Alex asks
Hi Hentzau, I know that the conservation of energy is an immutable thing, but what happens with capillary action in liquids? Where does the energy for that come from, and how does it work?
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Category Archives: science
Rouge Planet.
This is CFBDSIR2149-0403, which I’m sure you’ll agree just rolls off the tongue. CFBDSIR2149-0403 made the news yesterday as one of the more recently-discovered rogue planets. Contrary to popular belief, a rogue planet is not:
- A planet which backstabs other planets.
- A planet which drains the powers of other planets.
- A planet all done up in makeup designed to emphasise the cheekbones.
If We’re Living In The Future, Then Where Are All The Jetpacks?
Note: last post for a little while thanks to real life concerns making a nuisance of themselves. Will post again this time next week. Probably.
Sultana Josh asks
Jetpacs. How would they work?
Science Miscommunication.
If you read just about any major news site with any sort of regularity, you may have noticed a disturbing news item creeping into the most-read sidebar: the conviction of six Italian seismologists for not-really-specified offences over the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila that killed 309 people. I say not-really-specified because the reporting on this has been uniformly bloody terrible; every single article I have read – bar one – has been based off of the same piece of agency copy, with the same points, same facts, and same quotes in each one. That original agency copy seeks to cast the case as one of the Italian judiciary versus science, and that these scientists have been convicted for failing to predict the unpredictable: an earthquake. But it’s not quite as simple as that.
Is It Two Pair Or Four Of A Kind?
Lord Smurf asks
I can just about get my head around a planet orbiting two suns, but this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19950923 confuses me. I notice that it says two of the suns are ‘circling’ the planet, rather than ‘orbiting’. Is there a difference? I always think of suns as the giants of solar system so I don’t understand how they can orbit a planet, rather than the other way round. How does this system actually work because all the articles are telling me how amazing this is but none of them actually say how the damn thing works.
Never Tell Me The Odds.
I had to disable Jetpack because it wasn’t letting people post comments. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Rear Admiraless Josh asks
In The Empire Strikes Back, there’s a bit where the Falcon goes into an asteroid field pursued by a bunch of TIE fighters, and they have to avoid a load of rocks flying around very fast in close proximity. It’s what a lot of people think of asteroid fields as being like, but logically that’s can’t be right, as the rocks would just bash each other into sand over the course of a couple of centuries. So what is the inside of an asteroid field really like? What is the largest thing you can swing around while reasonably expecting not to hit anything?
Ooooh, “rocks just bash each other into sand over the course of a couple of centuries” is so close, and yet so far.
Bad Science Journalism, Part 1: The Orbo.
It’s likely you won’t remember Steorn and their Orbo device – especially if you live outside the UK– so a little bit of memory-jogging in probably in order. Steorn is an Irish company that claimed, back in 2006, to have invented a device that would provide “free, clean, and constant energy” in contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In other words these guys were saying that they’d managed to break science by inventing a perpetual motion machine. Perpetual motion machines are impossible for a number of reasons – you can’t create energy out of nothing (the First Law of Thermodynamics), amongst others – but the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a bit special. It states that the net entropy of a closed system always increases, and Arthur Eddington had this to say about it:
The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation