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Final Blog Post

Nuclear Protection Lots of people love to watch action movies, where there is exploration, action, and most importantly explosions. In the movie Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, there is all of these qualities and more. The movie in fact starts out with a fight scene and the goes on and shows our hero survive a nuclear explosion. Now you may ask, how did our hero survive the explosion? The answer to that is that he climbed inside a lead lined refrigerator and was sent flying off into the distance. The problem that I am looking at has to deal with projectile motion and how Indiana Jones was sent flying while hiding in this refrigerator. There are a couple of aspects that we should take into account when it comes to looking at our problem. The first aspect is how high does the refrigerator travel after being hit by the explosion. We can find the answer to this by using the equation y=1/2(Vyi+Vyf)t ,but there are parts of this equation that we need to ...
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Interstellar

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Black Holes In the movie Interstellar there are a lot of different physics topics to talk about but the most interesting is probably the black hole Gargantua. What makes black holes so interesting is that there is so little that we actually know about them yet there are some effects that we do know. What we do know about how black holes work is that they exert a large gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing can escape from it. It also has the ability to exert a very strong gravitational force on any nearby object such as planets that are nearby. This is especially important when the group of astronauts land on the ocean planet that is nearby. On this nearby planet there are these very large waves that reach towards the sky. These waves are caused by the pull of the gravitational field of the nearby black hole. The pull of black hole would rock the planet back and forth relative to the black hole. This occurrence causes the planets tidal gravity to reach towards the b...
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Contact

Contact In the movie contact there is controversy over the concept over the twin paradox theory. While early on in the movie there is a conversation where they get the concept of the twin paradox correct and it seems like they will be on the right track to make the movie somewhat make sense, by the end of the movie they completely ruin the entire thing. By the end of the movie when they try to show how the twin paradox works they end up getting what they initially got correct completely backwards. In the earlier conversation they discuss that when they send people through the machine that time would pass much faster in the outside world  and slower for the person in the machine. They also say that when the person would return that it could be as much as 50 years in the future compared to when they left. This theory is correct however the movie makes it out that while the main character was gone for 18 hours in the real world it had only been around 1 or 2 seconds. This complete...
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Movie Clip

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The Martian and Bad Astronomy

The Martian and Bad Astronomy Philip Plait is the author of Bad Astronomy and in Chapter 24 he gives 10 examples of bad astronomy in major motion pictures. While some of these are not directly correlated to the movie The Martian some of the examples do apply. The first example has to do with the fact that there is no sound in space. As you may or may not know is that there is no sound in space, and in most movies you can hear ships as they go passing by or maybe even explosions. Unfortunately The Martian is one of these movies that have sound in space when it is not physically possible because sound cannot travel in space. For example, when they try to save the main character and through out the entire scene there is sound from thrusters and other objects that the characters are interacting with. The second example that he list does not apply to the movie and it has to do with asteroid fields which you do not see in the movie. The next example that is listed is about banking in ...
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Nuclear Weapons

Morality of Nuclear Weapons A lot of people talk about the morality of creating and using nuclear weapons. Most people have agreed on not using nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, but the creation of weapons is another discussion entirely. Most people are against the creation of these weapons of mass destruction however, I am not one of those people. I support the creation, not the use of these weapons not because I want to see the world burn, but because you need a way to protect yourself. If we are not the first to create a new weapon or able to make these weapons then that leaves us vulnerable and at the mercy of others who have created these powerful weapns. This was the case when we created the atomic bomb during world war 2. A lot of people were against the creation of the bombs because of the destructive potential and the fear that others would learn how to create the same weapons. However, there were those who supported the creation to set us up on top a...
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Global Warming

Global Warming Global warming is a huge problem that we have to deal with and there are a lot of things that contribute to it getting worse. One of these problems is greenhouse gases more specifically methane gas. While methane gas does not have as many long term effects such as carbon dioxide, however it absorbs heat much more effectively. For example, in the first two decades after the release of methane gas, it was 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Now we need to know where the methane gas is coming from. The gas comes from both manmade and natural sources, the manmade source is from the oil and gas industry and the natural source is from things like cows. In the past measures have been taken to reduce the emission of methane gas from the oil and gas industry, but there is not a lot we can do to stop the natural component. A portion of the natural component comes from natural water sources like wetlands and freshwater systems as well as things that deal with agricultu...
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