Inflight Science: A Guide to the World from Your Airplane Window
Brian Clegg
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1848313055
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The perfect companion to any flight - a guide to the science on view from your window seat
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would pass through solid objects he called them X-rays (or rather X-Strahlen) to show that they were unknown and mysterious. They were officially renamed Roentgen rays, but everyone liked Roentgen’s original nickname for them, and it stuck. In reality, X-rays aren’t particularly mysterious – they are nothing more or less than light, but light of a colour that is far outside the spectrum that we can see. All light is ‘electromagnetic radiation’, a special interaction between electricity and
consists of a very small central part, the nucleus, which contains over 99 per cent of its weight, surrounded by a fuzz of tiny particles called electrons. When a photon of light meets an electron, the electron can consume the energy in the photon. This leaves the electron buzzing around with more energy than it started with. This process of an electron absorbing or giving off the energy of a photon of light is called a quantum leap, a term that has come to mean a large, significant change,
It’s heat and light from the Sun that powers our weather systems, including the winds, and waves are generated by wind. (The exception here is tsunamis, which are produced by earthquakes and landslips, but the vast majority of waves are produced by wind flowing across the surface of the sea.) Experiment – Micro waves Get a glass around three quarters full of liquid. Give the glass a sudden sharp shake (be careful not to splash the person next to you if you’re on a flight). The resultant
similar in size to Earth, and though significantly closer to the Sun than we are, it was thought for a long time that its cloud cover could make the surface habitable. It was quite a shock when the first probes reached Venus and were almost instantly destroyed by a hellish 480°C average surface temperature. Lead is a liquid at this temperature. To make matters worse, the atmosphere, practically all carbon dioxide, is much thicker than our own, with a pressure on the ground of around 90 times that
of your body. You don’t actually come into contact with the seat, you float just above it on a cloud of repulsion. If that were all that was happening, you would be pretty well frictionless. But where there’s a large electron cloud on one atom it can push the electrons on another atom out of the way, leaving more of a positive charge for it to cling on to. It’s this electromagnetic attraction that’s responsible for much of friction, rather like the way the little pieces of paper clung to the
