Today was a very interesting day which started off wiht Rita and Gau’s lecture about shape in nature. After this I headed off to the Fowler museum of art where i saw the art of the tribal people in papunya. This was a new sort of art form to me. Normally, the art i see is oil paintings, clay sculptures, or drawings, but this was completely different. This art work incorperated little different pieces of sticks to make a very large piece of art. This looked very in touch with nature because of the natural look to it.
After this my group went to Dr. Feckelman’s plasma physics lab. This was the highlight of the day for me. It was amazing how high temperatures and how fast plasma is recorded. It was said that the meaurements were taken at about one fourty-thousandth of a second, which is at an incredible speed. The most interesting topic of this tour was the talk about nuclear fusion. I learned that the temperature needs to be at around two hundred million degrees celcius in order for nuclear fusion to be an effective method of harvesting energy. This is extremely difficult, but i hope that scientists will soon be able to unlock the secret of maintaining this high temperature because it will solve the energy crisis of the entire world.
Lastly, i was taken to the special collections library where i saw Copernicus’s old textbook. This was extremely cool because i learned that students actually have the access to these books to use. This is surprising because some of these books are millions of dollars.
http://www.physicalsciences.ucla.edu/images/research/gekelman-full.jpg
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/incEngine/
www.physics.ucla.edu/plasmalab