Now: the lit match head - even after it goes out - is considerably hotter than boiling water. So - why didn't the sea boil?
Totally unrealistic, I see it more like red dwarf when the match would get blown back towards you and set fire to your hair.
Now: the lit match head - even after it goes out - is considerably hotter than boiling water. So - why didn't the sea boil?
Don't forget that journalists, even at the Beeb, are often astonishingly ignorant of even the most basic science.According to this story, the LHC has been creating temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the sun....
You have put your finger on the problem with fusion power. Creating the heat is easy - but power generation is forever "only thirty years away" because confining workable quantities in a box made of magnetic fields and plasma is quite a challenge.Pardon my ignorance, but how come the earth hasn't melted?
Don't forget that journalists, even at the Beeb, are often astonishingly ignorant of even the most basic science.
In 2009, for instance, they ran a story about an accident to a Navy submarine patrolling under the Arctic "leaving men trapped under hundreds of feet of ice!" The Arctic ice is generally about 15 feet thick, often less.
Fascinating stuff. I really, really want to work for CERN, but unfortunately I'm not a theoretical physicist.
I should have know, that link was coming!
Fascinating stuff. I really, really want to work for CERN, but unfortunately I'm not a theoretical physicist.
I've just finished reading why does E=mc² - highly recommend it.
Yeah - but - you really don't need any of this relativity, or quantum mechanics, or particle physics, to understand why the Earth doesn't melt. You only need a bit of basic thermodynamics. Try - the First Law of Thermodynamics, for starters...
I should have know, that link was coming!
Mind you, I would have expected our very own local, Brighton-based, instance of same:
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Best book without getting a textbook is The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.
Basically three reasons, the cross sectional area of collisions area is very small (picobarn), it's in a vacuum and an inverse square law occurs with temperature anyway apart from the actual materials. If you want a cool event see this http://www.youtube.c...player_embedded
Well I do recall being told that the reason a barn (10[sup]-28[/sup] m[sup]2[/sup]) is called a barn, is that, in the context of nuclear physics, it's "as big as a barn door". Honest - no kidding! Hence the sub-units...Well I never...a picobarn is ten to the power of minus 40 square metres. Not very big at all.