Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
HOLOGRAM
HOLOGRAM: _____ Typical laser-lit transmission hologram ____ Prologue: Suppose you want to take a photograph of an apple. You hold a camera in front of it and, when you press the shutter button to take your picture, the camera lens opens briefly and lets light through to hit the film (in an old-fashioned camera) or the light-sensitive CCD chip (in a digital camera). All the light traveling from the apple comes from a single direction and enters a single lens, so the camera can record only a two-dimensional pattern of light, dark, and color. To be more accurate camera records wave length (color) and intensity (amplitude) of light waves. If you move your head slightly, the photograph remains same i.e. it is two dimensional. The physical world around us is three-dimensional (3D), yet traditional display devices can show only two-dimensional (2D) flat images that lack depth (i.e., the third dimension) […]
THE ATOM
___________ THE ATOM: ___________ The figure above is an animation of the nuclear force (or residual strong force) interaction between a proton and a neutron. The small colored double circles are gluons, which can be seen binding the proton and neutron together. These gluons also hold the quark-antiquark combination called the pion (meson) together, and thus help transmit a residual part of the strong force even between colorless hadrons. Quarks each carry a single color charge, while gluons carry both a color and an anticolor charge. The combinations of three quarks e.g. proton/neutron (or three antiquarks e.g. antiproton/antineutron) or of quark-antiquark pairs (mesons) are the only combinations that the strong force seems to allow. ________ Prologue: Since childhood I was curious about breaking down any matter (table/chair) into smaller pieces continually till I reach a point where it cannot be broken down. What is that point? Is matter infinitely divisible? […]
