There are the rushing waves, mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business, trillions apart yet forming white surf in unison. - Richard Feynman

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Fun Physics Fact Friday 3

I apologize for being a day late - I had this fact already picked out, I just for some reason thought that today was Friday. I was wrong. So ready or not, here's the next FPFF!

If you were standing at arms length next to someone and each of you had 1% more electrons than protons, the repelling force between you would be enough to lift a weight equal to that of the entire earth!
I read this one from my Feynman Lectures on Physics: Vol 2 that I got with some birthday money. I bought the entire box set and it's really nice. Back to the point: the force that you would see is called the electromagnetic force and more precisely, in this case, a Coulomb force and it is the force that is observed between two charged particles. As you may already understand from magnets, like charges repel and opposite charges attract. In your body you have, on average, 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 7*1027 atoms. Each atom is composed of a specific number of negatively charged electrons, positively charged protons, and neutrally charged electrons. There is such a perfect balance within your body that you have the exact same number of electrons and protons and therefore you don't radiate a field around your body that affects others electromagnetively. But if you each had more electrons than protons, you would each have a total negative charge and repel each other.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Fun Physics Fact Friday 2!

Sorry, I forgot to post this past week's FPFF on friday. I only posted it on my twitter :/. So here it goes!
Fun Physics Fact Friday 2: Out of all of the universe, less than 5% of it is matter that we understand: atoms, particles, etc. The rest is composed of 23% Dark Matter and 72% Dark Energy. That 95% "stuff" is invisible and current experiments are being performed to try and detect Dark Matter in the world around us.