The Anthropic Principle (Week 11)

manna moment

Isaiah 45:18- “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (He is God), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; He did not create it empty, He formed it to be inhabited!) I am the LORD, and there is no other.”
Our perfect planet was made with order and intentionality from a Creator God in order to sustain life.  Jesus is the life and through Him all things were made.

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The Goldilocks Planet

If you have ever heard of Goldilocks, she was a little girl that went to the Bear's house in the forest and tried out all their food, chairs, and beds until she found the one that was 'just perfect'.  Earth is sometimes referred to as the Goldilocks Planet because it is 'just perfect' in so many ways.
The ways that the Earth is perfect make up what is called the Anthropic Principle.  Webster's Dictionary defines the Anthropic Principle as a 'cosmological principle that states that conditions observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist and the universe must have properties that make inevitable the existence of intelligent life.'

The parts of the Anthropic Principle that I highlighted in these notes are:
1.  Perfect Distance from the Sun
2.  Perfect Mass of the Earth
3.  Perfect Rotation speed of the Earth
4.  Perfect Atmosphere
5.  Perfect Tilt or Position of the Earth
6.  Perfect Magnetosphere

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Typically what I do during class is have the students read aloud the information.  These notes have blanks for them to fill in with a word bank at the bottom.  The students can then use the word bank to choose the best answer for the blanks.  

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Homemade Compass

The last topic we went over in our notes was the perfect magnetosphere.  One of the benefits to our magnetosphere is that our compasses will always point to magnetic north.  I demonstrated this by making a homemade compass in class.  

Materials:

• 2 needles
  
• Strong magnet
  
• 2 slices of cork
  
• Small container for water
  
• phone/real compass to compare
  

1.  Taking one needle, I rubbed it on the strong magnet going one way to polarize the needle.
2. I sliced a cork and placed the magnetized needle through one cork slice and the non-magnetized needle through the other cork slice.
3. I poured some water into my small container
4. Placed the magnetized needle in the water to see where it would turn.  It turned towards magnetic north as shown on my phone compass.
5. I then placed the non-magnetized needle in the water to compare.  This needle went a completely different place showing that we can see the effects of our magnetosphere even by making our own compass.

Non-magenetized is pointing the opposite way of the magnetized needle.

This is the magnetized needle pointing very close to the magnetic north according to the compass app on my phone.

Vocabulary Review and Jeopardy Review Questions

For the rest of class, we played a vocabulary review game.  I assigned six areas in the room.  The students could go to any area.  I would roll a 6-sided dice and whichever number was rolls that was the area that I called on to answer the vocabulary question.  Some students aimed for where I was going to call and other students avoided that areas that I called like the plague.  I encourage the former.

Since next week is our final class for this semester, I compiled some review questions in the form of Jeopardy for them to review at home.  These are taken from all the note taking sheets that I have put together for 4th Day Science.  It always amazes me how much we cover in such a short amount of time.

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