I frequently go swim in the athletic pool with Jerrah. She is on the swim team, so she has access to a nice pool that is big, deep, and not dirty like the only availble to the public. We were walking back today, when we passed this fountain on Pitzer (the “stoner college”, i am told.) Every time we go past this thing, the jets are at a different height. And every time we go past it, Jerrah makes some kind of comment about it. Today, the jets were completely off. The water in the fountain wasn’t still, though – it was swirling around in a clockwise pattern. I remarked on this observation, and Jerrah said it was probably because of the water pumps, which sucked water out of one side of the pool and pushed it out on the others.
I looked into the fountain and observed two circular devices in opposite corners of the pool; I presumed these were the jets/suction things. I am not sure just now what to call the device that sucks water out of the pool into the filter thingy, so I will just call it a sucker. It seemed like if there was just one sucker, all the water would gravitate towards it. If there was one sucker and one jet, then water would radiate away from the jet and flow towards the sucker. This reminded me of the electric field between two opposite charges. The more I thought of this analogy, the more sense it made: a jet raises the water ‘energy’ around it, pushing it away, while a sucker lowers the water energy, drawing it in. If you drew field lines from the sucker to the jet, you’d probably be drawing those lines along the wavefronts travelled by the water in the pool.
My original observation was that the water was travelling counterclockwise, which Jerrah explained by saying the jets/suckers had something to do with it. However, if my charge model is accurate, then this could not be the case. As anyone who has taken E&M will remeber (hah!), the curl of an electric field is zero in the case of static charges. The reason for this is that the electric field radiates from charges and never has an angular component. Therefore, there’s no curl in the field generated by static charges. What this means is that in our water example, there can be no ‘curl’ in the flow of the water – if you dropped a little bobber in the water, it would traveling along some kind of curvy path towards from some point to another, but it would never go around in a circle.
The fact that I observed the water moving in a circle means either that the model is inaccurate, or that someone moved the water in a circle themselves. I think the second is more likely.
I have been organizing games of capture the flag on thursday nights, and it’s a lot of fun. As usual, the rules change while we play the game. There’s a bit of yelling sometimes, and a good amount of confusion. Still, it’s nice to plan something and have 20 people show up to take part. Research is humming along at harvey mudd, and I’ve made a lot of friends here. I visited Qualcomm yesterday, and that place seems like it’d be great to work. The longer I’m out here, the more I think i’ll be spending a significan portion of the next couple of years in this part of the country. That said, I look forward to getting home and playing with my guinea pigs, seeing my friends, moving into my house, and enjoying life in cincinnati and at Xavier while I still have it.