Science Methods II - Lauren Hird

      This week in lab, the main questions we were answering were about the relationship in time between when each part of the Earth was created. We talked about things such as human life, plant life, animal life, pangea, the moon, the great oxygenation, and many others. The point of this is to understand how relatively small things are in compared to the time the universe has existed, and many things happened longer ago then we have comprehended in the past.      We ended discussing the idea of convection and were assigned a video project to see how convection works. 

     In lab this week, we heard our peers give presentations on six different topics: origin of the universe; life cycles of stars' origin of the Earth and Moon; past, present, and future of space travel including Mars; and black holes. Our peers included this information along with preconceptions, misconceptions, historical version, and cool facts about their topics. Each group had a review at the end with three quiz questions to check for comprehension.      In Thursday's lecture, we discussed the main points of each of the six topics to further our understanding of what we learned. It included some details that needed to be stressed as well as some things that were left out by our peers that students in other sections may have included. Specifically, we discussed some of the alternative theories to the origin of the universe such as Steady-State Universe, Eternal Inflation - Level II Multiverse, Oscillating Universe, and a few other theories. We also discussed the idea that

      The main idea for this week's lab was discovering how big the solar system actually is when created to scale. My group used playdough to create the size for the planets and a cut out piece of paper for the sun. The diameter of the sun was 160 mm, which made Mercury 0.5mm, Venus 1.3mm, Earth 1.4mm, Mars 0.4mm, and the Moon 0.35mm. In relation to the sun, Mercury was 6.66m away, Venus was 12.4m away, Earth was 17.2 m away, and Mars was 26.2m away. Compared to the Earth, the moon was 26.6mm away. Here were our planets in size relation to the sun.  Sun: paper Mercury: red Venus: yellow Earth: green Moon: blue Mars: pink     In Thursday's lecture, we discussed the phases of the moon and how the rotation of the earth effects shadows. We talked about the Tropic of Cancer, Equator, and Tropic of Capricorn and how depending on where on the planet someone is located, his or her shadow will either be North, South, or directly above them at exactly noon. We finished by talking about