Month: December 1996

What is the scientific explanation of a rainbow?

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What is the scientific explanation of a rainbow? — RS, Salinas, CA

A rainbow is caused by three important optical effects: reflection, refraction, and dispersion, all working together. The rainbow forms when sunlight passes over your head and illuminates falling raindrops in the sky in front of you. This sunlight enters each spherical raindrop, partially reflects from the back surfaces of the raindrop, and then leaves the raindrop and heads toward you. The raindrop helps some of the sunlight make a near U-turn. But the path that the light follows after it enters the raindrop depends on its color. Light bends or “refracts” as it changes speed upon entering water from air and the amount it bends depends on how much its speed changes. Since violet light slows more than red light, a phenomenon called “dispersion,” the violet light bends more than the red light and the two colors begin to follow different paths through the drop. All the other colors are spread out between these two extremes.

The colored rays of light then partially reflect from the back surface of the raindrop because any change in light’s speed also causes partial reflection. Now the various colors are on their way back toward you and the sun. The light bends again as it emerges from the raindrop and the various colors leave it traveling in different directions. Only one color of light will be aimed properly to reach your eyes. But there are other raindrops above and below it that will also send light backward and some of that light will also reach your eyes. But this light will be a different color. What you see when you observe the rainbow is the lights that many different raindrops send back toward your eyes. The upper raindrops send their red light toward your eyes while the lower raindrops send their violet light toward your eyes. You see a series of colored bows from these different raindrops.

In a microwave oven, does food cook from the inside out or outside in?

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In a microwave oven, does food cook from the inside out or outside in? — KS, Essex, England

If the piece of food isn’t too large, it all cooks at once. The microwaves that heat the food pass deep into it and they deposit energy in every part of the food simultaneously. Only if the piece of food is so large that an appreciable amount of microwaves are absorbed before they reach the center will the center cook more slowly than the outside. I doubt that this shielding of the center is a problem with foods small enough to fit inside a normal microwave oven. However, the microwaves in a microwave oven aren’t perfectly uniform, so that some parts of a meal will cook a bit faster than others. That’s why it’s important to move the food about during cooking to achieve uniform heating throughout.

I recently acquired a microwave that “doesn’t cook as fast as it used to.” Doe…

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I recently acquired a microwave that “doesn’t cook as fast as it used to.” Does this sound right? What type of service might need to be performed? – W

It is possible for a microwave to lose cooking speed. If the microwave source isn’t able to produce as intense microwaves as before or if it doesn’t turn on reliably and steadily, it won’t cook as fast. For the source to produce less intense microwaves, the high voltage power supply would probably have to be weak. Its storage capacitor could have failed or one or more of its high voltage diodes could have burned out. According to a reader, the most likely cause of weak cooking in a microwave oven is a failed capacitor—with no ability to store separated charge in its capacitor, the oven produces pulsing rather than steady microwaves and delivers less average power. I suppose that the magnetron itself could be dying, with the most common failure (according to that same reader) being shorting out, the result of electromigration of the filament material. For the source to not turn on reliably, it would probably have to have a bad connection to the power line. One good possibility is that the relay that turns on power to the high voltage power supply is not making good contact.

Listen to the microwave as it operates on a medium setting. It should cycle on and off every five or ten seconds. You should hear it hum softly during the on half of the cycle and then stop humming during the off half of the cycle. Different power levels simply vary the fractions of on time and off time. If you don’t hear the hum or the hum is intermittent, then something is probably wrong with the power relay or with something else in the high voltage power supply. If the relay is flaky, a little cleaning of its contacts may cure the problem. Be careful of the high voltage capacitor, which can store a lethal charge even when the unit is unplugged.

Where is all the matter “sucked” into a black hole thought to go?

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Where is all the matter “sucked” into a black hole thought to go? — KH, St. Johns, Newfoundland

From our perspective outside a black hole, the matter never quite passes through the black hole’s event horizon—the surface from which not even light can escape. That’s because time slows down near the event horizon and it takes an infinite amount of our time for the matter to pass through the event horizon. But from the perspective of the matter falling through the event horizon, the passage is uneventful—the matter experiences no sudden changes as it passes through that surface of no return. Instead, the matter continues to accelerate toward the singularity at the center of the black hole—a point of infinite density and infinitely small size. Its approach to the singularity completely destroys the matter’s structure. The gravitational tidal forces caused by the differences in gravity at different locations in space tear the matter apart so that it contributes only mass, charge, momentum, and angular momentum to the singularity. The black hole is usual identified with the event horizon rather than the singularity contained inside it. Passage through that event horizon erases any memory of the structure of the matter, leaving only its mass, charge, momentum, and angular momentum observable in the properties of the black hole.

What would happen if the two magnetic poles of the earth were to be reversed? Wo…

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What would happen if the two magnetic poles of the earth were to be reversed? Would it affect climate and weather? Has this ever happened before? — HP, Birmingham, AL

The earth’s magnetic poles have reversed before, many times. A record of the earth’s magnetic field is made whenever a magnetic mineral is cooled through a magnetic transition temperature called the Curie point (named after Pierre Curie, the husband of Marie Curie, who first identified it). Volcanic lava often includes such magnetic minerals and as the lava cools, it records a snapshot of the earth’s current magnetization. By examine ancient lava flows, scientists have pieced together a detailed record of the earth’s magnetization and have found that the earth’s magnetic poles have drifted about and reversed many times, typically every few hundred thousand years or so.

I can’t think of any mechanism whereby these reversals would seriously affect climate or weather. However, these reversals would affect some migratory animals that use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate. In principle, these animals might migrate the wrong direction and die out. However, there are always a few of each species that are born with their magnetic compasses reversed. While these backward animals might not survive during normal times, they would prosper during a reversal and would help to perpetuate their species. Moreover, experiments have shown that individual animals can adapt to the magnetic reversals as well.

If microwave cookers are so energy-efficient, why can’t similar machines be used…

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If microwave cookers are so energy-efficient, why can’t similar machines be used as hot water heaters or in central heating systems? – GB

Microwave ovens transfer about 50% of the electric energy they receive from the electric company to the food. Conventional ovens transfer only something like 10%. Cooking just isn’t a very energy efficient process because you’re trying to get heat into an object from outside that object. In contrast, an electric space heater transfers 100% of the electric power it receives to the room around it. Home heating is much more energy efficient because you’re getting heat into an object from inside that object. In effect, your microwave oven is also 100% efficient at heating your room—every bit of electric energy it consumes eventually enters your room as heat. But it’s an expensive sort of “space heater” and you do better just to use conventional heating systems.

My son and I are building an electromagnet for a science project. We know that i…

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My son and I are building an electromagnet for a science project. We know that if we wrap the wire around the nail and connect the battery to the wire…presto, a magnet is born. But what is it about flowing current that allows this to happen? — GG, Westfield, NJ

Moving electric charges are inherently magnetic. That’s because electricity and magnetism are intimately related and aren’t really separate phenomena. To see why this is true, imagine two electrons sitting motionless in front of you—they push one another away with electric forces. But now imagine that you and those two electrons are moving northward in a train and someone standing beside the track is watching all of you pass. From that person’s perspective, the two electrons are moving and they exert both electric and magnetic forces on one another. What appears to you to be a purely electric effect appears to the person near the track to involve both electricity and magnetism. Without the appearance of magnetic effects in moving charges, grave inconsistencies would appear in the dynamics of objects view from different perspectives.

So the current in the wire of your electromagnet is inherently magnetic. The magnetic field it produces aligns the tiny magnetic domains in the steel nail so that the nail’s magnetic field greatly strengthens that of the current in the wire.

I have heard of a magnetic top that will spin on top of another magnetic field b…

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I have heard of a magnetic top that will spin on top of another magnetic field because of the gyroscopic effect. If that is put into a vacuum chamber, would it spin perpetually? — JH, Visalia, CA

Probably not. The magnetic top that you mention is a wonderful invention, sold under the name “Levitron”. It uses gyroscopic precession to stabilize what is normally an unstable arrangement: two oppositely aligned magnets, one supporting the other. In air, you can get the Levitron top to stay aloft for a couple of minutes before its spin rate declines to the point where it stops being stable. In a vacuum, I’d expect it to last much longer but not forever. Thermodynamics overwhelms just about everything sooner or later and the Levitron won’t be an exception. Even if you get rid of air resistance, the spinning top’s strong magnetic field will interact with its environment and will allow the top to exchange energy with that environment. While there is always the possibility that these exchanges will make the top spin faster, such favorable exchanges are relatively unlikely. Instead, the energy exchanges are much more likely to extract energy from the top and slow it down. For example, any conducting surfaces near the Levitron top will exert a magnetic drag force on the top and will convert its energy into thermal energy in those conducting surfaces. Forever is a long time and the top will certainly slow to a stop eventually. Still, it might be interesting to see how long it can stay spinning. I’ll bet 10 minutes is the realistic maximum. If I have a chance to test it out, I’ll let you know what happens.

How do I graph (line or pie) the time it takes different amounts of water to fre…

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How do I graph (line or pie) the time it takes different amounts of water to freeze? — LC, TX

First, you must determine what it is that you’re really measuring. If you pour a gallon of water onto a huge copper plate that’s been cooled to -200° C, the water will freeze in a fraction of a second while if you put a drop of water on a hot frying pan, it will never freeze at all. You must design a sensible experiment and then repeat it with several different amounts of water. The experiment should be sure to focus on the water by avoiding situations where external effects determine the freezing time. For example, you might obtain 4 identical 1-liter containers and fill them with 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, and 1 liter of the same water respectively and then put them simultaneously in a freezer with a uniform cold temperature. Then you can record how long it takes each of them to freeze. Then use an XY graph to plot these times: the x-axis could be the amount of water in the container and the y-axis could be the time it took for the water to freeze. The four points you’ll obtain probably won’t form a straight line. That’s because the amount of heat that must leave the water for it to freeze depends on the water’s volume and the time it takes that heat to leave depends on the water’s surface area. Doubling the water’s volume doesn’t double its surface area, so the freezing time will have an interesting and somewhat complicated dependence on the water’s volume. Try it!

How do helicopters work?

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How do helicopters work? — KH, Holland, MI

The wings of a normal airplane obtain upward lift forces from the air as the airplane moves forward through the air. That’s because the shape and angle of the wings is such that air flows faster over the top surface of each wing than under the bottom surface of that wing and the air pressure above the wing drops below the air pressure below the wing. Each wing experiences a net upward pressure force and these upward forces are enough to support the weight of the plane.

A helicopter spins its wings around in a circle so that they move through the air even when the helicopter itself is stationary. Normally, these rotating wings are called blades. Again, the air flows faster over each blade than beneath it and there is a net upward pressure force on each blade. These upward forces support the helicopter and they also allow it to tilt itself—by adjusting the angle of each blade as the blades turn, the helicopter can obtain twists from the air so that it tilts one way or the other. Once the helicopter has tilted, it can use some of the lift force from its blades to push it horizontally so that it accelerates forward, backward, or toward the side.