The Coriolis effect says that anytime you’re rotating—whether it’s on a playground toy or your home planet—objects moving in straight lines will appear to curve. This bizarre phenomenon affects many things, from the paths of missiles to the formation of hurricanes.
You may have heard that the Coriolis effect makes water in the bathtub spiral down the drain in a certain way, or that it determines the way that a toilet flushes. That’s actually wrong.
Although, as you may have noticed while tracking a hurricane on the news, storms in the Northern Hemisphere spin counterclockwise, while those in the Southern Hemisphere spin clockwise. Why do storms spin in different directions depending on their location? And why do they spin in the first place? The answer is the Coriolis effect.
You’ve probably seen atoms like this emoji ⚛ everywhere from science textbooks to the logo for The Big Bang Theory. But what does an atom really look like? The truth is much stranger.
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What if the Earth were swallowed by a black hole? Would humanity’s legacy be gone forever? Or could you somehow get back that information from behind the event horizon?
There are three possible answers to this question…but they all break physics as we know it!
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fall into a black hole? Take a 360° adventure to find out!
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#1. Speed of sound: Unlike light, sound needs a medium to travel through, and its speed depends on characteristics of that medium like density and temperature. In the extreme environment of a neutron star’s core, sound can travel extremely fast. But knowing that sound can’t surpass the speed of light, physicists can narrow down their models of neutron stars to include only those where “extremely fast” is less than light speed.
#3. Relativity rainbows: A team at MIT created a game called “A Slower Speed of Light” that lets you see the world as you would at near-light speeds. Their trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu7jA8EHi_0
This evidence seems to suggest that the dark matter is particles that are less than four times the mass of a proton and are moving at non-relativistic speeds. This is consistent with dark matter particles being so-called WIMPs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles.
We did something a little different in this episode and answered questions from you, our viewers. If you have a questions about the universe, past videos, or life as a scientist, leave a comment below!
How can you train yourself to be a quantum detector? Quantum interactions happen at impossibly small scales. But the life-size effects are all around you. You can detect quantum mechanics all over — if you know how to look for it.
ADVANCED SCIENTIFIC NOTE: Quantum mechanics would be much more obvious if we had very sensitive eyes. If your eyes identified each photon individually, you would see them land as described in the video, and only build up to this wave pattern. The pattern that we see can be explained classically by waves, it is *ultimately* a quantum phenomenon. The only reason it’s hard to tell is because our light detectors (eyes) aren’t quite sensitive enough.
SCIENTIFIC NOTES:
* The relationship between information and energy comes from Landauer’s Principle, which connects the erasure of information and energy. But, more generally changes in information (e.g. recording information) are related to changes in energy. I will talk more about this in a future episode about the physics of memory, and why you will forget everything you ever knew! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
* The numbers calculated in this video give a lower limit on the energy to record a particular amount of information, but to create a more permanent storage of information would require more energy.
* Retina display resolution, as it’s name implies, is similar to the eye’s resolution.
What if everything in the universe came to your doorstep…in a box?! What The Physics is BACK! Future episodes will explore the universe—but first, let’s unbox it.
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SCIENTIFIC NOTES:
Explosive young stars
* The average lifetime of a star is about 10 billion years, but the bigger the star, the shorter its life. One rare type of star, called a hypergiant, can be tens, hundreds, or even a thousand times the mass of our sun. These stars burn out and explode into supernovae in just a few million years. http://www.guide-to-the-universe.com/hypergiant-star.html
Black holes
* Black holes form from the collapse of a massive star at the end of its life, but this only happens in stars about three times as massive as the sun. http://burro.case.edu/Academics/Astr201/EndofSun.pdf
How big is the universe?
* Probably infinite. No one knows the size of the universe for sure, and we may never know, but the latest thinking is that it probably goes on forever. https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html
Standard cosmological model
* According to the standard cosmological model, the universe started with a big bang, underwent rapid inflation within the first fraction of a second, and continues to expand, driven by a vacuum energy called dark energy. All of the structure we see in the universe has come from interactions between dark energy and dark matter (which accounts for about 85% of the universe’s matter). This model describes and predicts many phenomena in the universe but is not perfect. https://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/108
False vacuum model
* The false vacuum model is a real, albeit unlikely theory. All the fundamental forces of nature have corresponding fields (e.g., gravitational fields, magnetic fields, etc.), and we generally believe that the universe is at rest in a global minimum of the potentials of those fields. But if we are instead at rest in a local minimum, or a “false vacuum,” the universe could potentially be nudged, catastrophically, into a lower minimum.
Recycling stars into life
* Before the first stars, the universe was all hydrogen and helium. All heavier elements, including the building blocks of life, were forged in stars.
Dark matter and dark energy
* Only 5% of the universe is made up of matter we can see. The “missing mass” later dubbed dark matter was first noticed in the 1930s; dark energy was discovered in the 1990s. In both cases, their existence was inferred by their effect on objects they interact with. However, they are still not directly observable, so nobody knows yet what they are made of.
Leftover light from the Big Bang
* The theory of the Big Bang predicted the existence of cool radiation pervading the universe, left over from its beginning. In an accidental discovery, two New Jersey scientists discovered the cosmic microwave background, a nearly uniform bath of radiation throughout the universe at a temperature of about 3 Kelvin, or -454 degrees Fahrenheit.
Gravitational waves
* Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his theory of general relativity in 1916. According to his theory, the acceleration of massive objects, like black holes, should send ripples through space-time at the speed of light. A century after his prediction, two merging black holes sent a ripple through space-time that was detected on Earth as a signal that stretched the 4-kilometer arms of a detector by less than 1/1,000 the width of a proton.
Cosmic dust
* Cosmic dust is cast off from stars at the end of their lives and hovers in galaxies as clouds. These clouds of dust absorb ultraviolet and visible light, obscuring much of what lies behind them. This makes it notoriously difficult to study things like the dusty center of our galaxy.
The observable universe
* The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Since the distance we can observe is limited by the time it takes light to travel to Earth, we can only ever observe a fraction of the universe: an expanding sphere around us that is now about 46 billion years in radius. However, the universe is much larger than what we can observe.
CREDITS:
Host, Writer, Producer: Greg Kestin
Animation & Compositing: Danielle Gustitus
Contributing Writers: Lissy Herman, HCSUCS
Filming, Writing, & Editing Contributions from:
Samia Bouzid and David Goodliffe
Creation of Sad Star Image: Drew Ganon
Special thanks:
Julia Cort
Lauren Aguirre
Ari Daniel
Anna Rothschild
Allison Eck
Fernando Becerra
And the entire NOVA team
Experience what it’s like to leave Earth, traveling to over 90,000 feet into the stratosphere. Never before has a 360 video been recorded at these heights – so buckle up and enjoy the view as Seeker takes you on a journey to the Edge of Space.
