mike d: those are fantastic pants
fantastic pants girl: thanks!
mike d: they look extremely comfortable
fantastic pants girl: they are!

too often, I reach the point where I have SO many tasks I need to complete that my speed of working actually SLOWS and I get less done.

My Advanced Dynamics class will be pretty challenging. The difficulty will be worth it though just to hear my professor get super excited about Newton and Physics.

Let’s get geeky.

One thing the professor mentioned was Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), something I had known nothing about. I decided to do a little extra research on the matter and share it with the world.

We’ve all heard of Dark Matter. The big reason Dark Matter is believed to exist is because galaxies act a little funny. Let’s first look at things that aren’t galaxies… take for example our solar system.

Mercury is close to the sun. Because of this, the sun’s gravity influences this little planet more than the sun influences… say… Neptune. As a results, Mercury rotates much faster around the sun than the rest of the planets. Not only does it follow Newton’s law F=ma, it just makes sense.

Unlike our solar system however, all bodies in a galaxy move around the center at about the same speed. This doesn’t make ANY sense. If gravity is huge and imposing at the center of the galaxy, it should be weak and pathetic at the edge of the galaxy. Until 1981, everyone had assumed that the only explanation of this would be if there was some mass that we didn’t know about that was adding some muscle to the weak edges. And thus DARK MATTER was born.

Dark matter, as Newton followers believe, forms a ring around the galaxy that equalizes the gravitational forces. The result is that all bodies in a galaxy would rotate at the same speed. ta-da! problem solved!!

Mordehai Milgrom, an Israeli physicist, was NOT COOL WITH THIS.

Milgrom suggested that perhaps when the acceleration of F=ma is really tiny, things get funky.

Tiny is relative of course… but when we’re looking at galaxies, tiny accelerations could be pretty substantial by our standards. So Milgrom suggested F=ma be changed to:

F= m u(a/a0)a

There’s plenty of data on that equation on the internet, so if you’re interested I would recommend checking out this site.

The problem with MOND, is that it’s extremely hard to TEST. This is because we can’t really deal with a scale big enough to make accelerations really tiny. So far all scientists seem to be able to do is observe OTHER galaxies and say “hey… that one has constant speeds too.”

My dad has a lot of good stories. This is one of them.

We had mice. And one day I found one of the ‘have a heart’ traps had been triggered. We had caught one of the little guys!! I picked up the trap, brought it to the car, and drove to the cemetary to release him. It was winter at the time and very cold. So when I opened the door to the trap the little mouse didn’t want to come out. It was far warmer inside the trap.

I shook it a little bit, but he clung on. So I shook it a lot and he fell out onto the snow - immediately jumped up, ran towards me, and ran up my pant leg! Just like in the cartoons! I had to grab my knee to keep him from running all the way up! I thought “This doesn’t happen to real people!”

I had to shake my leg like crazy until he came out.