Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: harryneild on 11/04/2006 23:20:20
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A friend was telling me some of the facts he had learnt out of a book that he'd picked up. I wasn't totally sure that they were possible and thought that maybe someone could clear it up for me.
Number 1 - If you make a cup of tea and accidentally leave it to go cold, it will warm up again if you continually scream at it for 8 weeks.
Is this presuming a perfect insulator for a cup because i would suspect that the gain in heat energy from your shouting would quickly dissipate out.
Number 2 - If you continually walk into a wall once every second for 10 billion years, then you will eventually walk through it due to your atoms being perfectly aligned with the walls.
Number 3 - For every breath you take, approximately 5 atoms of Caesar's last breath will enter your lungs.
I would appreciate any contributions. You could even add your own!
"Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes." Peter F. Drucker
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The third of these doesn't sound too unreasonable as long as the atmosphere is well mixed. There are an awful lot of atoms in a 2l breath maybe 1 x 10^23 or so. The atmosphere is about 4 * pi * 6400km^2 *16km = 7.5 billion km3 so about 3 x 10^21 breaths in the atmosphere, about 30 so if anything I recon this is an underestimate, although some atoms may be locked up in the nitrogen or carbon cycles so are not now in the atmosphere.
1. I think this is a creative misinterpretation - I could imagine that screaming for 8 weeks would provide enough energy to heat up the coffee, but the practicalities are probably not there.
2. I guess this is talkign about quantum tunneling, which is an effect where because everything is a wave there is a small probability things can 'tunnel' through barriers which they shouldn't be able to. This process is quite unlikely when you are talking about a single particle and barriers a few micron thick. The probability drops exponentially with distance, so if the probaility is 1/2 for 1micron, it will be 1/4 for 2micron, 1/8 for 3micron etc. Considering that all the atoms in your whole body would have to tunnel through someting 10cm thick at the same time, I think 10 billion years is an immense underestimate!!
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i dont know about quantum tunneling but the wall would disintergrate from the repeated impacts (onthe premise that you could survive unharmed for the time it would take) also im fairly sure that it would be possible to build a free standing wall with the correct dimensions sothat an impact every second would be its resonance frequency that would mean you could distroy it in just a few minutes
J.B.S Haldane on the perforated eardrums which were a consequence of his pressure experiments "the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment".
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Yeh i think that fact 2 was implying that the body and wall stayed in good condition since these are theories because it is pretty obvious you would be dead after even a day or so i rekon. :)
Anyway are there anyother facts like these because i find them quite interesting. Please share them if you know any.
"Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes." Peter F. Drucker
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The worlds an open door so way bang your head against the wall? [:D]
What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
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The real reason I have been absent is because as a firm believer in empirical study I have been shouting at a cold cup of tea for many weeks now. I can confirm that it did not heat up at all. I then moved on to a rather ruthless leaflet campaign and then abusive texts......none of which seemed to phase the tea at all.
The only thing I can report is that if I had in fact been successful in giving this tea the gift of heat that the consequences would have been that I would not have been able to consume it because 1: I don't drink tea and 2: The milk had gone off !
Men are the same as women, just inside out !