Perfectly Imperfect

Tonight's post is about perfection. (Or, rather, things that lack it.)

Let's Start With Me

I made a commitment to myself, and a career coach, that I'd publish a blog post on here every couple of weeks. It's been a few months since my last post, so that didn't happen.

You know what, though?

That's okay.

It used to be hard for me to forgive myself for making that kind of mistake. Yet lucky for me, in between publishing my last post and this one, I read a great book that's changed things called the Perfection Detox.

I recommend it to anyone who's a perfectionist because it has such good advice on how to let go of perfection. Plus, it's been critical in helping me journey down the qubit hole.

If you read it, I hope it helps you, too.

Now, On to Another Thing That's Less Than Perfect

What could it be?

Perfect gases, of course!

This isn't a perfect gas, but it's beautiful and I couldn't resist putting it in.

I learned about perfect gases a couple weeks ago from my physics text book.

At the time, I was starting to brainstorm what this post would be like and I thought it was funny that I ran across information about these perfectly imperfect gases.

What I learned was fascinating. Here are my notes so your mind can be boggled, too:

• Perfect gases are the theoretical, ideal case in which the interactions are negligible (in comparison with the thermal energy of the moving molecules) and particles collide with each other like perfectly elastic billiard balls.

• At a constant pressure, the volume of such perfect gas would contract to zero at the absolute zero of temperature and all the particles would be stationary at a single point in time.

• But that being said, this can't happen in real gases because the molecules have a finite size and interact with each other.

That was a lot of interesting info, so here's another picture of gas to look at while you absorb what you read.

• Even in principle, perfect gases are an impossible ideal because of quantum effects.

• The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we can't simultaneously know the precise values of the momentum and position of particles.

• A gas that has raw energy and volume would violate the principle since the particles would have zero momentum and their position would be precisely known.

Fun fact: Reading about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle felt like hitting a great milestone. I knew that we couldn't know both a particle's speed and position in space, but I didn't know the name for that.

Now That You've Learned Something New, Here's What's Coming Next

I'll work on publishing posts regularly again - and I'm going to share more quantum physics information.

I'm at a point in my textbook where I've gotten through the sections on theoretical and astrophysics and now I'm learning about particle behavior and experimental physics.

Those are the branches I want to go into, so I'm at an exciting point and I'm itching to share what I'm learning.

P.S.

Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science! To help us celebrate, here's a Forbes article about women in physics (and it was written by a female physicist, no less!).