Just Some Cool Shizz

Hi guys sorry about the delay in posts but I am working on some stuff I promise. In the meantime I've decide to fill some of the gaps with smaller, filler posts that also have some cool topical stuff in them.

So yeah here we go, what's happening at the moment? Well yesterday marked the first day of the 12 days of deadpool, a pre Christmas period of festivities dedicated to the one and only merc with a mouth! Below if the official schedule but its promising to be a period of happiness and joy for nerds everywhere :D :D

The gist of it is that new deadpool content will be released every day leading up to Christmas on the websites listed with a brand new trailer coming down the digital chimney on December 25th, but why listen to me when the man of the hour could explain it himself?

And now that the crazy is over, let's get down to the other thing that made me scream with happiness this week -  a trailer released on Monday for the brand new Star Trek - Star Trek Beyond!! This hasn't gone down well with a lot of hardcore star trek fans due to the action based route that it seems to have taken, however for anyone who liked the general gist of Guardians of the Galaxy, it looks brilliant. However the more frustrated Star Trek fans will simply have to put their faith in Justin Lin's directing and wait for more trailers. In the meantime I'll link the trailer below, which I personally like (Trekkies please don't kill me).

And finally, the one that I've been counting the days for for a month now, the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens! As I'm writing this its one day until it comes out and I genuinely could not be more excited, from watching the original 6 twice to hours of reading the lore to playing star wars battlefront 2 for hours on end, this is finally it! As I am avoiding media and advertising involving the film, I will do a review of the film after rather than speculating about it now. However I will say that according to early viewing reviews it holds up to the previous films' standard well so rest assured Star Wars fans, This is the film you are looking for.

Well that was new wasn't it? Personally I enjoyed taking some time to go through websites combing for geeky news articles. I hope you guys enjoyed this article and I'll be back with some more stuff really soon. See ya :)

Could The Fallout Series Actually Happen?

So if you rad my last post, I assume you've gathered the idea that I really like the idea of the fallout series, but a big question to ask is is an atomic apocalypse real and possible? I mean there are fungi that can create zombies out of ants and meteorites are another scarily obvious possibility but could the world end because of good old human hostility?

According to Wikipedia, these are the countries that currently have nuclear weapons.

Less than you thought? Me too, I personally assumed that during the cold war a lot more countries would have gotten busy with their nuclear research but there are in fact only 5 recognized Nuclear Weapon States in the world today that are America, Russia, France, China and of course the UK.

The other colors stand for countries that do also have access to nuclear weapons, except for the countries colored green which are in fact states that used to have nuclear weapons but no longer possess them or have disassembled them in the case of South Africa.

All that aside there are estimated to be 10144 nuclear weapons in the world, which seems far too precise for an estimation but I'll let that pass as they probably know what they're doing.

So firstly lets look at the size of the are they'd need to nuke. The total surface area of the Earth is listed as  510 million square kilometers, but we only need to know the habitable regions. The total land surface area is listed as 149 million square kilometers. But the bombs would obviously be dropped on the populated area and so that is what we must calculate. Of this 149 million, deserts make up about 32 million, forests 39 million, mountains 30 million and freshwater 9 million square kilometers. Obviously none of these are able to have large communities and so the remaining surface area for humans to live on is only 39 million square kilometers, and even this will not be completely filled as humans don't live everywhere and they tend to clump together in regions rather than spread out and fill a whole area (95% of the population is estimated to live in 10% of the land area). But this figure fits our purpose so we'll use it for now.

The next factor which we must account for is the size of the bomb. In a nuclear explosion the damage can be thought of as circles around the area of the explosion. The first circle is the fireball radius, this tends to be very small and is the radius of the nuclear fireball itself. The second is that of the deadly radiation, with mortality rates of 50% and upwards, this radius is around 7.5km. The third and fourth radii are those of air blasts, this would gradually tail off, however they can remain deadly at radii of above 33km. The final circle is that of potentially the largest killer, the thermal energy. If large enough this will cause serious burns and create firestorms and can reach a terrifying 77km.

Comfortingly these are the figures that would be observed for the Tsar bomb, the biggest USSR bomb ever designed which packed a massive 100 megaton explosion (equivalent of exploding 100 million tonnes of TNT), However if all nuclear weapons were this powerful, it would only take around 2100 to nuke our 39 million square kilometers, meaning they they would have actually quite a good chance to be thorough and go over it 4 times, making sure they killed everyone.

Less comfortingly however, is that in a nuclear explosion, the explosion itself isn't the only killer. Possibly one of the most frightening implications of a nuclear bomb is the nuclear fallout which comes after.

When a nuclear bomb is detonated it releases massive amounts of energy in gamma waves, enough to actually cause a lot of the surrounding material e.g. dust to become radioactive aswell. And when the explosion forms its iconic mushroom cloud, all of this radioactive material is sucked up into it, and through this, into the atmosphere.


This radioactive material can be devastating to the environment, in some cases it has been seen to contaminate areas up too 500km away from the detonation! And when we take into account our ten thousand nuclear weapons, its pretty obvious that that's more than enough fallout to go around.

As a result of this, people would suffer mutations and illnesses, cancer would be widespread and the fact that isotopes such as Strontium-90 would be created which can directly bond into our bodies means that this radiation would most likely prove fatal for most.

However the good news is that if there ever does happen to be a nuclear war, provided you can survive the initial destruction, the fallout and any diseases that follow, you're pretty much in the clear!

So the final answer is yes, fallout could potentially happen, because physics.

Once again thank you all for reading, it means a lot to me that people actually read this! And if there ever is a nuclear apocalypse, fallout is more likely than we realise, with humanity's tendency to survive against the odds.

Anyway I'm finishing up now, so \i'll see you all again soon and thanks for reading! :)

Fallout 4 and Atoms part 2

So Fallout 4 came out yesterday, for those of you who don't know, that is a video game. The idea of the fallout series in general was to take the fear of the nuclear apocalypse that haunted people from the 50s riiight the way through to the end of the cold war, and then make it into a fun playable experience.

See as the name suggests (fallout means the radioactive particles that fall as dust or rain after a nuclear weapon is detonated), the fallout series are all set in a world similar to that of the 1960s, except the nuclear war actually happened and now it is a wasteland.

I'm not just telling you this because I'm a nerd, the point which I am making is that this is a truly brilliant game, the gameplay is immersive, there is plenty of stuff to do, and the trailer below has me still humming the wanderer.

However the thing that appeals to me most about fallout 4 is that its a NUCLEAR apocalypse. Not zombies or aliens or ancient artifacts but good old fashioned nuclear war between America and China that wipes out the world in 2 hours and is followed by crazy survivor attempts to mutate humans into super-soldiers and to create deadly viral weapons.

So pretty simple idea - pretty fantastic game series.

You know the announcement of fallout 4 and the nuclear bombs that caused the series were actually what caused me to google atoms and write these posts on all this stuff.

Anyway I'm getting a little off topic, to tell the truth that was all mainly a filler because this post may not be as long as the last one see this post, I am going to cover the other model of the atom in use today, the quantum mechanical model.

Back in a simpler time you could ask any physicist what is the difference between some light and this electron and they would have said that one is a wave whereas the other is a particle, but then physics once more got in the way of our nice simple view of the world.

See there is this weird phenomenon called the photoelectric effect that helped to muck up our nice simple view. To put it simply, when you shine light above a certain frequency (and therefore energy) on a metal's surface, there are electrons emitted instantaneously. Now some of you might be thinking its just like boiling off water, the light gives it thermal energy and so the electrons have enough energy to escape, but the weird thing wasn't the emission, it was the fact that it occurred instantaneously. Even with the biggest oven in the world, there would be a gap in time before the metal was heated and the electrons boiled off, so what exactly is going on here?

It was a guy called Plank's hypothesis that helped us to understand what was going on here, as he suggested that light was less of a wave of energy and more like a massive stream of quantised packets of energy, like how a river flowing looks like a liquid, but in fact is made up of trillions of H2O molecules.

But why is this so important? Well the higher the frequency, the more energy these packets will be carrying, which means that above a certain energy, they would provide exactly the amount of energy that an electron would need to escape the positive pull of the surface of the metal. We refer to this amount of energy as the work function. However the key thing to take from this is that light doesn't always behave like a wave, sometimes it behaves like particles.

The second thing that began to mess with our heads was much simpler, what happens when you shoot a beam of electrons at a disk shaped target? Well up until they hit the target, they act completely normal, flying along in a straight line, but when they hit the target, something bizarre happens, specifically this:

Whats so weird about this you ask? This is the pattern which scattered light makes when it is diffracted. And therefore the electrons are no longer acting like a particle, but like a wave instead.

From these two seemingly small things, some very clever people were able to draft up the theory of what we know as the wave particle duality, the idea that waves and particles can be equated as one thing in a similar way to how Einstein equated matter and energy. In order to do this, DeBroglie created a very interesting equation:

Which is in summary wavelength is equal to Planck's constant over mass times velocity. Or to the non physics people, waves and particles pretend to be each other.

What does this have to do with atoms you ask? Well many more equations were made until eventually we became able to actually write a particle as a wave of probability, stating effectively how much of the particle is there. And the particles we can do this with include electrons.

So last time I showed you the electrons in nice tidy orbitals, whereas the quantum model of the atom takes into account the fact that electrons could be wavey and makes it look like this instead:


And when there is more than one they will still repel, despite being merely a cloud of charge and will form all the pretty patterns on the right. depending on how many are present. to be as far away from each other as possible, much like two arguing siblings.

And that is how simple the quantum model of the atom gets, well now hopefully you understand atoms just a little bit better now.

You know whats a weird thought? Just how complex such an incredibly small system can even be, there was a time that the atoms were thought of as indivisible, but over time we have come to discover that even these tiny little bits of stuff are even more unimaginably complex than we could ever manage to completely understand.

Once again it has been a pleasure writing and thank you all for reading, see you soon :)

A Journey to the Centre of the Atom - Part 1

HELLLLOOOOO INTERNEEEEEETTTTTT!!!! I have missed you guys but now I'm back and had a pretty interesting idea for a couple of more posts!

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm a massive physics nerd. Physics is great, in some cases it knows exactly what's going on and can predict is really accurately. But in other cases it can model something, but all that we really know for certain is how little we really know about the topic, and one of the most famous cases of this is the atom.

Humans seem to love making things, our creativity is one of the things that defines us, setting us apart from the bacteria and fungi that we share this planet with. But there have been times where in order to make new things, we have had to have a greater understanding of what we're making them out of.

We have always been looking closer and closer, building microscopes to detect light and even electrons in an attempt to figure out what everything is made of, probing deeper and deeper, trying to find the indivisible individual sections of matter that make up everything. The atom may not be the simple individual piece that we're looking for but it is a truly beautiful system, made up of a complex structure of matter and balanced charges.

In this post I'll explain the classical model of the atom, where we assume everything is all nice and tidy and made of particles and not a quantum mess of clouds of charge and such.

So lets begin with the biggest part, the atom itself, the largest atom known to us is that of Cesium (CS) which has a radius of around 270 pm. Lets put that in perspective, 1 pm is 1x10^-12 m or in an easier to understand format, 0.000000000001 m that means that one of these atoms is 0.000000000540 m across. Pretty small right? Guess again because that's not as small as an atom gets, the smallest atom possible is that of helium, with a minuscule radius of 31 pm, nearly 9 times smaller! OK fine that's really not that much smaller in the sense of things, until you realise that's the difference between the Arc De Triomphe and the Empire State Building!

So that's how big they are, or more accurately how small they are, I mean there's more atoms in a grain of sand than there are grains of sand on Earth!

Anyway moving on, next layer, AKA the electrons! Who doesn't love electrons? They power our gadgets, they're thought to be fundamental particles, they do all kinds of cool stuff with light and charged particles and they supposedly orbit neatly in shells of 2, 8 and 8 right? Wrong.

Electrons are great little things, but they are by no means straightforward. The fact that they repel means that when they are orbiting an atom they take up positions that will allow them to be as far away as possible from the other, so one is fine by itself, two will be on opposite sides of the nucleus, three will be in a triangle and 4 will be a tetrahedron and so on and so forth.

The chart on the right is a bit of a preview to next time but also shows just how incredibly complex these seemingly simple little lumps of negativity can be.

And it only gets weirder.

Now on to the next part of the atom, the nucleus, a region which is so dense that if we could fill 1 cubic meter with the nuclei of atoms (they're all roughly equally dense) it would weight roughly 2.7x10^17 kg, which is equivalent to 77500000000 Saturn V rockets. ItIhelps to visualise to say that if the moon was compressed to this density from its current average density of 3347 kg/m3 then it would have a new surface area of 22600 meters squares, roughly the size of 1 quarter of Ireland. So yeah its pretty incredibly dense, and as the electron's mass pales in comparison we tend to just say that the mass of the nucleus is the mass of the atom.

But now we must leave out electrifying friends as we have to go deeper!

Anyone who has done GCSE physics will know that the nucleus contains protons and neutrons, the positively charged particles that keep the electrons around and the neutral particles really don't do much more than add more mass and stability to the nucleus.

But lets look a little closer shall we? Firstly the proton. This particle is the optimist of the atomic trio, constantly positive with a charge of +1. Its is also spinning constantly as are all of the particles, and as it is spinning, the motor effect dictates that a small magnetic field is generated. And that is pretty much it, it is also interesting to note that as a hydrogen nucleus is simply 1 proton by itself, we find a lot of protons simply floating around as either Hydrogen atoms or alone as Hydrogen + ions.

Secondly the neutron, this is actually sightly more simple than the proton, the neutron consists of quarks which have charges that actually balance out to 0 making it a completely neutral particle (hence the name). The neutron just kind of sits there, spinning around and adding a bit of mass, sometimes it may influence the spin of an electron but that is really one of the only significant effects that the particle has.

However when we look at what happens to the system as a whole under different circumstances, it gets a lot more interesting, for example, while the strong force can easily bind together a nucleus with the same amount of protons and neutrons, once there is an imbalance, things start to get a little bit tricky. Through quantum mechanical processes, the nucleus can literally beak apart over and over again, emitting alpha particles (helium nuclei) until it is eventually stable enough to bind the particles together better. We call this radioactive decay (although there are two other types that occur in different ways to this one).

Does anyone think this is as small as things get? If you did then you're completely wrong and need to remember that physics does not comply or cooperate with us willingly. Ever. Scientists in the late 60s decided they wanted to see what was inside these particles, so naturally they got a big particle acceleration machine and smashed things into each other until they found their answer. (yay physics!)

What they found was extremely interesting, when you fire an electron at a proton with enough speed it will actually go through the proton, however it is deflected by what appear to be 3 point charges within the proton. The same applies to the neutron. The physicists who predicted this before the experiments were carried out had creatively chosen the name "Quarks" pronounced "kworks" as opposed to a traditional physicsy name like subnucleonic particles, which is frankly refreshing considering how wildly creatively science as a whole has named most things (yes I'm talking about you chemistry with all of your naming systems!).

Quarks make up protons and neutrons, there are 6 flavours of quark called up, down, strange charm, top and bottom, they all possess a charge of either 2/3 or 1/3 (positive or negative) and they also posess colour charge because normal charge is not enough for them, and as a result of this, cannot exist alone and I swear that I did not make up any of that, those are actually the correct names and terms.

Personally I'm looking forward to the names that they will come up with for more advancements in this field just as much as the science itself!

At the moment we have no idea what is inside a quark, for all we know it might be fundamental, and until we can prove it experimentally we have no clues other than theoretical maths created to support theories. However physicists at the Large hadron Collider (LHC) are doing exactly that, being unsure if the LHC can actually provide enough energy to break a quark into bits, they are instead aiming to make one excited (energetic) in the hopes that they can tell from the energy emissions whether or not it has a substructure.

And there we have it, from atomic radii to quarks, that is the nuclear model of the atom, which is surprisingly not able to explain everything, considering the amount of detail it consists of. But anyway whats a story for next time.

If any of you saw the date yes I did spend lots of Halloween typing this but I already went to Halloween party this week and can't cope with continuing my walking dead marathon at night when its dark so don't judge me!

Anyhow its getting late and I am tired so I'll leave it there for today, has it occurred to you yet that particle physicists are a bunch of atoms trying to understand themselves? Yep our universe it that awesome and weird and clever and generally crazy.

On that note I shall leave you all once more, Happy Halloween to you all and I'll post again soon! :)

From Turing to Transistors

Hello once again my fellow science nerds and/or people who clicked on this by accident. I want to start off by apologising for not posting in ages, but between adjusting to A levels, applying for university and writing an EPQ I haven't had a lot of time, which I really regret (although I already have offers from Warwick and Liverpool so yay).

I was about to sit down and work on my EPQ when I realised that a good way to kill two birds with one stone would be to write about some stuff I've been researching, as a blog post! Solidify my own understanding while getting to talk to you guys again :).

So here it is, this week I'll be using my newfound understanding to explain how the hell your computer is working, and your phone, and your tablet, and any microwaves, dishwashers, televisions or video game consoles you happen to have hanging around all work (wow we are pretty dependent aren't we?) because frankly we all take computers for granted and use them constantly, even being arrogant enough to complain when they don't function perfectly and sometimes treat them like crap, without realising that what we are using is truly a miracle of human engineering.

Quick poll now, raise your hand if you've seen the imitation game. If your hands are not currently in the air and you aren't remembering what a brilliant film it is then I suggest that that is the first thing you do after you finish reading this. However the gist of it is that a top lad known as Alan Turing invents a computer, saves everyone in WW2 and turns the world on its head because he just designed a bloody computer and its 1940 when they still have teams of people instead of a pocket calculator.

Now Britain, being all secretive and such decide to keep all this hidden to the extent that the story did not emerge properly until around the 1970s and Turing never got the thanks that he truly deserved for shortening a world war by a year. So in this time America decided to build their own computers (not knowing what had happened in Britain) and eventually came up with the electronic numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC) A.K.A this monster 

Over time thanks to the work of Von Neumann and other scientists, computing science flourished in America, who remained astounded at the equally impressive work occurring in the UK who they thought had no experience with this sort of stuff before.

As always the technology just got better and better and found its way into everything and now we rely on digital computers and their many uses to get us through most days. but enough history, I said I'd explain how they work and now I'll give it a shot.

All computers can be linked all the way back to Alan Turing because frankly the man was brilliant. In 1936, Alan Turing wrote a truly incredible paper known as "On Computable Numbers" which laid out the ideas for a perfect computer (basically a theoretical one that was created using maths). the idea was that any problem could be written as binary code, and by applying the appropriate transformation to this binary code you will get the answer to this problem. This also means that any program can be executed so long as you can represent it purely as maths, which is why coders have to use specific codes and convert it to binary code after. For example when a computer multiplies 2 and 3 it will multiply 01 and 11 to get 011 (six) because it can only work in binary code. Without looking into too much detail, it can be said that by performing a number of simple logical operations on a number you can get the answer, which is where algorithms come in.

An algorithm is a mathematical step by step recipe, much like a lego instruction booklet or a recipe for a cake, you put in stuff (numbers) follow it step by step and get an output. But the important thing is that you can do complex mathematical sums by doing several simple stages, for example to multiply a number by n you simply add the number (n-1) times or in a sightly more complex algorithm here's the one for the square root of a number.

As you can see they only get more complex, with many rearranging an equation to find x in terms of guesses for value of x like a sequence, instead of the output in a method known as iteration.

And now the clever ones among you will be wondering how does a machine known what to do, and the short answer is that it doesn't, the computer doesn't actually know anything, that's the beauty of it, it is just a machine which feeds this data into a bunch of microscopic switches known as transistors.

These transistors may or may not change depending on the value which flows through them as an electrical impulse which is key, as this means that they can be arranged in little patterns known as logic gates. When data passes through these they will do a very specific function, such as changing the ones and zeroes to the opposite, only changing the ones, or only changing the zeroes, or doing all kinds of crazy little things. But the gist of it is that after doing a lot of these little things, they will eventually form a pattern which will cause a big change to the output number and will give you your answer.

Whew that was a lot of intense knowledge. I hope I managed to find a balance these as its hard to give a good explanation without going into too much boring mathsy detail, but if I tell you that a high end mobile phone's processor actually has 1 billion transistors ticking away in its processor and the Xbox one in my room actually had 5 billion on own its processor, maybe it'll help you to appreciate what geniuses humans are.

Once again sorry for the lack of posts, I actually have started drafts for posts on castles, insanity and "The Martian" which I am still trying to think of a subject for but I just haven't had the time to finish them all, however I'll soon have a lot more free time and hopefully be able to start churning out science to my hearts content once more.

As always thanks for reading and I hope this has peaked your interest in how complex even the stuff that has been made by people can be. Maybe if we keep doing science, one day a human will be able to point at something and say truthfully "I understand that completely" but frankly thats a long way off yet. I shall leave you with my personal favorite quot from a robot.

"Bleepity Bloop Bloop" - R2D2

Peace out homies :)

Shut up and Dance!

Who doesn't love music? Everyone, extrovert or introvert, from Europe to the Amazon rain forest, likes music, and why wouldn't we? Music can inspire us, excite us, effect our emotions and importantly, make us dance! But what is dancing? And why have cultures that all developed separately around the world all developed both music and dance? Read on a bit and I'll tell you why.

So if we're asking why do we dance, we pretty obviously need to know why we make music? As music and dance go hand in hand and with music being the world's leading cause of dance, it's a pretty integral factor.

Music is a funny thing, if you think about it, it is a bunch of pretty unusual sounds, all in the same key (the soundwaves are oscillating harmonically), in set predictable patterns, with the optional addition of one or more humans singing along to words that convey a message when listened to.

Maybe a better way to understand the purpose of music is to understand where it came from. Nowadays music seems to be all about love and largely promiscuity, with a nice sprinkling of depression and general emotional turmoil mixed in for some variety. But at heart, it is still telling a story, and as we go backwards in time this trend becomes stronger and stronger. Even if we look back to the 60s and 50s we see an ever increasing amount of sings following a lyrical pattern with more story than nowadays and where the repeated section (or chorus) is more used for conveying one particular part of the story or as emphasis for effect in a similar manner to writers.

Rewind even further to the dark ages and nearly all of the songs were of great deeds or kings and nights and notable battles of the time, probably one of the more interesting things for people of those times and in an extremely similar manner to the songs in Game of Thrones (other than the awesome theme song) like "The rains of Castamere" which depicts a small war an annihilation of a lesser house.

At this point it is blindingly obvious that music did not evolve as a few humans passed the time by making weird noises, but as people telling stories, and people adding emphasis to certain parts, and making the stories more exciting with sounds until eventually, much like how we evolved from our bacterial buddies, music evolved to the incredible phenomena that it is today, a sort of inevitable branch of the art of language developed by our ancient ancestors.

And NOW we can have a bit of a clue as to what dancing really is, because much like how music has aspects of its original purpose - storytelling, still around today, so does dancing. Lets give it a thought, what do we do when we dance? We move right? But for a lot of songs those movements aren't random, but particular movements associated with that song (Notable mentions are "Twist and Shout", "Gangam Style", "Cha Cha Slide" and the last song in dirty dancing with the really cool dance to it.) Remind you of anything? Dancing may very well be the result of reenactments of stories, and visual aids to storytellers, evolving over time in a similar manner to music.

And as if we needed any more evidence we need look no further than South Africa, a land rich in culture, where many ancient tribes of people still thrive to this day, and The Zulu and the Ndebele tell stories of their history of war victories through tribal dances. 

So there we have it, dancing has evolved from an aid to storytelling, similar to pantomime, to the eventual, wonderful thing that it is today. Our world today is generally extremely divided but there are some things we cannot escape, our basic human needs, our desire to be around other people, and our love of both music and dance. So in summary, we need to remember the seeds that our ancestors planted tens of thousands of years ago and recall our similarities instead of our differences as our world becomes divided by class, religion and frankly unjustifiable wars. Also, SHUT UP AND DANCE.


See you all again soon and once more, thank you so much for reading :)

Its a Small World

Hello all. Who's ever felt alone? Most of you I guess. As the fantastic TV show known as scrubs states, humans aren't meant to be alone. But are we alone really? Through social networks, interpersonal connections and families we are all connected to one vast web of humanity, all 7 billion of us!

But the shocking part about this is how close you are in this web to everyone else, you are most likely only a couple of people apart from a scrap dealer in Beijing, or a banker in Vermont.

There was a massive hype about this a while back, during which it became known as the "six degrees of separation" or the idea that any two people on this planet, statistically should be able to be connected through a maximum of 6 different people.

But how accurate is this? How about we think about Twitter, if on twitter we assume that every person followed by someone has at least 50 people that the person looking does not have, then after 6 people we would arrive at 50 to the power of 6 people which is in fact 15625000000 people! Or to put in simpler terms, 15.625 Billion people!!! Which is double the number of people on Earth at this moment. Even if we settled for 45 we would still arrive at over 8 Billion, and still more than today.

Now I know what you're thinking, this is a bit far fetched, not every person has 50 people I don't know and there's no way that it could be that simple, besides this is a bit groundless so far. Well back in May of 2011 Facebook studied this phenomenon itself and what they found is pretty damn remarkable. On Facebook back in 2011 there is an average of 3.74 degrees of separation between 2 people! So not only is there solid evidence for this theory, there is solid evidence that it is in fact, decreasing and that the world is becoming more connected.

What Facebook did not account for however is that not everyone has Facebook and that people also use different means of communication. One person is increasingly likely to be signed up to different social networks and are likely to have different friends who are different types of people on these social networks. Although I could not find any research that managed to incorporate this effect, and the effect of our real life friends and family aswell, the only possible effect would be that it would further decrease the degrees of separation.

So there you all have it. Not only are we never truly alone, we are never truly disconnected, so next time you feel alone or insignificant just remember that you're most likely only a few people away from your hero, the person you might marry, the creator of pikachu and myself!

This world is full of wonders, one of them is you, and the others are a lot closer than you realise.

(also shoutout to Amy)

For any of you who are interested I'll post the link to the video I watched below, as well as a website which allows you to map degrees of separation specifically from Kevin Bacon's acting career. and as always, thanks for reading guys :)

http://9gag.com/tv/p/aM8jxR/the-science-of-six-degrees-of-separation

https://oracleofbacon.org/

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System

Hi Guys, I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while but I'm hoping that this will make up for it. In the time that I wasn't posting, I was on Tumblr writing a mini series about the solar system, which I hope will entertain and inform you all on the wonders of our planetary neighbors, I would also like to add that as it was inspired by the photos of Pluto, I started at the outside and worked inwards, meaning that after the Mars Post, there is a significant drop in quantity. Anyways I guess I should include my outro here as I already uploaded them all in order. The Solar system is massively more magnificent than any human can truly comprehend. One day it may be possible for our descendants to go swimming in the mists of Saturn or to dive deeply under the seas of Ganymede. However at the end of the day we're in the best age of humanity, because what they may take for granted, we have the unrivalled satisfaction of discovering. And with that enjoy my friends, see you soon :)

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Mercury

Here we have Mercury. This is the smallest planet to our solar system and yet is one of the most interesting, purely because being so close to the sun has made it so unique. its slow rotation and fast orbit means that the side facing the sun doesn’t change much (about 3 every 2 orbits) and as a result, the one side can be 427 degrees, while the other can be a, substantially cooler, -173 degrees!

It also has a unique kind of atmosphere, where although solar winds are always blowing it away, they are also constantly replenishing it, through radioactive decay and micrometeors causing dust. It is also very closely the second densest planet with about 5.4g per cubic centimeter.

Its extreme closeness to our sun also makes this planet extremely challenging to study, however two probes have managed to visit mercury, including messenger (a nice reminder of the god for which mercury was named) and together those two probes have mapped out the surface.

It is also the most cratered planet in our solar system, the rocky planets that can suffer craters from meteors usually self heal through geological processes but due to its geological quirkyness, mercury does not. Many of its craters are named after famous humans such as authors and scientists. As well as this, unusual readings mean that it is thought to have a molten core which is extremely unusual for a rocky planet of any size.

This extremely small, fast moving planet is by far one of the more interesting as it has preserved the history of our solar system in its craters where various information on impacts may be found. It is also an oddity as planets go, even in our solar system. Making it seem all the truer that great things come in small packages.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Venus

Next up we have our closest planetary neighbor, Venus. The acidic, boiling hot, toxic, generally deadly planet sized wasteland which was ironically named after the goddess of love (nice going Romans). It is often referred to as the sister planet of Earth, as they are incredibly similar in size (only 638 km in difference) and they are both very close together. Because of this it is also the second brightest object in the night sky after the moon and can even be seen in the day on occasion. Its usefulness, in ancient times earned it the names morning star and evening star, as it could sometimes be seen before sunrise, and sometimes just after sunset.

As romantic as all of the names and coincidences may sound it doesn’t change the fact that Venus is effectively a planet sized death trap. The atmospheric pressure on Venus is equivalent to 92 times that on earth which is the same as in the deep sea. This means that any humans on the surface would simply be squished and that is if the rest of it didn’t kill them first.

Venus is a fair amount closer to the sun than Earth, however it experiences unexpectedly high surface temperatures due to its thick atmosphere of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide.This is an example of a runaway greenhouse effect where more and more heat is trapped by the sun, which means that the surface temperature of Venus is a cosy 462 degrees and the fact that there is no seasonal variation really does not help.

Despite this (and by the power of human stubbornness) various probes have actually been sent to Venus and several Russian landers actually landed on the planet (where each of them have been promptly destroyed). The most successful mission to date has been Venera 13 which managed to survive 2 hours on the surface of the planet, despite being designed to last 30 minutes) and has also sent back colour photographs of the surface of the planet.

This sister to Earth is fascinatingly deadly, and due to its unique atmosphere and composition, gives extremely interesting data for our scientists to study. However it is also a sharp reminded of how dangerous our solar system is, that even our own “sister planet” would kill us in only a matter of seconds.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Earth

Look where we’ve finally arrived. I’ll admit that ever since I started writing these posts I have both been excited to write this part, but baffled as to what I should include. Our planet is one which is truly unique to us, even with the discovery of a new “superearth” (otherwise known as kepler 452b), our planet remains unique because of one simple factor. Us, the birds outside, the earthworms beneath your feet. Life.

Earth is the largest rocky planet in our solar system. It is also the densest with a Deity of about 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter approximately. Surprisingly it rotates exactly once a day and shockingly it orbits our sun exactly once per year. Although the rotation is currently in the process of slowing down which means that it adds an extra 17 milliseconds per day per 100 years.

Our moon is also pretty special as it is the largest in relation to its planet out of any in our solar system and it is also Earth’s only moon. It is thought to have been created when a few billion years ago, a younger earth collided with a planet about the size of Mars. The debris formed the current Earth and our beloved moon.

But what makes Earth really unique is the sheer amount of life that has flourished there. We have studies thousands of exo planets and have yet to find one where life is likely to be as abundant as Earth. Because not only has life formed on Earth, but life has thrived, for millions and millions of years life has prevailed, our delicate complex carbon structures refusing to be destroyed by meteorites, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts and while our Earth has grown mountains and created whole continents since the first slimy little thing crawled out of the sea there has always been life. And likely as not there will always be life, until the planet itself dies.

If that doesn’t make it the most incredible place we know then I don’t know what does.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Mars

This planet should be a familiar sight for anyone. The red planet, AKA Mars is a massive focus of astronomers and astrobiologists alike as it lies in our sun’s habitable region and there is strong evidence that is once contained flowing water and was very like earth. This also implies a very strong possibility of there having been life on mars at some point or another.
Because of this everyone on Earth is raving over mars with a rover (that has its own twitter page https://twitter.com/marscuriosity ) currently rolling around looking for life and taking selfies and another mission planned for next year to send an european rover to mars. However despite all of these successes only 18 of the 40 missions to Mars have actually been successful.
Something lesser known however is that there are bits of Mars right here on earth. Due to violent collisions with Mars, meteorites have ejected rocks off the planet into space which have traveled for a very long time before crashing into our very own little lump of space rock. This means that scientists could study mars before they even got there in the first place!.
This red lump of rock has the largest dust storms in the universe (which is saying something considering half of our planets are basically made of dust) and its reddish tinge is given by iron rich minerals on its rocky surface.
We may well never know if life inhabited Mars all those millions of years ago, but there almost definitely will be soon, with NASA planning to spend volunteers to live on mars around the year 2030. This planet may be past its glory days, but that doesn’t mean its rusty surface is any less remarkable.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Jupiter

This is the king of our solar system. A truly gargantuan planet, its mass is that of the rest of the solar system COMBINED and consists entirely of gas. 

See the big red spot? That is a storm that is big enough to fit 3 entire earth’s inside it and has been raging for at least 350 years at this point. 

As if that wasn’t cool enough it has an ocean of metallic hydrogen in several of its layers, 67 moons, 4 rings, and spins so fast that it’s day is only 9 hours. This planet may just look like a giant ball of gas but when it gets down to it it really deserves to be the one named after the chief God.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Saturn

This ringed giant is most likely familiar to you all. Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, the second largest in our solar system and one of the more easily recognisable planets. 

It is a gas giant like its neighbours and its rings are composed of small pieces of rock thought to be from a moon that collided with something long ago. The planet itself is composed of gas which is less dense than water which means that the entire planet could float in a big enough bowl and titan, its largest moon, is thought to be a potential harbour for non earthlike life, due to anomalies observed in the atmosphere and probes will be sent in the near future to investigate.


It might be one of the more easily recognised planets, but, like the rest of our vast, vast universe, there is still a lot about it that most people do not know.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Uranus

Meet Uranus. Aside from being the punchline in many more crude astronomy jokes, it is also the third largest planet in out solar system and the 7th from the sun.

It is also unique as it spins nearly perpendicular to the direction of planets that we are used to, as in it spins on its side. Because on this we still can’t even decide which is its north and south pole because they are both so close to what on our planet would be the equator!

Like its close neighbours it is a gas giant and it even has extremely faint rings like those of Saturn that go around it in its direction of orbit. This planet is so interesting as the odd child out of our solar system and really deserves a bit more respect than as the punchline of a dirty joke.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Neptune

This is Neptune, by far one of the more underappreciated planets in our solar system.

The spotlight might be more focused on Jupiter the giant, Saturn with its pretty rings or Mars with its potential ancient life. Ergo Neptune is long overdue its time in the spotlight.

With stormy winds circling its atmosphere at up to 600 metres per second and a storm recorded lasting 5 whole years, this planet really does deserve a little more attention.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Pluto

In case you’ve been living under a rock these are the pictures that were recently taken of Pluto, a planet that has never previously been photographed in this much detail. 

With a diameter of 2368 km things that are bigger than it include the moon, the perimeter of the Bermuda triangle and the country of Russia. 

However it remains a crucial area of our solar system due to how little we know about it, which is quite a feat given human persistence and the fact that we’ve known about it since 1930. Bravo Pluto. Such a small ball of rock and ice which has been the heart of so many debates on a world 5 planets away, it might be small, but Pluto is no less important than any other planet.

Life Finds a Way - Or does it? (Part 2)

Hi everyone, apologies for the long wait but I've had a lot to do recently. So where were we, dinosaurs right? Okay, where we left off last time we were trying to determine whether or not, assuming we had the technology to create them, a dinosaur would actually be able to survive on the Earth as we know it today. We've already tackled the biggest two so lets get down to it then.

The next big factor that any animal needs, not to survive as such, but to be happy, is company. We are only now beginning to understand the complex social mechanisms that are in other species, not just humans.

For hundreds of years we were arrogant enough to simply assume, without reason that humans were the only animals with a complex social system and that no other animals could even come close. However now that animal psychology is becoming a more accepted field and we are accepting their intelligence we are making striking discoveries. Even Tyrannosaurus Rex is thought to have been a fiercely defensive parent. And if animals need other animals to function properly then whose to say that dinosaurs were not the same?

It is pretty generally accepted that triceratopses traveled in herds, so what would happen if one was brought into the world today with all of the genetic instinct of a herd animal, but no herd? Well it would most likely suffer from extreme loneliness, and like a chained dog it may experience fits of anger, frustration and fear. So if we were going to bring dinosaurs back we would most likely need to bring back more than one of each kind, forming a dino-colony of sorts.

Now we need to think about the biggest factor, how has the Earth itself changed in the 65 million years since the dinosaurs roamed alongside early life and would dinosaurs have adaptions still relevant to survive today?

So how exactly was the Earth different that long ago? Well to make it simpler we'll think about the end of the Cretaceous period when a meteor is said to have wiped out the dinosaurs, as dinosaurs saw a lot of change in the millions of years that they were on earth. At the end of the Cretaceous period the continents weren't all that different to ours. But was different was the surface itself. Primitive flowering plants had begun to flourish and due to the much warmer climate there were no ice caps, resulting in a world of forests surrounded by shallow seas. The land was much lower as this is when many mountain ranges began to form and all of this was ended when a big lump of rock fell out of the sky!

So how do we compare today? Well for one it is a hell of a lot chillier. The temperature could even rise up to 45 degrees which could extend to the poles due to the much more evenly distributed temperature, so we would only have a very narrow band near the equation where dinosaurs could sustainably live under natural conditions.

However altogether there's not much different enough to have a huge effect. Sure dinosaurs my not be so well suited to digest the more complex plants they may come across today, or may be harmed by foreign chemicals in the water, or diseases unfamiliar to them. But none of these are problems that we humans couldn't fix with some clever planning.

In conclusion although there would obviously have to be a lot of very clever planning and, despite the warning from Jurassic world, a tad of genetic engineering; not only is it possible that a dinosaur could survive today, its not even that big of an undertaking. What we would have to do to support, say a triceratops, is not much more than is done currently by zookeepers all over the world holding foreign animals in zoos. And who knows, maybe one day humanity will indeed resurrect some of these prehistoric wonders to witness the world as we know it today.

Apologies this took so long guys I've been really busy recently. However I'm finally finding myself with more time to write these. I'd like to thank everyone for reading, it means a lot that I can make your days just that little bit more interesting :) researching this has really given me an appreciation for how small we are in the grand scheme of life throughout the history of Earth, a mere smear of a paintbrush on the work of art that is life. So this is me going now, but firstly I would highly recommend Jurassic World to anybody who found this interesting as it is a truly amazing film with some excellent points. Until next time :)

Life Finds a Way - Or does it? (Part 1)

Who doesn't love dinosaurs? I mean really. Those of you who've seen Jurassic Park may have already guessed from the post title that this was inspired by the upcoming movie, and of course the fact that everyone loves the surreal idea of a prehistoric world full of dragon-like creatures that were all wiped out by an enormous astronomical event 65 million years ago!

But anyway down to the science.

It occurs to me that I haven't yet explained what this post is about so today I will be exploring if Jurassic Park would work as we all know that the Earth was very very different 65 million years ago, but would a fully grown dinosaur simply be able to cope with the conditions nowadays?

In order to answer this we must firstly think, what was the Earth actually like 65 million years ago? And what has changes today that would hamper me from being able to ride a triceratops around?


First of all lets tackle what today is seen as our future doom hanging over us all.... climate change!


Many famous dinosaurs that we know and love (Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops etc) are from the Triassic period, the final of the three periods in which dinosaurs mainly lived (Cretaceous, Jurassic and then Triassic in order). The conditions at this time were in general hot and dry, which suited the dinosaurs pretty well as they were cold blooded and therefore rely largely on heat from their surroundings.

There are actually a surprising amount of areas in which a dinosaur could survive and in fact thrive under these conditions, in fact pretty much anywhere around the equator would get enough heat and sunlight to heat the blood of our reptilian friends.


Secondly - and this is a big one - food and water.


So dinosaurs either eat plants, or meat, or both, allowing us to organise them into 3 classes: Herbivore, Carnivore or Omnivore.

So we'll begin with our vegetarians, herbivores range from what were thought to be grazing creatures e.g. stegosaurus all the way to the long necked creatures akin to reptilian giraffes that munch on the tops of trees, but is there enough vegetation to support them all?

We can safely say yes to that question, however there are some problems still, many herbivores were adapted to a diet of particular plants, many of which are extinct today, so without a carefully thought out diet or the return of some prehistoric ferns we could most likely not keep our dinosaurs satisfied with the weedy plants that are about today.

The next type of dinosaurs are carnivores, meat eaters. Carnivores tend to have to eat less mass and their bodies generally process the food more efficiently meaning that it would take less food to satisfy them.

This being said I think personally that we eat so many animals that we could definitely spare a few for a dinosaur or two to eat. We wouldn't really have any trouble feeding these beasts as they aren't too picky about what the meat is either.

The final class of dinosaurs is omnivores, and although we would have no trouble supplying food for this generally medium sized, not very picky group of dinosaurs, to keep them healthy we would be faced with the challenge of balancing their diet in such a way to keep them healthy, as their diet is such a mixture that we could not overfeed them on one section at risk of imbalancing their diet.




So that's it for this post, sorry I haven't uploaded much recently but I've been completely swamped and I assure that regular uploads will resume soon. I will continue this is a second part (mainly because this is beginning to get a bit too long for my liking) so goodbye until then, as always I appreciate you all and thanks for reading :) .

All You Need is Love

Attraction between people is something which has been around since the very dawn of humanity (because lets face it that's just how nature works) and as a result it's influenced our culture, our religions, our social media and even our science. So today lets look at what exactly makes our heart skip a beat when we see that person.

Firstly I'm just going to clarify that I will avoid the psychological explanations (definitely not because they were far too complex and too many for me to get my head around) and I will stick more to the biological side of things. Also if i did include all the crazy inside of the head stuff this post would be far too long and frankly nobody would actually read it.

And now that that's out of the way lets dig into the science. Attraction is a tricky thing to define, despite the best efforts of poets, writers and musicians over the centuries the google definition lists it as an attraction of provoking interest or liking, which is frustratingly vague. However while it is still difficult to get a precise definition of attraction we can take a pretty good guess at how it works.

Its no secret that people's bodies are a large source of attraction towards them, but the first thing I read about it in fact is pretty unusual, because a big thing that turns people's gears is what is known as bilateral symmetry.

This is literally what is says, symmetry!

If someone looks asymmetrical it could be due to trauma or stress experienced during development, that they weren't strong enough to deal with and obviously, this is something which humans are not so keen to replicate. This results in people being a lot more attracted to those whose faces are in fact more symmetrical.

Secret preference numero dos is one which features largely in our pop culture today, though we may not realise it, what I'm obviously on about it waist to hip ratio. Yep, to an extent baby got back is actually pretty scientifically correct.

This one probably doesn't come as a surprise because insecurity about our weight is one common fact that a massive amount of people share, especially in the western world. And what with all the media promoting impossible body standards, people nowadays are constantly bombarded with body standards that are in fact impossible for us to match, but evidently it doesn't stop a lot of people trying.

Humans seem to prefer when the waist of a prospective mate is roughly 70% of the width of their hips, and although this may seem a little harsh it has actually proven to have medical benefits for both men and women, as people in this range tend to produce the ideal amount estrogen in women and testosterone in men. 

It has also been noted that people in this range tend to be less susceptible to cardiovascular disorders, cancer and diabetes and women in this range have less difficulty giving birth and conceiving.

But there are some things that have a far bigger effect than any other these previously mentioned factors, namely pheromones.

For those of you who don't know, pheromones are like chemical messages given out by our bodies that give nearby people a hint at our genetic makeup (because who doesn't want to take in a big noseful of best friend every now and again?)

So as we all know the shizz that goes on inside our heads is pretty damn crazy. And all the crazy attraction stuff is down to our animal nature, our ancient hormonal programming which makes us want to find a mate and reproduce, it all pretty weird, in fact romantic love is actually akin to an addiction inside our brains!

So what hormones make this all happen? Well there are 4 main ones, which are Dopamine, Oestrogen, Seretonin and Testosterone are the main players in this field (its also important to know that these are not dependent on sex lines). 

The study that determined this tied each one to a different personality type. According to the study people with more active dopamine centers were more reward driven and impulsive in love. People with more seretonin were less anxious but more risk averse. But the key thing about this was that they tended to be a lot more attracted to people like them.

On the other hand it is also pretty true that opposites do sometimes attract. Testosterone full people tend to be analytical and competetive while oestrogen rich people tend to have more empathy and social. And these two groups actually were more attracted to each other. 

Its also important to recognize that these groups are not exclusively attracted to each other and this is not all that determines attraction, and after the initial phase lots of other stuff comes into play and helps to solidify the relationship over time, and form a longer term bond after the initial love (what people call new love) period is over.

So there it is, there's just a few of the crazy things that influence what we call love. But the real truth behind it is that we're never actually going to understand it completely. The human mind is simply far to complex and incredible to try and truly understand and predict, and the thing that has made humans so fascinated by love all these years is its unpredictable, inexplicable nature. If anything lets hope that science never completely understands it, because if love was quantifiable, then it wouldn't be half as wondrous. 

Personally I think there are few feelings on par with the little internal spark when you see that person, so maybe take a minute out of your day to make sure they know it. 

This is usually the part where I try to say something inspirational and obscure about the nature of human discovery or something like that, but instead I'll leave you with what is probably my favorite, and the most accurate summary of this topic, from the flash. (which is frankly a fantastic show in every way) 

Thanks for reading, See ya :)

Interstellar

I don't do this ordinarily but having just watched interstellar I have to express what a fantastic and thought provoking film it is, albeit hard to understand what happening at some parts it is absolutely chock full of moments that make you think oohhhhh or ahhhh. Basically it is a fantastic film which has been creatively made and extremely well written.

Under Pressure

With deadlines for coursework and exams approaching quickly, I highly doubt that I'm the only one who's feeling a bit tightly strung. Stress is something which we all experience at some point or another but why do we really feel such an emotional discomfort when we come under pressure? 

If we ask google it tells us that stress is ''a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances''. Which although true, is over complicating our question a little. Stress, when it comes down to it, is not an emotion. Stress is in fact a state of mine which results in an emotional response including but not limited to a mix of:

• Anxiety
• Sadness/Depression
• Trouble Concentrating
• Irritability
• Loss of appetite
• Memory troubles

So evidently stress is not a nice thing, nor a good thing, but what exactly is it? 

In a mechanical sense, stress is a physical force on an object, so considering that emotionally it feels very much like this, it is no big surprise that they are referred to by the same word. 

Our bodies run off a delicate equilibrium, a constant input and output of various things, the usual everyday routines and nothing that is very out of the ordinary most of the time. However when a condition in any equilibrium is changed, the equilibrium actually changes in favor of an opposing condition to attempt to restore this balance. This is exactly what stress is in a sense.

Stress is our body's response to change, our the effect of our various internal systems all working away rapidly to oppose a change. This also explains why such a wide variety of situations can cause stress, as anything which causes a drastic change or threatens to change our daily routine in future is in fact opposed by our own bodies. Through the emissions of various hormones or our brains refusing to stop working furiously to find a solution our bodies can cause us to feel run down and all sorts of emotional discomfort.

Having said that, is stress really a bad thing? Without stress we would not adapt to a new situation and would simply keep going the way we are. If we had no stress then we would not be prompted to adapt and survive. Potentially as a result of this humanity could have died out a very long time ago!

So there we have is, a quick evaluation of stress, like everything in the delicate equilibrium of life we need some to survive but when the balance gets upset it can lead to some pretty serious consequences. So next time you're feeling stressed out realise that you're feeling the emotion that's been driving us since the dawn of humanity, its pretty cool to think about :)

Thanks for reading guys I say this quite a lot but I appreciate it all, as I implied there are exams coming up and evidently I won't be posting so regularly for a while but I'll be sure to write when I can, see ya :)

I Want To Play a Game

What do you think of video games? Are you an enthusiast who is willing to defend them to the bitter end? Or do you think they waste time and cause crime rates to skyrocket? Either way we're delving into the depths of cyber (and real) space to try to figure out just how real these games could ever get.

Everyone has a different opinion about video games. To designers they are works of art, with months, sometimes even years of constant nitpicking every detail in order to give us the best experiences. Gamers obviously like them, as they provide a way to fill time, play with friends, and do things that they never could in real life, giving them a sense of accomplishment. 

On the flip side there are those who are strongly against video games, claiming that they give children violent tendencies and promote criminal activity to those who play them.

Video games weren't so much of an invention as they were an eventuality. With people becoming increasingly able to access computers that they could control it was only a matter of time until some person with too much time on their hands made a game out of it.

But what makes a video game real? Well in order to answer that we must think what lets us observe and absorb data from out current real world? Contrary to popular belief humans actually have at least 9 senses with most researchers agreeing we probably have about 20. However for the sake of time we are only going to talk about the big 5 that everybody is brought up learning about.

Sight

A huge part of developing video games is the graphic design. Everything in a game has to be individually designed, with a 3D model created, then each small blip on the model has to be individually colored in. So evidently due to the fact that you can always zoom in further on an object, we could never truly replicate an object within a game. However the trick is that humans cannot see the smaller things. In fact the human eyes only have a resolution of roughly 576 Megapixels. Game designers creating a simulation of real life could always take advantage of this and realise that a certain level, we cannot see the detail and so it would be not worth doing.

Accomplishable

Hearing

The second in command in the human brain is the sound, with a large portion of our brain dedicated to auditory processing we are able to pinpoint a sound from quite a distance and some people are even capable of echolocation, the biological radar commonly used by whales and dolphins. This is surprisingly easy to accomplish as even today video games accomplish a realistic surrounding using mixers to vary volume levels and guide us towards where an even occurs using sound. On the other hand it may never be possible for people to navigate a game with echolocation.

Accomplishable

Touch

This one is difficult, indeed until recently it was inconceivable, however with advancements such as microsoft's Kinect we no longer have to use controllers to control our games, on top of this, holograms may soon be able to be used widely due to Hololens, another advancement by microsoft. The only problem is that without actual physical objects or a direct link to influence the nervous system, it is basically impossible to simulate touch. Maybe this will come with time but for the moment it is simply not able to be done.

Not Currently Accomplishable

Smell

Smell is actually not as difficult to replicate as most people would think. In fact simply dispersing tiny amounts of the required substance or one of a similar smell would be sufficient. However this may not work well for people with allergies, other than that it is possible with some simple chemistry.

Pretty Easy

Taste

Ah the most widely used sense in the battlefield. Lets face it there are a lot of video games today where what you are most likely to taste is your own blood because you're getting shot at. However once again it could most likely be accomplished with some chemistry and substances of different textures.

Probably

And now a Bonus one, how on earth would a video game simulate true motion? How would it create a truly realistic environment? Because no matter how advanced the NPCs are or how good it looks if the world itself isn't realistic it will never seem real. And the sad truth is that due to the random nature of the universe that we live in this is almost unaccomplishable. There are simply so many factors, lets think about a simple flower for a minute, the head might turn to face the sun, but the wind might also be moving it. Gravity will be pulling it downwards, and if you step on it what happens then? If a simple flower take this amount of programming to create then the odds are that there will never be a video game that truly simulates real life.

I'm not exactly sure what this article implies but I am truly a fan of video games, I believe that in offering people opportunities to accomplish things that they could not do in real life they can help to boost self esteem and make people more open to new things. On top of this the sheer amount of work that goes into each and every one is immense and the people who design them really do not get the credit that they deserve for these works of digital art.

What I was trying to show with this article is the true complexity of the world around us, and how little we actually notice. If you take one thing from this article I hope that it is that our universe is incredible more complex and incredible than we could ever hope to comprehend. But we can really give it a good shot. Thanks for reading this I know it was long but I was very bored, it means a lot that people actually read these :) see ya!