Week 8--Classical Physics

Newtons 3 Laws and Me
1. Law of Inertia--I (the external force) pushed my friend's baby stroller (the object in the same state of motion) down th street.
2. A force causes only a change in velocity or acceleration--the greater the mass, the greater amount of force is needed. This can be applied to moving. I couldn't pick up certain boxes because they were so heavy, but my cousin had no problem with them since he is so much bigger than I.
3. For every action there is an equal reaction. My example with moving again; I was pushing a bookshelf into a corner of 2 walls. My cousin told me that I would knock the walls down if I pushed any harder. So in a sense, the wall was "pushing" back.

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. I suppose that's how we can recycle energy. Since our body temperature gives off the same amount of heat as a lightbulb, perhaps we can someday manage to light our lightbulbs with the amount of heat we give off. We are coming up with ways to recycle, so we are being more sensitive to being more energy efficient. Entropy increases like the way heat is transferred. The third law explains how things really aren't perfect because absolute zero is impossible to reach.

Descartes used to think that thoughts and memories are not part of the "real world". But thoughts are just electrical impulses traveling across neural networks delivering information. The Cartesian way of thinking, that we are separate from nature, is not as accepted in society right now. This is probably a good thing since we will never be completely independent from natural wonders, such as how we react to the sun and food, or from each other.