Today’s Reflections:
Today I tried to get through to Dr Robert Anderson but we couldn’t get through to him, so I sent an email to him instead. I also sent a whole load of emails to Australian Universitys, to help answer my genetic questions.
Tomorrow’s Plan:
Tomorrow we are not doing much on our inquiry’s because people are doing their debates. But I hope that people would start answering back to my emails.
These are my spelling words for week 4, term 4.
1. sustained
2. solemn
3. benevolence
4. benign
5. critical
6. equable
7. honours
8. illuminate
9. ordinarily
10. reigning
Today’s Reflections:
Today I checked to make sure one of our experts phone number was correct, as well as figuring out questions for that expert. I also found out about this great site called the giant experiment, and I signed up to get latest Genetic Engineering news.
Tomorrow’s Plan:
Tomorrow I will hopefully be contacting Dr Robert Anderson, who is a GE expert.
Today’s Reflections:
Today we started my new inquiry “Should genetic modification be discontinued”, and today we did our timeline, and part of our hypothesis.
Tomorrow’s Plan:
Tomorrow I will finish my hypothesis, and do some research on this project.
Spelling:
1. recessive
2. plagal
3. acceleration
4. parachutes
5. astronaut
6. efficient
7. potential
8. parallel
9. neutral
10. sophisticated
Here is my conclusion for my “Where did Matter come from?” inquiry.
Where did matter come from? As I said in my hypothesis, this question is really tough because no one actually knows where matter came from. There are theories about where matter came from like the big bang, but know one knows the truth. Scientists however are getting more evidence from experiments that the big bang did exist, and these ideas get more and more convincing. I also wanted to find out what matter is and what makes matter, which are atoms to my understanding, and find out about the particles that make atoms. I found out many new information, mostly by websites, but I did have a couple experts hat clarified my questions, and a movie telling me about the big bang. I contacted experts from New Zealand and the USA, but I only got two people who gave me comprehensive answers. These people where Trevor Kitson from Massey University (New Zealand), and Terry Scott from Otago University (New Zealand), but I got most of my information from good websites. Firstly I would like to talk about what I said in my hypothesis and the new information that I found out. I stated in my hypothesis that matter is everything, whether it was a car, air, table, ocean, water, star, planet, computer, human, animal, they are all made of matter. There is six states of matter, and these are solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, quark-gluon plasmas, and bose einstein condensates. Solids is anything that is solid, like the body of a car, table, animal (except some parts of the insides), computer, paper, saxophone, and many other things. A solids particles are all organized in a tight pattern sort of thing, and they only experience tiny vibrations. Liquids is anything like water, the ocean, liquid medicine, some poisons, petroleum, oil, and many other things like this. A liquids particles are tightly together, but instead of being organized ,they are moving around each other and are not organized. A Gas is a state of matter that is usually invisible to the human eye like air, but some gases that are less common, you can see. Gases are anything like air, carbon dioxide, steam from boiling water, the steam that comes of hot thermal lakes, the poisons that come out of exhausts of cars, and other things like this. A gases particles are spread out, and are not tightly together, and these gas particles are free moving. The travel quite vibrantly, depending on their surroundings, and even if there is no wind to carry these particles along, they still can move at high speeds. Plasmas are things like stars, some types of flames, aurora (northern lights), lightning, sun, and other weird things like these. A plasmas particles are spread out like a gases, but they move independently, in other words, where they want to go. Another thing that makes plasmas particles unique is that a plasma only consists of ions and electrons, and also plasmas are usually very hot from 1000 degrees Celsius to 1 billion degrees Celsius. A quark gluon plasma is just like a plasma, but it consists of quarks and gluons, and they are usually a bit hotter. A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) a none natural state of matter on planet earth, instead scientists try to make them. BEC’s is a very unusual state that is formed at a very low temperature just above absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius). A BEC’s particles look as if it is just one atom that looks like a fuzzy ball, even though there are heaps more atoms. For a solid to change into a liquid it has to get heated so that the solid will melt, and the specific temperature for the solid to turn into a liquid is called a melting point. The opposite goes for a liquid, for a liquid to turn into a solid it has to be cooled until it reaches below it’s melting point. for a liquid ton turn into a gas, it has to be heated enough so that gas comes up from the liquid. The special name for the specific temperature of which a liquid turns into a gas is called boiling point. The opposite goes for a change from a gas to a liquid, to change a gas into a liquid you have to cool it enough till it reaches below the boiling point. For a gas to change into a plasma, you have to ionize the gas by heating the gas to really high temperatures until you can see that the gas now has the properties of a plasma. For a plasma to change back into a gas, you have to deionize it by cooling the plasma top change back into a gas. So all this that I just told you was just some of the basics of what I found out and what I already knew, and then clarified it again to make sure of information. Next I will briefly talk about some of the things I found out and already knew about the periodic table and the elements. There are about 114 known elements and these are sorted into a periodic table. Each element has it’s own symbol, for example boron, which has a symbol of B, there are two numbers next to the symbol of boron, the smaller number being the atomic number and the larger number the mass number. For boron the atomic number is 5 and the mass number is 11. The atomic number is the number of protons in the elementary atom, and the number of electrons in that atom. The mass number is the number of protons and neutrons added together to get an overall mass number. If you minus the atomic number from the mass number, you get the number of neutrons in an atom. That means boron has 5 protons, 5 electrons, and 6 neutrons (11-5=6). In my hypothesis I said the same thing so I must be correct then, because I looked at some good websites and they clarified my own knowledge. Now I will briefly talk about subatomic particles, and most of this stuff is information that I have learnt. Quarks are particles that are found in protons, neutrons, and many other particles like lambda, sigma, xi particles and many more. There are six different types of quarks (or flavors), and these are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. A proton consists of three quarks, two up quarks and one down quark. A neutron consists of three quarks, a up quark and two down quarks. Quarks make up the charge for the particle that it is in. Gluons are a special force that connects the quarks in a particle. Hadrons are any particles with quarks in them, and there are two types of hadrons, and these are baryons and mesons. Baryons are particles with three quarks in them, like protons, neutrons, lambda, sigma, and others. A meson is a particle that has two quarks in them (one quark and one anti quark), and these are things like pions, kaons, and many others. There is also a type of baryon called an exotic baryon, and this is a pentaquark, which is a particle with five quarks in them (four quarks and one anti quark). Leptons are particles without quarks in them, like electrons, muons, tauons, and their associated neutrinos. That I think is enough of the subatomic particle explaining for a conclusion. Now I should briefly explain the big bang (which is where I thought in my hypothesis where matter came from), and briefly explain the steady state theory. The big bang is what most scientists and normal public believe where the universe came from. Before time began the universe was all in one tiny super dense hot thing that was the size of an atom. Then all of a sudden something triggered it to explode outwards, this created a super fast inflation. Then electrons and quarks were made, and in a second after the beginning of time the quarks formed into protons and neutrons. 300,000 years after time begins the protons and neutrons and electrons combine to make mostly hydrogen and helium atoms. One billion years later gases combine to make the first stars and galaxies. Even today the universe is still expanding at a fast rate. The steady state theory is the scientific opponent to the big bang theory. The steady state theory is when the universe is in a steady form or a cycle. The steady state theory means that matter has to be created out of nothing to cope with the expanding universe. So because the universe is expanding, more matter has to get created to make the universe the same density, and equal lengths apart from a galaxy to the next through time. Well now it comes down to the final answers to the question, where did matter come from. I think matter came from the big bang, because it is the theory most widely used by people, and I think that this is the most possible way according to science. Also the evidence for the big bang is very strong and most of all I believe the scientific theory. The reason why I didn’t say the steady state theory is that it has a few problems that go against laws of physics. Like there is the law that matter cannot be created and destroyed, when matter got created, it was all the matter that got created, not just matter being created all the time. Also, the discovery of cosmic background radiation was the final blow to the steady state theory. Really though, no one actually knows where matter came from because we weren’t around at that time, and you can not make sure that certain things happened at those sorts of times, but you can predict. The most best answer would have to be the big bang for me then, because I believe in that scientific theory, and it is cool to think that something like this could have happened, which for me is the big bang.
Here are my spelling words for this week.
1. horizontal
2. pyramid
3. prominent
4. cultivation
5. permanent
6. varieties
7. perpetual
8. propagated
9. successional
10. sufficiently
