To honor the start of a new school year, we bring to you the following Fermi problem: How long would a physics lecture have to be to actually kill you?
Or more precisely, from Physics Buzz:
Assuming you’re not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?
The mathletes at the Buzz make a few assumptions about the classroom, but in a 16-foot by 16-foot classroom with a 10-foot ceiling, packed with 34 bleary-eyed students and one Red Bull fueled professor the answer is…2 hours and 51 minutes!
Of course you’ll probably be brain dead long before that point.
Check their math here and then tell us why they’re right or wrong, or if you’ve ever survied such a physics marathon.
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DISCOVER: Fairway Physics
Image: flickr / Rober S. Donovan
Scientist hoping to prove the existence of dark matter are bringing their search deeper underground, thanks to a lab that at certain points will reach nearly 8,000 feet below South Dakota’s Black Hills.
The laboratory is being constructed beneath an old goldmine, which itself was once the site of renowned physics research. The fact that it’s sheltered from cosmic rays makes it a great potential locale for the mysterious dark matter particles, which may make up a quarter of the universe’s mass and do not “feel” the electromagnetic forces that affect ordinary matter. According to the AP:
The research team will try to catch the ghostly particles in a 300-kilogram tank of liquid xenon, a cold substance that is three times heavier than water. If they tried to detect dark matter above ground, the highly sensitive detector would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.
(more…)
The next time you’re interested in a healthy dose of physics (with a generous splash of literature), resist the temptation of your Wikipedia bookmark, take a step back from the harried, irreverent blogosphere, and dive into the enrapturing prose of pre-Soviet Russia.
In 1913, Yakov Perelman wrote an enchanting book called Physics for Entertainment, and it’s just what Jules Verne and H.G. Wells would have turned out—had they any desire to teach the fundamental laws of the universe. Perelman’s book was only recently translated to English, and seeks (successfully) to “arouse the activity of scientific imagination, to teach the reader to think in the spirit of the science of physics…with all that he normally comes into contact with.”
In chapters like “How to Work Miracles,” “Mathematics and Imagination,” and “Fairy Tale Railway,” Perelman associates the laws of physics with an ample variety of both everyday phenomena (knots, eggshells, fire, jumping from a moving vehicle) and the wildest fantasies of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Cyrano de Bergerac, Gogol, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Pushkin, and Edgar Allan Poe. Blending flowery prose with equations, neither of which are burdensome, he weaves his own delightful narrative with the imaginations of a great writer, producing a highly engaging piece of educational literature.
Some excerpts, illustrating Perelman’s merging of science fiction with physics non-fiction: (more…)
