Month: April 1997

How does the telephone work?

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How does the telephone work? — JB, Sydney, Nova Scotia

A telephone uses an electric current to convey sound information from your home to that of a friend. When the two of you are talking on the telephone, the telephone company is sending a steady electric current through your telephones. The two telephones, yours and that of your friend, are sharing this steady current. But as you talk into your telephone’s microphone, the current that your telephone draws from the telephone company fluctuates up and down. These fluctuations are directly related to the air pressure fluctuations that are the sound of your voice at the microphone.

Because the telephones are sharing the total current, any change in the current through your telephone causes a change in the current through your friend’s telephone. Thus as you talk, the current through your friend’s telephone fluctuates. A speaker in that telephone responds to these current fluctuations by compressing and rarefying the air. The resulting air pressure fluctuations reproduce the sound of your voice. Although the nature of telephones and the circuits connecting them have changed radically in the past few decades, the telephone system still functions in a manner that at least simulates this behavior.

How does a relay work?

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How does a relay work? — CS, Fairfax, Virginia

A relay is an electromagnetically operated switch. It contains a coil of wire that acts as an electromagnet. Since electric currents are magnetic, this coil of wire develops north and south magnetic poles whenever current passes through it. A metal core is often placed inside the coil of wire to enhance its magnetism. Adjacent to the coil of wire is a moveable piece of iron. While iron normally appears nonmagnetic when it’s by itself, it becomes highly magnetic whenever it’s exposed to a nearby magnetic pole. The iron piece becomes magnetic as current flows through the coil and the two are attracted toward one another. As the iron piece shifts toward the coil, it moves various electric contacts that are attached to it. These contacts close some circuits while opening others. The coil remains magnetic and continues to hold the iron piece near it until current stops flowing through the coil. When the current does stop, the coil loses its magnetism and so does the iron piece. A spring in the relay then pulls the two apart and the electric contacts return to their original positions.

Why are there two tides per day?

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Why are there two tides per day? — JF

The tide is caused primarily by the moon’s gravity. Gravity is what keeps the moon and earth together as a pair—the moon and earth orbit one another because each is exerting an attractive force on the other. While they are effectively falling toward one another as the result of this gravitational attraction, their sideways motion keeps them from smashing together and they instead travel in elliptical paths around a common center of mass. But the moon’s gravity is slightly stronger on the near side of the earth than it is on the far side of the earth. As a result, the water on the near side of the earth bulges outward toward the moon. The water on the far side of the earth also bulges outward because the earth itself is falling toward the moon slightly faster than that more distant water is. The distant water is being left behind as a bulge.

There are thus two separate tidal bulges in the earth’s oceans: one on the side nearest the moon and one on the side farthest from the moon. But the earth rotates once a day, so these bulges move across the earth’s surface. Since there are two bulges, a typical seashore passes through two bulges a day. At those times, the tide is high. During the times when the seashore is between bulges, the tide is low. Because the moon moves as the earth turns, high tides occur about 12 hours and 26 minutes apart, rather than every 12 hours. Since local water must flow to form the bulges as the earth rotates, there are cases where the tides are delayed as the water struggles to move through a channel. However, even in those cases, the high tides occur every 12 hours and 26 minutes. The sun’s gravity also contributes to the tides, but its effects are smaller and serve mostly to vary the heights of high and low tide.

I’m helping on a lesson plan for grades 3-12 where students make ice cream. Addi…

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I’m helping on a lesson plan for grades 3-12 where students make ice cream. Adding salt to the ice makes the ice colder. I’m having trouble explaining why we put salt on the roads to melt ice, but in making ice cream the salt actually lowers the temperature of the ice. — N

These two observations—that salt melts ice and that salt makes ice colder—are actually consistent with one another. When you add salt to ice, you make a relatively ordered mixture—pure crystalline ice and pure crystalline salt. This orderly arrangement is looked on unfavorably by nature; given a chance, nature tends to maximize randomness. There is a much more disorderly arrangement available—salt water—and nature tends toward disorderly arrangements. When you put the salt and ice together, nature’s tendency toward randomness begins to drive the system to rearrange. The ice begins to melt so that the salt can dissolve in it. Although the melting of ice requires energy, the randomness this melting and dissolving produces makes this process take place. The energy needed to melt the ice is extracted from the remaining ice and that ice gets colder. When you’re making ice cream, some of the energy needed to melt the ice also comes from the ice cream mix, so that it gets colder, too. If there is enough salt around, the ice will melt completely to form very cold salt water—the desired result with salt on a slippery sidewalk. The salt water remains liquid well below the normal freezing temperature of water because forming ice crystals would require the salt and water to separate from one another—an orderly and therefore unlikely event. In short, nature’s trend toward disorder causes salt to melt ice, even though that melting lowers the temperatures of everything involved well below the freezing temperature of pure water.

What is the relationship between gravitational force and electromagnetic force?

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What is the relationship between gravitational force and electromagnetic force? — TPC, Foster, OK

As yet, there is no direct relationship between those two forces. Our best current understanding of gravitational forces is as disturbances in the structure of space itself while our best current understanding of electromagnetic forces involves the exchanges of particles known as virtual photons. However, physicists are trying to develop a quantum theory of gravity that would identify gravitational forces with the exchange of particles known as gravitons. How closely such a quantum theory of gravity would resemble the current quantum theory of electromagnetic forces (a theory called quantum electrodynamics) is uncertain. It’s also uncertain whether those two quantum theories will be able to merge together into a single more complete theory. Only time will tell.

How would I go about making a camera that’s more than just a pinhole camera?

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How would I go about making a camera that’s more than just a pinhole camera? — JL, Longview, WA

While a pinhole will project the image of a scene on a piece of film, it doesn’t collect very much light. That’s why a pinhole camera requires very long exposures. A better camera makes use of a converging lens. If you hold a magnifying glass several inches away from a white sheet of paper, you will see that it forms a real image of anything on the other side of it—particularly bright things such as light bulbs or well-lighted windows. A typical camera uses a converging lens that’s not unlike a magnifying glass to form an image of this sort. You could use a magnifying glass to build a camera, but I’d suggest that you start with a camera and rebuild it yourself. Go to a company that processes film and see if they will give you any used disposable cameras. These cameras are of essentially no value to them and they either discard them or recycle them. If you ask around, you should find a photo shop that will give you a couple. You can then disassemble them. You’ll find a very nice lens, a shutter system, a film advance mechanism, and so on. You can use a toothpick or small screwdriver to turn the exposure dial backward so that the camera behaves as though it still has film left. You can then “advance the (non-existent) film” by turning the film sensing gears in the back of the camera with your fingers until the shutter cocks. Finally, you can press the shutter release and watch the shutter open the lens to light. Disposable cameras are great because if you break something in your experimenting, you can just throw away your mistake.

How does an overhead projector work?

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How does an overhead projector work? — SR, Hartford, CT

An overhead projector uses a converging lens and a mirror to project a real image of your transparency onto a screen. A lamp brightly illuminates the transparency and a special surface under the transparency (actually a Fresnel lens) directs the light from the transparency through the projector’s main lens. This lens bends the light rays in such a way that all of the rays spreading outward from one point on the transparency bend back together and merge to one point on the screen. For example, if you make a green dot on the transparency, light rays spread outward from that green dot and some of them pass through the main lens. The lens bends these rays back together so that they form a single green dot on the screen. There is a single point on the screen for the light rays from each point on the transparency.

The pattern of light that forms on the screen is called a real image because it looks just like the original object—in this case the transparency—and it’s real, meaning that you can touch it with your hand. Real images are usually upside-down and backward, but the overhead projector uses its mirror to flip the image over so that it appears right side up. Because of this vertical flip, the side-to-side reversal is a good thing—the right side of the transparency becomes the left side of the screen image (as viewed by the same person) and the screen image is readable.

What path does sunlight follow for you to see a mirage?

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What path does sunlight follow for you to see a mirage? — XF

The first step in explaining a mirage is to understand why the sky is blue, or why it has any color at all. If it weren’t for the earth’s atmosphere, the sky would be black and dotted with stars. That’s how the moon’s sky appears. But the earth’s atmosphere deflects some of the sunlight that passes through it, particularly short-wavelength light such as blue and violet, and this scattered light (Rayleigh scattering) gives the sky its bluish cast. When you look at the blue sky, you’re seeing particles of light that have been scattered away from their original paths into new paths so that they reach your eyes from all directions.

The blue light from the sky normally travels directly toward your eyes so that you see it coming from the sky. But when there is a layer of very hot air near the ground in the distance, some of the blue light from the sky in front of you bends upward toward your eyes. This light was traveling toward the ground in front of you at a very shallow angle but it didn’t hit the ground. Instead, its entry into the hot air layer bent it upward so that it arced away from the ground and toward your eyes. When you look at the ground far in front of you, you see this deflected light from the blue sky turned up at you by the air and it looks as though it has reflected from a layer of water in front of you. This bending of light that occurs when light goes from higher-density cold air to lower-density hot air is called refraction, the same effect that bends light as light enters a camera lens or a raindrop or a glass of water. Whenever light changes speeds, it can experience refraction and light speeds up in going from cold air to hot air. In this case, the light bends upward, missing the ground and eventually reaching your eyes.

I read a recent article about the FCC requiring all TV stations to switch to dig…

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I read a recent article about the FCC requiring all TV stations to switch to digital signals instead of analog ones by 2006. How are digital signals different from analog signals, and will they work with our current TV’s? — JP

Current video signals use continuous physical quantities to represent the brightness and color of the spots on a television screen. For example, the current in a video cable can take any value and that value is used to represent the brightness and color of the spots. This use of a continuous physical quantity (such as current) to represent a continuous physical quantity (such as brightness) is called analog representation.

In a digital video signal, a physical quantity first represents numbers and then these numbers represent the brightness and color of the spots. The physical quantity representing the numbers doesn’t have to be continuous. For example, a current that’s on could represent the number 1 while a current that’s off could represent the number 0. A certain pattern of on and off currents could represent larger numbers and these numbers could then represent brightness and color. This use of a continuous or non-continuous physical quantity (such as magnetization, charge, or current) to represent numbers and then these numbers to represent a continuous physical quantity (such as brightness) is called digital representation.

One advantage of digital representation is that it’s relatively immune to noise. In analog representation, any disturbance in the continuous physical quantity representing the information leads directly to a disturbance in the recovered information. For example, if the strength of a radio wave is representing brightness and color on your television (the current technique), then any disturbance of the radio wave leads directly to a damaged image on your television. But in digital representation, small changes in the physical quantity that’s carrying the information won’t change the numbers that are obtained from that physical quantity and will thus have absolutely no effect on the recovered information. For example, if the strength of a radio wave is representing numbers in digital format, using binary (base two) encoding, then a small disturbance of the radio wave will not affect the binary numbers that are recovered from the radio wave. To see why that’s true, imagine representing the number 1 as a powerful radio wave and a 0 as no radio wave at all. It’s pretty easy to tell a powerful radio wave from an absent one so that, even if there is some radio interference around, it’s unlikely to confuse the receiver. Moreover, even if noise does occasionally confuse the receiver about a number or two, the digital scheme can include redundant information that allows the receiver to identify errors and to fix them! That’s why a compact disk is so immune to noise—even if there is a flaw or dirty spot on the disk, there is enough redundant digital information to reproduce the music flawlessly.

The other advantage to digital representation is that digital compression techniques become possible. A typical video signal contains lots of unnecessary and duplicated information. For example, when two people are standing in a room and the only things that are changing with time are the images of those two people, there is really no reason to keep sending an image of the room itself from the broadcast station to your home. Digital compression can identify redundant information and remove it from the transmission. In doing so, it can use the communication channel more efficiently.

By adopting a digital transmission scheme, the FCC has recognized that broadcasters will be able to send much clearer, more detailed images using digital representations than with the current analog representations, while still occupying the same portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, there is a cost—current televisions will not work directly with these new digital signals. To fix that shortcoming, there will be inexpensive converters that receive the new digital signals and recreate the analog signals needed for current televisions. This conversion will allow older televisions to keep working, but the new digital televisions will be designed to make better use of the enhanced details in the transmissions. The new transmissions will contain about 4 times the detail of current transmissions so that the images will be sharper as well as more immune to noise than the current transmissions.

Why does water freeze at very low pressure? I saw an experiment in which a small…

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Why does water freeze at very low pressure? I saw an experiment in which a small amount of water first boiled and then froze solid when exposed to a vacuum. — BLG, Old Bridge, NJ

Water molecules are always leaving the surface of liquid water and when they do, they carry away more than their fair share of the water’s thermal energy. Placing the water in a vacuum speeds this process because (1) it prevents those gaseous water molecules from returning to the liquid water, in which case they would return the thermal energy, and (2) it makes it possible for bubbles of water vapor to remain stable inside the liquid water even at low temperature, so that the water can boil. Overall, the main effect of putting the water in a vacuum is that its molecules leave rapidly and don’t return. Since each leaving water molecule takes away more than its fair share of thermal energy, the water molecules that remain behind become cooler and cooler. You experience this effect when evaporating water from your skin makes you feel cold. In the present case, this cooling is so effective that the remaining water cools all the way to water’s freezing point and the water begins to crystallize into ice. Water molecules continue to leave the surface of ice, a process called sublimation, so that even the ice gradually gets colder in the vacuum.