Today’s lecture was about how shapes are everywhere. We talked about how shapes of atoms, crystals and opals deeply affect their behaviors and appearances. And then we related shapes to art and architecture, the way artists express themselves through their pieces. There was a slide where they compared the universe to an atom; the sun is the nucleus and the orbiting planets are the orbiting electrons.
After lectures, we went around Westwood visiting museums and labs. We first visited a museum where we saw art pieces by people in Africa. The exhibit was called the Icons of the Desert in the Fowler Museum of Cultural History. These paintings were of their dreams and maps and daily life. Most of these pictures were considered sacred; it was forbidden for people other tan the elders who painted them to know anything about it. They didn’t care if we saw it since we were students in the United States, and we had no other knowledge of them to be able to hurt them in any way.
Afterwards, we visited a lab, where they made plasma. Plasma is when electrons are freed from their bonds around a nucleus. The plasma is hot enough to melt metal so to contain it, the vacuum like vault was of a specially made material that wont melt. The extremely low pressure also helped the material stay solid and to electron to move around. Looking through a little window in the vault, we were able to see the plasma shoot from a certain point, all around the vault in a straight red line of light, and then back.
At the end of the day, we visited the UCLA library where we learned about a collection of old books. And what makes them so valuable, even if they aren’t as old as they look.
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/incEngine/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)