...Quantum mechanics (QM – also known as quantum physics, or quantum theory) is a branch of physics which deals with physical phenomena at nanoscopic scales, where the action is on the order of the Planck constant. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the quantum realm of atomic and subatomic length scales. Quantum mechanics provides a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It is the non-relativistic limit of quantum field theory (QFT), a theory that was developed later that combined quantum mechanics with relativity. In advanced topics of quantum mechanics, some of these behaviors are macroscopic (see macroscopic quantum phenomena) and emerge at only extreme (i.e., very low or very high) energies or temperatures (such as in the use of superconducting magnets). The name quantum mechanics derives from the observation that some physical quantities can change only in discrete amounts (Latin quanta), and not in a continuous (cf. analog) way. For example, the angular momentum of an electron bound to an atom or molecule is quantized.[1] In the context of quantum mechanics, the wave–particle duality of energy and matter and the uncertainty principle provide a unified view of the behavior of photons, electrons, and other atomic-scale objects. The mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics are abstract. A mathematical function known as the wavefunction provides information about the probability...
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...MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (36) 50% of Total Marks Choose the best answer from the responses listed Use the Answer Sheet provided 1. According to the Fundamentals of Strategy textbook, which of the following elements is not found in strategy statements a) Mission b) Experience c) Advantage d) Vision e) Scope 2. A Strategic Business Unit (SBU) is a part of an organisation for which there is a) Senior management with strong links to corporate HQ b) Specific goods/services that are sold to other SBUs in the corporation c) Integrated operations with other SBUs in the corporation d) Close links with other companies in the industry value network e) A distinct external market for goods/services different from other SBUs 3. Which of the following statements in relation to Mintzberg’s 5 P’s for Strategy is not true a) As plan, strategy tries to establish direction for organisations b) As ploy, strategy involves exploiting competences c) As pattern, strategy focuses on consistency in action and behaviour d) As position, strategy matches an organisation to its environment e) As perspective, strategy concerns how intentions become shared 4. According to Gene Browne of the City Bin Company, mediocrity results from a) Not trying hard enough b) Focusing on only one part of the value chain c) Trying to be a jack of all trades d) The type of industry you are in e) Operating in a cyclical business 2 5. Scenarios are plausible alternative views of how the business environment...
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...Conforming our beliefs to the evidence of reality is a hard transition for most. Unraveling the deep truths about our origins in this universe is confronting the very foundations of our society’s historic religious establishments. Could modern science bring us closer to a true pantheistic god of beauty, or destroy all notions of a sense of purpose (Krauss, 2012)? Regardless of your faith, the laws of physics are proving every day that something can come from nothing. A god of the gaps is probably the most common, as well as most elementary, argument for debating science vs. religion. This idea is simply employing a divine meaning to things that science has no answer to. It is often a question of why, and assumes purpose to everything. One thing that science cannot refute is a purpose to our world. It is scientifically inert, that is to say that there is no plausible way to test its predictions. The scientific method is just field testing the observable world we see around us. We are all naturally inquisitive; we thrive to find our “purpose” in the world. But this, I believe, is simply a limit to our senses. When there are questions that science cannot answer, such as why we came to be, skeptics often say that it is outside the bounds of our universe. This, to me, is just a lazy answer. The god of the gaps is a “fill in the blank” answer to everything that has been so far, untestable. This does not mean that anybody has the right to invoke a spiritual...
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...If the universe is described by an effective local quantum field theory down to the Planck scale, then we would expect a cosmological constant of the order of . But the measured cosmological constant is smaller than this by a factor of .This discrepancy has been called "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics!".Some supersymmetric theories require a cosmological constant that is exactly zero, which further complicates things. This is the cosmological constant problem, the worst problem of fine-tuning in physics: there is no known natural way to derive the tiny cosmological constant used in cosmology from particle...
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... GE 253 Physics Albert Einstein’s Contribution to Quantum Mechanics Albert Einstein was one of the greatest minds in world history. Einstein is known as a brilliant physicist who contributed more to the scientific world than any other person. His theories on relativity paved the way for how science currently views time, space, energy, and gravity. Einstein was so advanced in his thinking that his studies and work set the standards for the control of scientific energy and space explorations currently being studied in the field of astrophysics. Albert Einstein's most noted contribution to the world is his theory of relativity. By 1902, Einstein was working on combining time and space, matter and energy. In 1905 when he was only 26 years old, he published a paper on relativity. This paper showed mathematically that the speed of light is constant and not relative to its source or to the viewer. Einstein had actually written an essay when he was only 16 years old on relativity, which became the basis for his published paper. The greatest result of relativistic physics was Einstein's famous relation, E=mc2. In this, he was able to prove that any increase in the energy, E, of a body must lead to a corresponding increase in its mass, m, these increases being related by a factor c2 , where c represents the velocity of light squared. In conclusion, Albert Einstein ranks as one of the greatest people for his contributions towards physics and his part...
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...A Little Concept Called Creation Science and religion, religion and science – any way you put them (at least in my eyes) you got two studies of the beginning of life that would never intersect. After reading a portion of Paul Davies’ G-d and the new physics I have learned otherwise. In the section’s I read, I found that while the book tended to get a bit intellectual and less college friendly, certain topics produced a yield that was really unlike anything I’ve read before. It should be put out there prior to diving into discussion topics that obviously two schools of thought will be presented, the sciences and the religious. The following are two almost definitions given by Davies: “Science is based on careful observation and experiments enabling theories to be constructed which connect different experiences. Central to this approach is the willingness of the scientist to abandon a theory if evidence is produced against it…Religion is founded on revelation and received wisdom. Religious dogma that claims to contain an unalterable Truth can hardly be modified to changing ideas. The true believer must stand by his faith whatever the apparent evidence against it is. (6) It is by these two definitions that most of this paper will be centered around, and very important that everyone who reads this knows how I have defined these topics and those who subscribe to them. “…Any system of thought that claims to provide an understanding of the physical world must make some statement...
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...Physics (from Ancient Greek: φυσική (ἐπιστήμη) phusikḗ (epistḗmē) "knowledge of nature", from φύσις phúsis "nature"[1][2][3]) is the natural science that involves the study of matter[4] and its motion through space and time, along with related concepts such as energy and force.[5] One of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, the main goal of physics is to understand how the universe behaves.[a][6][7][8] Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy.[9] Over the last two millennia, physics was a part of natural philosophy along with chemistry, biology, and certain branches of mathematics, but during the scientific revolution in the 17th century, the natural sciencesemerged as unique research programs in their own right.[b] Physics intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research, such as biophysics and quantum chemistry, and the boundaries of physics are not rigidly defined. New ideas in physics often explain the fundamental mechanisms of other sciences[6] while opening new avenues of research in areas such as mathematics and philosophy. Physics also makes significant contributions through advances in new technologies that arise from theoretical breakthroughs. For example, advances in the understanding of electromagnetism or nuclear physics led directly to the development of new products that have dramatically transformed modern-day society, such as television, computers, domestic appliances, and nuclear...
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...Assignment in Physics... 1. Definition of Science, Major branches of science 2. Scientific Method 3. Definition of Physics and its major branches 4. Notable Physicist and their contribution 5. Importance of Physics in our everyday life and in our society. (Write the references) Short bond paper, written or computerized (font: Times New Roman/font size: 12) Reading assign. Measurement Diff. system of measurement fundamentals and derive quantities scientific notation rules in significant figures conversion of units http://www.hep.man.ac.uk/babarph/babarphysics/physicists.html ) I.1 Science The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. I.2 The Branches of Science The Physical Sciences * Physics: The study of matter and energy and the interactions between them. Physicists study such subjects as gravity, light, and time. Albert Einstein, a famous physicist, developed the Theory of Relativity. * Chemistry: The science that deals with the composition, properties, reactions, and the structure of matter. The chemist Louis Pasteur, for example, discovered pasteurization, which is the process of heating liquids such as milk and orange juice to kill harmful germs. * Astronomy: The study of the universe beyond the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth Sciences * Geology: The science of the origin, history, and structure...
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...Sawyer until about the age of seventy two. My thoughts didn’t need a rhyme or reason and didn’t need laws to keep them within any certain limits. The furthest I ever made it in school was Algebra II and I barely passed that. The reason wasn’t that I couldn’t understand math. It was more that I didn’t apply myself to the concepts of it, or the practice and study it took to get there. I was always more interested in other concepts. Concepts that were gathered by free thinkers, philosophers, idealists. Now I knew that a lot of those figures I read about tried their hand in the sciences, physics, and mathematics in their day, but I was more interested in their philosophical views on everyday life. It was not until I started reading on the subject of quantum physics and standard physics that I became interested in math. The fact that the laws of standard physics didn’t apply to quantum physics intrigued me. I thought these were awesome ideas, but since I only took myself so far in math I was limited in my understanding of it. It took time to regret the fact that I didn’t apply myself to math all of those years. I would have gotten much further in the understanding of the physical world today. When, I saw that you could go out of the boundaries of...
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...Final Paper Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton were both very influential figures concerning science. They both discovered ground breaking things in the physics world. Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity. This is one of the biggest parts of physics alongside with quantum mechanics. Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician who are commonly referred to as one of the most influential scientists of all time as well as a key figure in the scientific revolution. Newton formulated the laws of motion and the universal gravitation that dominated scientists’ view of the physical universe for over the next three centuries. He also has demonstrated that the motion of objects on the Earth and that the celestial bodies could be described by the same principles. When he was deriving Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from his mathematical description of gravity, Newton removed any of the people’s last doubts about the validity of the model of the cosmos that was heliocentric. Near the start of Albert Einstein’s career he was beginning to think that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. While he was doing this it led him to his special theory of relativity. Thus he realized that the principle of relativity could also be extended to the gravitational fields, and this sparked his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916...
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...Aristotle was perhaps the first in the Western tradition to look at mechanics in any sort of structured way. A philosopher, rather than physicist, Aristotle thought about the way objects interact with each other, particularly their motions. One of the ideas to come from Aristotle’s work is that objects “like” to remain at rest. This seems rather reasonable put a book on a table and it remains still, push it gently and it will move until you stop. This begs the question, though what happens when we throw ad object? Our hand stops pushing, but the object continues to move. Likewise when we roll a ball we release the ball and it continues to move. Aristotle’s answer was impetus. When an object is moved by another (your hand, for example, throwing a ball), it accrues impetus. When the mover stops acting upon the movee, the impetus it accrued whilst being acted upon is used to continue the motion. Under this model, we would expect objects to exhibit straight-line trajectories rather than the parabolic trajectories we see when we throw an object A second idea of Aristotle’s is that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. It does, at first glance, seem rather reasonable but it is, like the idea of impetus, quite easily shown incorrect. The Aristotleans didn’t bother to take observations or do experiments to support their beliefs and most of those that came after them were content to trust Aristotle. Thus for more than 100 years, our understanding of mechanics was fundamentally...
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...In many ways, physics stems from ancient Greek philosophy. From Thales' first attempt to characterize matter, to Democritus' deduction that matter ought to reduce to an invariant state, the Ptolemaic astronomy of a crystalline firmament, and Aristotle's book Physics (an early book on physics, which attempted to analyze and define motion from a philosophical point of view), various Greek philosophers advanced their own theories of nature. Physics was known as natural philosophy until the late 18th century. By the 19th century physics was realized as a discipline distinct from philosophy and the other sciences. Physics, as with the rest of science, relies on philosophy of science to give an adequate description of the scientific method.[13] The scientific method employs a priori reasoning as well as a posteriori reasoning and the use of Bayesian inference to measure the validity of a given theory.[14] The development of physics has answered many questions of early philosophers, but has also raised new questions. Study of the philosophical issues surrounding physics, the philosophy of physics, involves issues such as the nature of space and time, determinism, and metaphysical outlooks such as empiricism, naturalism and realism.[15] Many physicists have written about the philosophical implications of their work, for instance Laplace, who championed causal determinism,[16] and Erwin Schrödinger, who wrote on quantum mechanics.[17] The mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has been...
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...irst some questions: What is time? In a physical sense? In psychological terms? What does time do? How does it work? Can it be transcended? Time in many ways is like space. In physics, time and space are woven together, like a fabric upon which all matter lies. At the limits, near the speed of light, movement in time is yoked to movement in space. As spatial speed increases, temporal speed slows. Recent quantum physics, in the area of non-local phenomena, suggests that both time and space are not as they appear on our scale of existence. It appears that particles, separated in both space and time, interact, in a simultaneous manner. Indeed, in one of the strangest experimental effects, the future may causally impact the past (the implications of that one will make your head spin). Distant particles are somehow connected, are somehow not distant. It is as if the space and time between did not really exist, nor the proposed distinction. Rather, these physicists (cf. Yakir Aharonov, Jeff Tollakson, and Menas Kafatos) suggest that perhaps there is an underlying singularity or unity to matter, across both time and space. Many spiritual traditions, philosophies, songs, and so on have suggested similar ideas: "We are one, heartache to heartache....love is a battlefield" Pat Benatar. Beyond funny ‘80's rocker references, such notions are at the heart of spiritual practices, across the various world traditions, even mainstream Christianity which proposes that God exists outside the...
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...Is Science the only sure path to Truth? Physics is “the branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of matter and energy. The subject matter of physics includes mechanics, heat, light and other radiation, sound, electricity, magnetism, and the structure of atoms” (Oxford Dictionaries). Till the first half of the eighteenth century, physics was a branch of natural philosophy. It “became widely used in its modern sense (i.e., excluding the life sciences, geology, and chemistry) during the second half of the eighteenth century” (Olson, 2002, p. 301). Olson (2002) explains how physics is divided into two main categories. He states that topics treated before the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century are said to be parts of classical physics. On the other hand a group of topics that emerged after about 1895 is said to make up modern physics. Since physics is a broad area, in this essay, I specifically focus on one topic from modern physics, namely quantum physics. I will evaluate whether quantum physics can lead us to ‘Truth’. In this paper, ‘Truth’ refers to quantum events. First, I will portray how quantum events are filled with uncertainties; I will then list three answers given by physicists to explain why uncertainties are present. I will then move on to show how quantum physics offers conceptual parallels to ideas in religion. I will mainly discuss the role of holism character in quantum systems. Finally I will evaluate whether god is the reason...
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...Hawking contra Philosophy Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence. Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times – Hawking conceded – philosophers not only tried to keep up but sometimes made significant scientific contributions of their own. However they were now, in so far as they had any influence at all, just an obstacle to progress through their endless going-on about the same old issues of truth, knowledge, the problem of induction, and so forth. Had philosophers just paid a bit more attention to the scientific literature they would have gathered that these were no longer live issues for anyone remotely au fait with the latest thinking. Then their options would be either to shut up shop and cease the charade called ‘philosophy of science’ or else to carry on and invite further ridicule for their head-in-the-sand attitude. Predictably enough the journalists went off to find themselves media-friendly philosophers – not hard to do nowadays – who would argue the contrary case in a suitably vigorous way. On the whole the responses, or those that I came across, seemed overly anxious to strike...
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