If the metal is a good conductor, then the microwaves don’t penetrate more than a fraction of a millimeter. That’s because the microwave electric fields push on the metal’s mobile electrons and those electrons immediately rearrange in such a way that they cancel the microwave fields inside the metal. Only the skin of the metal responds to the fields and it shields the rest of the metal from the microwaves.
Magnetic fields are associated with lines of magnetic flux, invisible structures that stretch between north and south magnetic poles or that curve around on themselves to form complete loops. Unless a material has its own north or south magnetic poles, it can’t terminate the magnetic flux lines and can have only small effects on magnetic fields. The few materials that do affect magnetic fields substantially are ones such as iron or steel that are intrinsically magnetic and that can easily develop strong north and south magnetic poles. These magnetic materials can significantly shift the paths of the magnetic flux lines. If you put an iron or steel box in a magnetic field, the flux lines will tend to travel through the walls of the magnetic box. As a result, there will be few magnetic flux lines inside the box and almost no magnetic field. This effect is used to shield sensitive equipment such as the picture tubes in televisions from magnetic fields.
As long as the tape is kept cool and dry, its magnetization should remain stable for years. However, there is the problem of magnetic imprinting from one layer of tape to the adjacent layers on a spool. With time, one layer transfers some of its magnetization to those adjacent layers. In a videotape, this imprinting leads to a gradual appearance of noise in the video images. As long as you’re willing to tolerate a little video “snow,” this imprinting shouldn’t be too much of a problem. You can reduce its severity by occasionally winding and rewinding the tapes. But I don’t see any real reason why a tape won’t be reasonably useable for decades.
There are two issues here. First, hard water is water that contains dissolved calcium, magnesium, and iron salts. The metal ions in these salts interfere with soaps and detergents, causing soaps to form soap scum and preventing detergents from effectively carrying away fats and oils. The standard way to soften water is to exchange sodium ions for the calcium, magnesium, and iron ions because sodium ions don’t have such bad effects on soaps and detergents. Adding salt to hard water, as you propose to do, won’t exchange sodium ions for the other ions. It will only add more metal ions to the water and the water will remain hard.
Second, a steam iron shouldn’t use hard water because when hard water boils away as steam, it leaves behind all the calcium, magnesium, and iron salts as unsightly scale. Again, adding salt to your hard water will simply leave more scale on the insides of your iron or on your clothes. You need demineralized water, not soft water, for your iron. The best way to demineralize water is to distill it.
Absolute zero can’t be reached for the same reason that any perfect order is impossible. It’s just too unlikely to ever happen. For an object to reach absolute zero, every single bit of thermal energy and every aspect of disorder must leave the object. If the object is a crystalline material, then its crystal structure must become absolutely perfect. This sort of perfection is essentially impossible. Reducing the temperature of an object towards absolute zero requires great effort and ends up creating a great disorder elsewhere. The closer the approach to absolute zero, the more disorder is created elsewhere. To reach absolute zero, you’d have to create infinite disorder elsewhere. For something to think about, imagine trying to make you lawn absolute perfect. The more perfect you tried to make it, the more gardeners you’d need and the more food, money, and services would be consumed. The lawn would grow more and more perfect but everything else would grow more disordered. And still you would never have a truly perfect lawn.
A heat lamp is much like a normal incandescent lamp, except that the heat lamp’s large filament operates at a much lower temperature. Because of this lower temperature, the filament emits relatively little visible light. Instead, it emits mostly invisible infrared light. While you can’t see infrared light, you can feel it as heat. Looking at a heat lamp is no more dangerous than looking at the glowing coals in a fireplace. Their thermal radiation heats your skin and the surfaces of your eyes, and is likely to make you uncomfortable enough to turn away before it causes real damage. In contrast, ultraviolet light from a sunlamp can injure your skin and eyes without causing any immediate pain—it’s only much later that you feel the sunburn on your skin and corneas. That’s why a heat lamp is relatively safe while a sunlamp is not.
In general, the greater the air pressure, the greater the air resistance. As the soccer ball moves through the air, the air in front of it experiences a rise in air pressure and pushes the ball in the direction opposite its motion. While there are various other changes in air pressure around the ball’s surface, this rising pressure in front of the ball remains largely unbalanced and it slows the ball down. The higher the air pressure was to start with, the greater its rise in front of the ball and the stronger the backward push of air resistance. Thus if you were to play soccer in the Rocky Mountains, where the air pressure is much less, you’d be able to kick the ball significantly farther.
The buoyant force lifts the helium balloon upward—the denser air flows downward to fill the space vacated as the balloon is squeezed upward. When the balloon finally reaches the ceiling, the ceiling exerts a downward force on the balloon and prevents it from rising further. But the force the ceiling exerts on the balloon’s skin is gentle enough and spread out enough that it doesn’t injure the rubber. The balloon simply comes to a stop and remains suspended until enough helium diffuses out of the balloon to cause it to descend.
This seemingly simple question has a surprisingly complicated answer. You might expect that if the earth and one of these distant galaxies had been very near one another at the creation of the universe and had both been moving away from one another at almost the speed of light, that after 15 billion years each would have moved almost 15 billion light years in opposite directions and would thus be separated by almost 30 billion light years. That’s not the case. That simple view ignores the important effects of special relativity on rapidly moving objects.
To understand these effects, suppose that there was an observer who was stationary at the creation and watched the earth and galaxy head off in opposite directions at almost the speed of light. From that observer’s perspective, the two objects are heading away from one another at almost twice the speed of light. After 15 billion years, this observer sees the galaxy as almost 30 billion light years away from the earth.
Now suppose that there was another observer who was on the earth at the creation. From this person’s perspective, the galaxy recedes from the earth at almost the speed of light, but no more. Nothing can move faster than speed of light! After 15 billion years, this observer sees galaxy as almost 15 billion light years away from the earth.
These two observations don’t seem to agree. The problem lies in how the two observers perceive time and space. According to special relativity, observers who are moving relative to one another don’t perceive time and space in the same way. Their perceptions will be so different that they will not even agree about just when 15 billion years has passed.
With this long introduction, here is the answer to your question: no distant galaxy in the observable universe can ever be farther from us than the distance light has traveled since the creation of the universe. Since that creation was about 15 billion years ago, the most distant possible galaxy is almost 15 billion light years away.
It doesn’t. When you dial a rotary phone, it briefly hangs itself up one time for every number on the dial. Thus if you dial a “5”, it hangs itself up briefly 5 times. In fact, you can dial the phone by tapping the switchhook briefly one time for every number. For example, if you want to dial a “5”, tap the switchhook (hang up the phone) briefly 5 times very quickly. It takes some skill, but you can “dial” just fine without ever touching the dial. It used to be that people installed key locks on the rotary dial to prevent unauthorized use of the telephone. Unfortunately, this action didn’t prevent someone with a nimble hand from dialing with the switchhook.