Event#3- The Horse

This past sunday I attended the event from HOX zodiac honoring the horse and it reminded me of the idea of how we can connect with both art and science through every aspect of our lives. The speakers talked about their functional relationshipes with horses, the stories they had around horses and the functional relationships between humans and horses though horse camp riding, cleaning horses, doing cinematography in movies on horseback, and even the origins of how horses were domesticated.

Some of the speakers, including professor Vesna, talked about the idea if so many people belief in something that is unscientific then it becomes real within the context of horsecopes. However, even scientific quantities and hypothesis we make are made up and are only true if taken to heart and adopted by a large enough fraction of the scientific community. An example of this would be the definition of the kilogram. 

The kilogram, as definied by the Encyclopedia Britannica, is the basic unit of mass in the metric system. It's one of the fundamental units taken by physicists from which units of force, power and energy are derieved from so you would think that it would be a physical quantity that would be constant. However the definition of the kilogram has changed throughout the centuries depending on how scientists would want to use it to make defined measurements. [1]

The first definition of the kilogram was as the mass of 1000cm^3 of water. This makes sense with how units are made up: common quantities of measurement come from common things people see in every day life. However, the density of water changes with temperature and so does the mass of water in a certain volume so scientists quickly found that the amount of water in 1000cm^3 of water wasn't a set quantity but a range.[2]

So they changed to a solid object. A cylinder made of cesium

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/kilogram-forever-changed-why-mass-matters

The problem with using a cesium cylinder is that solid cylinders will loose mass to radioactive decay. It's really slow, but it is measureable and if you are using a prototype like that as a definition of a unit then the unit changes with time, which is not possible as units are suposed to be constants. Additionally, surface contamination can add mass to the sample. [3]Therefore using a solid object as the prototype for a unit is not possible and they yet again had to change that perspective. [4]

To do that, they used Planck's constant. 

    https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-was-the-ultraviolet-catastrophe.576516/

Planck's constant is derieved from the fact that as you increase the temperature of an object that emits all energies frequencies (a blackbody) it does not increase the amount of light emitted, but instead it a limit at a certain value.  Max Planck used a mathmatical trick by expressing energies in terms of integral multiples of a constant called Planck's constant. Then using Einstein's E=mc^2 and E=hv you can solve the equation to solve for a kilogram of mass. [5] So even established quantities in science can change if enough people believe in them

Works Cited

Alsabeh, Farid. “The unsolvable problem that foreshadowed quantum mechanics | by Farid Alsabeh | Medium.” Farid Alsabeh, 24 March 2019, https://falsabeh.medium.com/the-unsolvable-problem-that-foreshadowed-quantum-mechanics-c43c46686270. Accessed 5 June 2022.

Banks, Michael. “New definition of the kilogram comes into force – Physics World.” Physics World, 17 May 2019, https://physicsworld.com/a/new-definition-of-the-kilogram-comes-into-force/. Accessed 5 June 2022.

Ghose, Tia. “The Kilogram Has Gained Weight.” Live Science, 6 January 2013, https://www.livescience.com/26017-kilogram-gained-weight.html. Accessed 5 June 2022.

“kilogram (kg) | Facts & Definition | Britannica.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/science/kilogram. Accessed 5 June 2022.

“Kilogram: The Present.” NIST, 14 May 2018, https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kilogram-present. Accessed 5 June 2022.