Download Lecture 2. Physics 2900. Jan. 20, 1998

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Review Session, Physics 2900, December 7, 2000
Quiz #2 will emphasize your understanding of material covered since
Quiz #1, but will also cover some of the same ground as Quiz #2.
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New material to be covered in quiz #2:
Science covered in class, guest lectures, labs and in reading in Mapping, including concepts
from chaos, the prey-predator rabbit population model, scanning tunneling microscopes and
the images they create, X-ray crystallography, DNA, interaction of DNA with proteins.
Computer science and perception concepts covered in class lectures , color surface
visualization of mathematical rules (such as multiplication) and of data (such as weather, etc
in the weather movie project), general representation of arrays of numbers as color surfaces,
grids for computer visualization, scientific animations. Posterization, index color, color
tables, false color enhancement of scientific images, Lectures on animations and persistence
of vision.
Prem's lectures on html - basic tags, image placement, links, tables, etc. Use of FTP to
mount a Website on a server.
Details of material to be covered
Mapping reading and guest lectures by Prof. Mike Ritzwoller (Physics Dept.) on
geophysics, Prof. Chuck Rogers (Physics Dept.) on the scanning tunneling microscope
(STM), and Dr. Jeff Boote (NCAR) on computer visualization of climate and weather
simulations.. Mapping: Chapters11, 12, 14. What are the key points?? Also, Chapters 4, 5,
were not covered in much detail in the last quiz (total of 5 pts out of 100)
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Seismic tomography (Chapter 4)
 How is the interior of the Earth organized? What are the core, mantle and crust?
What are S and P waves and how do they differ from electromagnetic waves such
as X-rays and light?
 What is seismic tomography? What is the role of earthquakes and seismic
stations? How does seismic tomography differ from medical tomography?
 What does seismic tomography tell us about the interior of Earth? Does the
interior of Earth move? How fast? Do hot regions move up or down? (Prof.
Mike Ritzwoller) Can you understand the color plate images in Hall showing
mantle and core movement?
Climate (Chapter 5)
 What is the difference between weather and climate?
 What is meant by a computer model of climate? How do the simulations carried
out using this model differ from computer visualizaztions of a database of climate
measurements? What is meant by "initial conditions?" in a conputer simulation?
 What kind of physics goes into the general circulation model of the National
Center for Atmospheric Research?
 What is a Paleoclimate Model and how is paleontological climate data collected?
 What are the steps necessary to construct a computer visualization of a database,
whether it be the Colorado temperature database you collected for a class project,
the display of a collected database of climate based on evidence from
paleontology, or a database produced by a computer model.
Chaos (Chapter 14)
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What is the fox-rabbit-clover model of a chaotic system? In this model, what
determines future rabbit populations? What is meant by period-doubling? Why
are chaos experts needed in cardiac units of hospitals? What is meant by initial
conditions?
 What is the chaos machine demonstrated in class? What kinds of motion did it
execute and what determined the type of motion?
 What is meant by sensitivity to initial conditions? What is the butterly effect?
 What is an example of a mathematical rule in chaos theory? What is meant by
iteration of a rule? What kinds of rules give rise to 2-D images (such as strange
attractors) by building them up point by point??
STM (Chapter 12)
 What is a scanning tunneling microscope and how does it work? What does it
measure? Why does the microscope have to be hung from a bungee cord (Prof.
Chuck Rogers)?
 What are examples of images produced by such microscopes? How can they be
enhanced by image processing?
 What does the surface of graphite look like? Can individual atoms be seen?
What do other surfaces look like?
 In what sense does the Schroedinger model of the atom predict that electrons in
atoms behave like waves.
 In the IBM Almaden Website image of an STM picture called “Quantum
Corrall,” what is the visual evidence for quantum mechanics.
DNA (Chapter 11)
 What is the structure of a DNA molecule and what does DNA do? How are G, C,
T, and A arranged to form the genetic code? What does the code make happen?
What is a gene?
 What is a restriction enzyme? Give an example of one and say what it does.
Image in book. Why is cutting DNA molecules important in genetic engineering?
 How do we obtain images of a protein strangling a DNA molecule? X-ray
crytallography works on the principle of interference. Understand what
interference patterns are and how they hold information about the object being
interrogated.
Color visualization and animations
 How can an array of numbers be generated by a mathematical rule? How can it
be visualzied?
 Why is the use of color in scientific images better than grayscale?
 What does the Photoshop command "posterize" do?
 What is a colortable and how can you use it to generate custom made colors in
scientific images?
 What is index color and how does it differ from RGB color?
Animations
 What are positive afterimages?
 What is persistence of vision?
 How many image frames must be shown each second in order for the afterimage
from one to overlap the afterimage from the previous one?
 What kind of information did the scientific animations contain which was missing
from the still color pictures?
 How can an array of numbers be generated from natural data (such as
measurements of temperature)? How can it be visualized?
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 How can animations be generated from sequences of arrays of numbers?
Basic html
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