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Physics Mysteries
150 questions answered by our physicists
Edita Bromova
It was probably Aristotle who first stated that from the bottom of a deep enough well, even on a sunny day, the stars could be seen. This statement was later repeated many times. His assumption was that at the bottom of…
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Edita Bromova
Surely you've thought many times, while stuck in traffic, squeezed in a crowded bus, or wracked by turbulence on a plane, how great it would be to be able to get from place to place without the hassle of travel. If you c…
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Edita Bromova
To watch a movie, whether it's projected on a wall at home or on a big screen at the cinema, you need a movie projector that will project beams with information about the image. It will direct red beams to where the red…
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Edita Bromova
The term "black hole" was first used in 1967 by Frank Wheeler to describe a cosmic body, which until then had been called a "black star" or a "gravitationally completely collapsed body". It is a bizarre object that is so…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
Boiling is a special case of evaporation — its peculiarity is that it occurs at a specific temperature (the boiling point) and at this temperature, evaporation takes place throughout the entire volume of water (which are…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
Because electricity and magnetism are closely related (they are actually different manifestations of the same phenomenon), the magnetic properties of substances are related to electrons. Each electron is a (very small) m…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
Temperature does have an effect on the speed of particle movement, but this effect is minimal compared to the influence of nuclear forces and therefore, (except under extreme conditions) the half-life of nuclei at differ…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
First, I need to clarify the difference between calories and units of energy, which are joules. Calories were previously used to determine the value of heat and it has been shown (for example in the First Law of Thermody…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
I think that this question cannot be answered simply and briefly and I will rather try to explain why it cannot be answered. Perhaps it will then be clearer why the answer is fundamentally impossible. When producing elec…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
Of the four known types of forces, only two interact between an electron and a proton — gravitational and electrostatic. Both have a similar method of calculation, with gravitational force depending on the mass of the in…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
The size of an atom is in the tenths of nanometres (0.0000000001 m), and the nucleus is even 100,000 times smaller. From this ratio and the fact that the mass of protons is approximately 2,000 times greater than the mass…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
In my opinion, the speed of an electron's movement in the electron cloud cannot be determined by direct measurement (electrons are too small for that), but we can use an analogy from astronomy — for example, the Moon orb…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
Just like with everything in our surroundings, it is necessary to determine under what conditions we want to measure the temperature in. For example, water can be at 4 °C in the refrigerator, 95 °C in an electric kettle,…
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Edita Bromova
The Earth has two north poles. The first is magnetic and the compass needle points to it. If you let it guide you, it will lead you to the spot where the compass goes "crazy" and starts pointing in all directions. Here,…
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Edita Bromova
Freezing is a process in which a liquid state changes to a solid state. Solid crystals begin to grow in the liquid and more and more molecules of the freezing liquid are added to them. Eventually, one solid block is form…
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Edita Bromova
When we heat water, it starts to evaporate. At first, it evaporates only from the surface, and when it reaches the boiling point, it evaporates from its entire volume. The water changes from a liquid to the gaseous state…
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Edita Bromova
Human beings have always longed to be invisible. Fables and myths are full of potions, incantations and cloaks of invisibility. H. G. Wells attempted to grasp the idea of invisibility a little more scientifically in his…
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Edita Bromova
The ability of dinosaurs to construct radiation detectors, take measurements, and record the results has not yet been proven, and it is quite likely that they did not actually do any such thing. Yet we know the half-live…
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Edita Bromova
Photons are particles with zero rest mass moving in a vacuum at the speed of light. As bosons, they are not constrained by the Pauli Exclusion Principle and can pass through each other or occupy the same quantum state ..…
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Edita Bromova
The nucleus of each atom is made up of protons with the addition of more or less neutrons. It is thus theoretically possible for an element to exist with any number of protons in its nucleus. Perhaps a thousand or a mill…
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