched. This amazingly related to how the electrons in atoms can't be "watched" because while we are shining radar right on them, the radar is changing their actions and speed.

Watching the clip from the beginning of Star Trek was even more exciting. At first I didn't understand why Mr. Bender would be showing us a extremely entertaining scene of a Robocop chasing James Kirk speeding in a car in class, but later I realized that the point he was trying to bring up was that James could have been speeding because the Robocop had used his radar gun on him. Of course, the radar gun was not to blame, seeing as the car's weight is much too large to be affected by a radar gun. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle works for electrons, which have small masses. HUP stated that it's impossible to know the position and momentum of electrons at the same time. Even though I don't fully comprehend how this principle works, let alone imagine how in the world science advanced so far as to allow people to see microscopic particles, I guess "it's all about the electrons"!

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