sunday, october 17, 2004
Negative vacuums and superconductivity
My Statistics teacher can’t teach. Also, he has a lot of weird ideas that he might get from the internet. Some of what he said in class on Thursday (student comments in parentheses):
You know what a vacuum is, a perfect vacuum? (I don’t know.) You take everything out that’s in there and there’s a perfect vacuum. And there could exist negativeness in that, atmospheric conditions, develop negative atmospheric conditions. (But there’s nothing in there that you could take out.) You take it out, take everything out. In fact, you could take everything out so that there’s a negative effect of it. It’s a theory of these things. But if you could produce it, it would take an enormous amount of energy or effort.
Just like in making ceramics for conductivity, for computers, to get absolute high-speed, full, complete transfer, you need to have a temperature of 459 degrees almost. And what that is, at 459 degrees — negative 459 degrees Fahrenheit — all molecular activity ceases to function. So, in other words, it’s uh, all the elements in the compound, they are almost like in suspended animation. And it is that, they need to do things there, in the space of a femtosecond, just as they bond, and you froze them right there. And if you could come in at that point and alter something there, you could probably alter things that exist on this planet.
Have you heard that theory before? (Not really.) I used to think about things like that.
He went on to talk about how Lovelace and Babbage had all the technology for making computers, but they didn’t know how to make plastic-injection-molded parts, so computers didn’t happen until later.
I can’t wait for him to discover RSS.
That’s his classroom. Ignore the picture-taking Linux-hater in the foreground. Most of the seats are empty because there are eight people in my Statistics class.
See also: the gates of hell.
comments (2)
nix-haters must get new hats!
– kyle on 10/18/2004 08:33:26
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
