Scientists have witnessed incredible phenomena for a long time in their laboratories and research fields. Unfortunately, for a long time, most of us could only access these phenomena described in books and encyclopedias. Since the advent of the Internet and video recordings, witnessing scientific phenomena has become a much easier task.
The Listverse website selected 10 of these phenomena that were recorded and shared for all to see. Here are these phenomena and the scientific theories that explain them:
10. Drops of Prince Rupert
The drops of Prince Rupert have fascinated the scientific community for hundreds of years. In 1661, an article was presented at the Royal Society of London about these foreign objects. The drops are named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who introduced them to cousin King Charles II.
Made by releasing melted glass in water, these strange drops exhibit strange properties when exposed to different forces. If we hit the round and bulbous part with a hammer, nothing happens. However, any touch on its tail causes the object to explode violently. Charles was interested in science and, therefore, challenged the Royal Society to explain the behavior of the drops, but the answer came only hundreds of years later.
Modern scientists, armed with high-speed cameras, have finally been able to see directly how the drops explode. A shock wave can be seen traveling from the tail to the head at approximately 1.6 kilometers per second as tensions inherent in the fall are released.
When these drops form, the outer layer becomes solid, while the inner glass remains molten. As the inner glass cools, its volume decreases and creates a strong structure, pulling itself, making the head of the drop incredibly resistant to damage. The tail, on the other hand, is more fragile. When it breaks, stress is released, which causes the entire drop to explode.
9. The movement of light
The light is so fast that seeing its movement is almost impossible. When we turn on the light in a room, she immediately goes through it, without having the opportunity to see how she got there. Until recently, we could only think of seeing the light on larger scales, outside the planet, but that has changed.
Using a camera capable of taking 1 billion frames per second, scientists were able to create videos of light that move through everyday objects. By firing a laser pulse that lasts only 1 billion seconds, the researchers were able to capture what is equivalent to a bullet of light that passes over things.
Other teams have already refined the techniques used to create the previous video. Using a camera capable of taking 10 billion frames per second, they can follow a single pulse of light instead of having to repeat the experiment for each frame.
8. Cloud cameras
Radioactivity was discovered when it was discovered that X-rays fogged photographic plates. Since then, people have been looking for ways to observe radiation to better understand the phenomenon.
One of the oldest and coolest ways to do this was to create a cloud chamber. Cloud chambers take advantage of the fact that vapor droplets condense around ions. When a radioactive particle passes through the chamber, it leaves a trace of ions. As the vapor condenses, it is possible to directly observe the path taken by the particle.
Today, cloud cameras have been replaced by more sensitive detection methods, but they have been vital in the discovery of subatomic particles such as positron. Today, cloud cameras are useful for showing different types of radiation. Alpha particles show short and thick lines, while beta particles have longer and thinner lines.
7. Superfluid
Superfluids are very peculiar types of fluids. When we stir the coffee in a cup, we create a vortex in the liquid. However, this vortex ceases to exist in seconds due to friction between the fluid particles, which interrupts the flow. In a superfluid, there is no friction. A stirred cup of superfluid keeps spinning forever.
Similarly, it would be possible to build superfluid sources that continue to flow up without adding more energy, because energy is not lost by friction in a superfluid. The strangest property of superfluids is that they can scale the wall of a compartment and leave it.
Unfortunately, not all chemicals can form superfluids, and in those that do, this occurs only a few degrees from absolute zero.
6. Ice Wave
Frozen lakes can have the amazing ability to form ice waves. If only the upper layer solidifies when a lake freezes, it is possible that the lower layer, still liquid, causes the ice above to move. If a hot wind passes over the lake, the entire ice sheet can begin to move, and all that ice has to go somewhere.
When the ice reaches the coast, sudden friction and stress cause the ice to break and accumulate. Sometimes these ice waves can be several meters high and travel inland. The crunch of the crystals that form the ice sheet gives the creation of ice waves a terrifying sound of thousands of broken crystals.
5. Volcanic shock wave
A volcanic eruption is the most powerful explosion that humans will probably see on Earth. In seconds, the energy equivalent to several atomic bombs can send thousands of tons of rocks and debris into the air. Better not be too close when that happens.
However, some spectators remain near erupting volcanoes to witness these extreme moments, and record. In 2014, Mount Tavurvur in Papua New Guinea exploded. Fortunately for us, people were there to film. As the volcano blew, a shock wave could be seen traveling up in the clouds and toward the observer.
The explosion that produced the shock wave was probably caused by the accumulation of gas inside the volcano, when the magma blocked its escape. The sudden release of this gas compressed the air around the volcano and produced the wave that shot in all directions.
4. Volcanic rays
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, Pliny the Younger observed something strange about the explosion: “There was a more intense darkness that was made more frightening by the intense glow of the torches at intervals obscured by the transient glow of the rays ».
This is the first recorded mention of volcanic rays. When a volcano throws a thundering cloud of dust and rock into the sky, huge rays can be seen dancing around it.
Volcanic rays do not occur with each eruption. They are caused by an accumulation of charge. In the heat of a volcano, electrons can be easily expelled from an atom to produce a positively charged ion. Electrons can also be transferred by collisions between dust particles. Electrons can connect to other atoms to form negatively charged ions.
In the different ways in which ions move due to their size and speed, an accumulation of charge can occur through the plume of the eruption. When the load is high enough, it is transferred from one region to another in the fast and warm rays of light seen in the video above.
3. Levitating frogs
Each year, the Nobel Prizes Ig (a fun and fun version of the Nobel Prizes, which reward the strangest scientific discovery of the year) are awarded for research that “makes people laugh and think.”
In 2000, Andre Geim won the Ig Nobel Prize for levitating a frog with magnets. His curiosity awoke when he poured some water directly into a machine with powerful electromagnets around him. Water stuck to the walls of the tube and the drops began to float. Geim had discovered that magnetic fields could act with sufficient force in the water to overcome Earth’s gravitational attraction.
Before that, it was thought that diamagnetic materials, those without a general magnetic field, did not interact much with magnetic fields. Then, Geim passed from the raindrops to live animals, including frogs. These could be levitated due to the water content in their bodies, which generated quite curious images of very confusing frogs that levitate in strong magnetic fields.
Geim won a real Nobel Prize for participating in the discovery of graphene.
2. Laminar flow
Mixing liquids is usually an easy task. The same cannot be said about the opposite task: after all, we cannot “mix” liquids, right? Well, it depends
Under certain conditions, this may be possible. If we mix orange juice in the water, it is unlikely that I can separate them. However, if we use dyed corn syrup, as shown in the previous video, this unlikely task can be accomplished. This is due to the special properties of the syrup as a fluid and the so-called laminar flow, a type of movement within the fluids in which the layers tend to move in the same direction with each other, without mixing.
This example is a special type of laminar flow, known as Stokes flow, in which the fluid used is so thick and viscous that it barely allows the diffusion of particles. The mixture is stirred slowly, so as not to form a turbulence that ends up mixing the dyes.
It just seems that the dyes are mixed because the light passes through the layers that contain the separated dyes. The slow inversion of the mixture returns the dyes to their original positions.
1. Cherenkov radiation
We learned from the beginning that nothing moves faster than the speed of light. In fact, the speed of light seems to be an insurmountable speed limit in this universe in which we live. But this is only true if we are talking about the speed of light in a vacuum. When the light enters any transparent medium, it slows down. This is because the electronic component of the electromagnetic waves of light interacts with the properties of the electronic waves in the middle.
It turns out that many objects can move faster than this new and slower speed of light. If a particle enters the water at 99% of the speed of light in a vacuum, the particle exceeds the light, which travels only at 75% of the speed of light in a vacuum in water. And the good thing is that we can really see it happen!
When the particle passes through the electrons in the middle, light is emitted when it interrupts the electronic field. A nuclear reactor in the water lights blue because it is releasing electrons at very high speeds, as seen when the reactor is activated in the video above. The sinister brightness of radioactive sources is even colder than most people think.
