10 Most Mind-Bending Physics Facts

October 22, 2016

Physics is one of the coolest branches of science and most of the students drift away from the before they reach their adulthood. Physics is not something to be feared and people like us who explore the subject from its fringes know that. We have listed below few of the facts that are unbelievably cool and explore the physics in them:

Space Travelers get younger due to Relativity – The speed of time is directly affected by the gravity and the velocity. Time passes slower when these factors are high. For every seven hundred and forty seven days one second of the time is lost because the time moves at a slower rate. It is because they were travelling at a higher speed in the lower gravity around the earth. This is what happens to the astronauts in the International Space Station.
Your GPS will malfunction if E=MC² did not exist – The navigation that we use in our cars and our phones depends on the geostationary satellites that revolve in the outer orbit of our earth. Due to the relativity theory the clock ticks at a faster rate at the satellite than a clock at the earth’s surface. It is around 38,000 nanoseconds faster than the one’s at ground. When the receiving device gets the data, a calculation correction is applied which gives us the required frequency of correction.
Speed of light varies – The speed of light is around six hundred and seventy one million miles per hour. It is the fastest that anything can travel. In actuality this figure comes into play only when the ray of light is in a vacuum. Light slows down when it passes through any material. The slowest it has been recorded is around 38 miles per hour at the absolute zero through rubidium.
A sugar cube could fit the entire humanity – We are all well aware of the atomic structure and as we know it has a lot of empty space. If the whole of the humanity is gathered and then crushed together removing the inter molecular space between them it would be as big as the sugar cube. Don’t ask me how I know it. I just do.
The density of that sugar cube will be extremely high and could weigh up to five billion tons.
Weight increases when something goes fast – Once again relativity comes into play in this case. As we all know, mass is equivalent to energy which means that when energy is added to an object that’s moving then the mass of the object also increases. In day to day life the gradual and the small increase in speed does not cause a change in mass but when the speed increases till the speed of light the mass change is significant.
We have no idea of the contents of the universe – Even though humanity has been progressing when it comes to astrophysics, such as discovering numerous explanatory systems beyond our solar system we have no idea as to what precisely is the rest of the universe composed of. Although scientists have been able to predict the mass of the universe the stars planets and other stellar objects make up only 2% of it. The dark energy or matter that constitutes the rest of the universe is a mystery.
We are all walking Hydrogen bombs – As the first law of thermodynamics dictates the total energy of a system remains the same and thus we get to the conclusion that energy cannot be created out of nothing and neither be destroyed. One starts to wonder where all the energy we take in everyday goes. Science tells us that all of this energy stays contained in our body, about 7×10¹⁸ The energy if released all together at one point of time will be similar to thirty Hydrogen bombs exploding.
The Big Crunch – Our universe is continuously getting bigger. One cosmological perspective entertains the idea that universe will slow its expansion down and start a reverse process that ends into a “Big Crunch”.
The Multiverse Theory – This theory suggests that parallel to our own universe there are infinite amounts of universe’s that co-exist. This theory suggests that the universes are slightly different than each other and every scenario that may be possible is played out in one of the universes.