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Physics Mysteries
150 questions answered by our physicists
Edita Bromova
The fission chain reaction in a nuclear reactor takes place when a neutron flies to a uranium-235 atom and collides with it, splitting the nucleus into two or three fragments. Several neutrons fly out of the whole proces…
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Edita Bromova
You may not like it, but people crowding outside the exit of a concert hall are subject to the Venturi effect. The same physical principle applies to water flowing through a pipe or wind blowing through a canyon. The flu…
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Edita Bromova
The short answer is yes, they can, but it is extremely unlikely. Photons are quanta of electromagnetic waves. When you turn on a light bulb, it starts producing billions and billions of these particles that whizz through…
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Edita Bromova
Depending on the distribution power lines of the country in which the bird lives, it can choose to sit on lines with a voltage of 100—400 kV, in some parts of the world even up to 800 kV. Electricity with such a high vol…
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Edita Bromova
Hopefully, it will never be necessary. To answer your question, let's first look at what radioactivity is, and how it is measured. Radioactivity is the process by which unstable atoms produce ionising radiation. This rad…
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Edita Bromova
By quickly peeling off the adhesive tape, you not only caused a flash of visible light, but even a brief pulse of X-rays. Don't worry, you are not in any danger and you can keep using the tape. This phenomenon is called…
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Edita Bromova
So far, outer space in the solar system is a peaceful place where no one is shooting at anyone, but we can feel free to entertain hypotheticals about what if we needed to. Maybe that astronaut doesn't want to shoot anoth…
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Edita Bromova
In a container filled with hydrogen under normal conditions, i.e. at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, hydrogen molecules (H-H, H2) collide quite normally. However, nothing at all is formed — only their temperat…
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Edita Bromova
The most common way to draw lightning is a zigzag line from the cloud to the ground. However, this is not the only way lightning can strike. This relates to the rather complicated way in which lightning is produced in a…
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Edita Bromova
Hydrogen is the lightest element in the known universe. It consists of just one proton orbited by a single electron. It would seem, therefore, that nothing could be lighter. Theoretically, it would be possible to create…
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Edita Bromova
Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. A water molecule contains one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms bonded to it at an angle of 104.45 degrees. In order for water to appear in the universe, these two basic eleme…
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Edita Bromova
Wind turbine blades are made of composites, fiberglass or carbon fibre, strengthened together with polymeric resin. They are designed to withstand harsh natural conditions. Strong winds, rain, frost, and ultraviolet radi…
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Edita Bromova
All bodies in the Earth's gravitational field are subject to a gravitational force that gives them the same gravitational acceleration g. If nothing obstructed the bodies when falling, they would all accelerate equally a…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
We all probably know that a lot of things that are said are not completely true. And the statement that water in the northern and southern hemispheres always rotates in reverse when it is drained is one of them. This que…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
At first, I have to point out that only light can travel at the speed of light — mainly because it has zero weight. Anything with non-zero weight would require exactly an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the sp…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
That would probably be pretty unpleasant, I'm afraid it would almost immediately end all life on the Earth. The Earth rotates with a frequency of 1 rotation per 24 hours. By a fairly simple calculation, we can find out t…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
Some materials or products are said not to be "earthly". It's certainly possible, but I'm not aware of any irrefutable evidence for it. Astronomers are convinced that there must be more than 1 planet in the universe to s…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
I imagine the place where I am on holiday is such a place :D But if we tried to answer this question purely from the physical point of view, there is no place on Earth where we would age noticeably slower ...
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
We mean the immediate movement of anything to any place by teleportation which we know from Star Trek, for example. The problem I see is mainly that we want to move anything and immediately. Every highlighted word allude…
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Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D.
So far it seems that time travel is limited by causality — this means that the effect can never precede the cause — I can't be full before I start eating. Therefore, travelling to the future is real, but it is a one-way…
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