Coming back from a decent weekend, the second week started off with a kick. I actually enjoyed the lecture on Space-time and gravity. I still fail to understand the concept of the earth rotating on a dip-like structure in space. There was also some talk on fluid movement in air and water and as an example a lobster’s swim was used.
I stayed awake through the entire lecture. One of the unfortunate things of the day was that it involved a lot of walking, but that however was made of for in the plasma lab. The study of plasma is one of my favorite fields in science considering it is not seen too often on earth, but is all over the universe. I never knew the sun was a source of plasma however, and this causes me to look at the sun at a different perspective. The only thing that I was disappointed about after the tour was that we did not see any actually experiments involving plasma, but rather some machines just producing it.
Before the plasma lab however, we went to a museum and looked at some Australian (I think) paintings. I really did not like this. After the plasma lab, we went to a biomedicine to see special collections. I am not much of a collector and even though some of the books and models were valued greatly by some, I did not care to much. I did enjoy this much more than the museum although I fell asleep, but that was only because we had a chance to sit down and it was the last tour of the day after much walking.
http://fusedweb.llnl.gov/CPEP/Chart_Pages/5.Plasma4StateMatter.html
http://cpmi.uiuc.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime
http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/aura/web/index.html
http://bigbang.ws/articles.asp?id=73