Thursday, April 06, 2017

Friday Science: Charges

Being Interim Dean of the (mostly) undergraduate School of Theology and Ministry has seemed a whole lot more work than it was being Dean of the Seminary. :-)

In any case, I've fallen behind on my Friday Science posts in the "Gen Eds in a Nutshell" series. Here's the last one. One realization is that I both have forgotten more and am further behind in my knowledge of electomagnetism than I thought. That post is mostly done but has been sitting incomplete since January.

So I'm trying to inch through this book, which will take about half a year. I am inching through another science book too, Adam and the Human Genome. In any case, I may give some progress reports on Fridays on things I'm reading in science. When I feel I have enough to finish the Gen Ed post on electromagnetism, I'll post it and move on.

So here's notice. I've finished the first chapter of the electromagnetism book. It was on charges and Coloumb's Law. :-)

1 comment:

Ken Schenck said...

Very interesting reading today on p.21, basically explaining radioactivity. The larger the nucleus, the more protons at a distance from other protons. This distance allows Coulomb repulsion of protons on the other side of the atom to be a more significant factor against the more local strong nuclear force. Also the added neutrons increases the overall kinetic energy of the nucleus. Thus the tendency for really large atoms to decay into more stable ones with smaller nuclei.