Waves that don't have anything to do with the ocean

Good morning students!

We began class today by talking about our test, and with Mr. Henderson saying how our scores were very spread out, unlike some other tests we may or may not have taken. Getting to the point we started the class with a discussion about atom models, and how said atom models were changed over history.

Firstly, let's start with John Dalton.

Dalton did not know how atoms looked, and didn't even bother trying to explain it to others. At least he wasn't a bragger. Dalton published his works during the early 1800s. Before him, only two men attempted to take a stab at the mystery of atoms: Socrates and Democritus.

Although this wasn't discussed in class, Socrates took a piece of cheese and cut it in half. Then he cut that in half. Then he cut that in half. So on and so forth, until he could not cut anymore. He called that the "atom".

Democritus had a slightly different approach.

He took some stuff, put it in a pestle, and crushed it up with a mortar. He called that "atoma" for indivisible. What these Greeks didn't know however, is that matter gets much smaller than even this! Stupid Hellenics. Sorry, Konstantine.

Back to the topic, we looked at Thomson next. He devised the "plum pudding" model. A sea of negatively charged particles inside an atom that looks like pudding. Yum.

Finally, Rutherford. He concluded that an atom is mostly empty space, simply because he fired alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil, and only a few bounced back.

We then proceeded to move on to waves, and how light consists of waves. Mr. Henderson brought up the class guinea pig to demonstrate. Will stood with one end of the coil to his cheek, and Mr. H interacted with the other end. The result was Will got hit in the face, and because of this, Mr. H showed us that you can get someone's attention simply by using energy. Wow.

Finally, what we did was we discussed different wavelengths. We went from the weakest to strongest, radio to gamma, and in between was the visible spectrum of color. We spoke about UV and how they settle in your skin, X-rays and how they settle in your bones, and gamma and how they go right through you. Oh and by the way, don't put your cat in the microwave. Its H2O molecules will start dancing.

Remember that video Mr. H talked about? That plane crashing into 12-feet of concrete video? Here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM8E-CogkYE

There you have it. At that, we concluded our day.

Fact: Nukes contain gamma rays.