The Quirky World of Physics

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The Quirky World of Physics! Why? It's a fundamental question all humans ask when observing the world around them. Many hours have been spent by great minds pondering this question. Curiosity is the vehicle for many human advancements. Physics is the logical attempt to solving many of the "why's and how's" that are encountered. The universe behaves in a manner that is predictable and constant enough that we call much of what we observe "laws." These laws are so predictable that we can explain them and prove them with mathematics. We start to encounter serious problems with the world as we understand it when we try to apply the prevailing proofs from the world of the observable to the naked eye to the world of the microscopic and smaller. Light has a top speed of travel and gravity is proportional to the speed of light. Einstein states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.1 Einstein's theories of gravity and light begin to break down once we move from the world of the large to the world of the very small. In the world of the very small light behaves like both a particle and a wave.2 The particle can be split in two and proves that some things can travel faster than the speed of light. Quantum physics is full of odd little quirks and conundrums that deviate drastically from the way in which we understand the physical world. Observe the physical world around us and we see, much as Isaac Newton did, that an apple falling from a tree accelerates as it approaches the ground. This basic principle is fundamental to physics. Newton also observed that and object in motion will remain in constant motion at constant velocity until a force is acted upon the object changing its velocity in either vector or causes it to accelerate in either direction.3 The combination of these two theories led Newton to the theory of universal gravity. Universal

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