Quantum Theory and Many Are Leery

Quantum Theory

Quantum physics or in reality, quantum mechanics provides a mathematical description of the dual, particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter.    The mathematical formulas of quantum mechanics are abstract and therefore were hard for most people to comprehend because they required an understanding of complex numbers and linear functions. In 1900 the atomic hypothesis was widely understood, but not universally accepted.   These waveforms were considered to be like acoustic resonance. From Wikipedia, the term acoustic resonance is sometimes used to narrow mechanical resonance to the frequency range of human hearing. However, many times the frequency is outside the range of human hearing. You could see what creative means had to be adopted to understand the unknown or unheard.

Grounding Electricity

Everyone understand that most things electrical should be always at ground potential. There are Electrical Codes and the NFPA writes the book on proper grounding.   We make sure our buildings, electrical equipment and appliances are all grounded and ionizers use a ground reference to create positive and negative ions. Sometimes we drive copper rods into the earth to seek proper grounding. One of the first things we look for in malfunctions in equipment is a ground fault. We think in terms of keeping things at “zero”. In the quantum mechanics model it works on a non-zero state, and instead of traditional static it allows for far more dynamic possibilities. Thinking totally outside of the box!!

Young Einstein

In 1905 Albert Einstein, at the age of 26, postulated that the energy of a beam of light is quantized and just a year later he used quantization ideas to study the heat/temperature puzzle of various gases. In 1911 quantization was used to experiments to understand position and speed albert-einsteinand in 1913 quantum mechanics/physics were introduced to gain understanding of the hydrogen atom. This scientific development lost some of its traction with the start of the First World War in 1914.   After the war, quantum mechanics expanded rapidly. We didn’t evolve to understand quantum physics, but the search made it more exciting, but not everyone was excited and quantum mechanics has its main detractors.   Although it has been a century since we established how quantum mechanics “works”, according to cosmologist Sean Carroll, we still don’t know what it really means. He went on to say that it might even be the most embarrassing subject in all of modern physics.

Some of us grew up in an era of Star Trek and the Starship Enterprise that was able to hit Warp Speed and others watched the TV show Quantum Leap, while others watch Carl Sagan in the Science hit Cosmos. Sagan said that at the heart of science, there are two distinguishing features which is uniquely valuable at the foundation of a workable world view. One of these is the self-correcting mechanism that not only allows for, but encourages, an unrelenting process of testing proposition in terms of their workability and falsifiability. The other is an essential balance between two attitudes: “an openness to new ideas, no matter how counter-intuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

Static Clean is proud to have an engineering team that pushes the boundaries of product development, but always with an eye towards verification and certification. “May the Force be with you”.

Dad-Daughter Day at 2014 Laconia Bike Week

Summer kicks off in Laconia with at 91st annual bike week

Laconia Bike week logoLaconia Bike Week is the oldest motorcycle rally in the USA, whose roots date back to 1916, but became official in 1923 as part of the Loudon Classic motorcycle races.  The event is held in June each year and is still called by some of the old timers as the Gypsy Tour.  An explanation of the name was given to an attentive crowd by the lead singer of one of the Rock Bands that played in one of the beer tents.  Today motorcycle enthusiasts call these gatherings “runs or rallies”, but Gypsy Tour is truly an American term that described riders from all parts of America that would meet at favorite destination.   Laconia in New Hampshire, Sturgis in South Dakota and Daytona Beach in Florida are a few of the more popular locations.  Bike riders would travel long distances, with the bikes loaded up with camping gear, sleeping along the roads, sitting around campfires, thus they were called gypsies.

While there are many makes and models of motorcycles at the Laconia event, the predominant bike is the Harley Davidson and it is really Laconia Bike Week 2014exciting to see the antique models with nicknames like Panhead, Knucklehead and Shovelhead.   They were given these names because of the distinct shape of their rocker covers.   In the more recent years some claim that Harley Davidson has paid less attention to “style and quality”, and more on being a marketing machine.  While the brute marketing approach is true, there is still something about the sound of the pipes and the thrill of riding an American Classic. Some of the new 2014 bikes are absolute eye candy.  If you enjoy Motorcycles, there are thousands of them to see during the week and most proudly show them off in various ways.

Making the bling look good

A number of years ago, our company, Static Clean had the fortune to work on Harley Davidson parts with one of their outsourced manufacturing partners.  Besides the Harley sound, the most attractive thing about a Harley is the chrome or bling as it is called today.   The speedometer and tachometer instrument gauges were being manufactured in Connecticut and secondary processing such as decorating or chrome plating were required.   Any debris or particles on the parts would show up in the finished product.   Our ionizing air nozzles were implemented and the reject rates were vastly reduced.   Static Clean helps hundreds of companies towards yield improvements by controlling the particle attraction of static electricity.  The automotive industry in general considers static to be a major problem that needs to be addressed.  It is exciting working on “cool things”.