Month: October 1997

How come if I stand on the balcony of my third story apartment and drop a hose t…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How come if I stand on the balcony of my third story apartment and drop a hose to the swimming pool down below, I can’t suck any water up through the hose into my mouth?

While it may seem that you are somehow attracting the water to your mouth when you suck, you are really just making it possible for air pressure to push the water up toward you. By removing much of the air from within the hose, you are lowering the air pressure in the hose. There is then a pressure imbalance at the bottom end of the hose: the pressure outside the hose is higher than the pressure inside it. It’s this pressure imbalance that pushes water into the hose and upward toward your mouth.

But air pressure can’t push the water upward forever. As the column of water in the hose rises, its weight increases. Atmospheric pressure can only lift the column of water so high before the upward force on the water is balanced by the water’s downward weight. Even if you remove all of the air inside the hose, atmospheric pressure can only support a column of water about 30 feet tall inside the hose. If you’re higher than that on your balcony, the water won’t reach you no matter how hard you try. The only way to send the water higher is to put a pump at the bottom end of the hose. This pump can push upward harder than atmospheric pressure can and it can support a taller column of water. That’s why deep home wells have submersible pumps at their bottoms—they must pump the water upward because it’s impossible to suck it upward more than 30 feet from above.

Does gravity have a speed at which it acts upon another body?

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Does gravity have a speed at which it acts upon another body? — CP, Billings, Montana

Yes, the speed of light. The gravitational interaction between two objects can be viewed as the exchange of particles called “gravitons,” just as the electromagnetic interaction between two objects can be viewed as the exchange of particles called “photons.” Gravitons and photons are both massless particles and therefore travel at a special speed: the “speed of light.” Since light is easier to work with than gravity, people discovered this special speed in the context of light first. If gravity had been easier to work with, they might have named it “the speed of gravity” instead. Sometime in the not too distant future, gravity-wave detectors such as the LIGO project will begin to observe gravity waves traveling through space from nearby cosmic events, particularly star collapses. These gravity waves will reach us at essentially the same time as light waves from those events since the gravity and light travel at the same speed.

How does a cassette tape recorder work?

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How does a cassette tape recorder work? — TW, Ottawa, Ontario

Like any tape recorder, a cassette recorder uses the magnetization of the tape’s surface to represent sound. The tape is actually a thin plastic film that’s coated with microscopic cigar-shaped permanent magnets. These particles are aligned with the tape’s length and can be magnetized in either of two directions—they can have their north magnetic poles pointing in the direction of tape motion or away from that direction. In a blank tape, the particles are magnetized randomly so that there are as many of them magnetized in one direction as the other. In this balanced arrangement, the tape is effectively non-magnetic. But in a recorded tape, the balance is upset and the tape has patches of strong magnetization. These magnetized patches represent sound.

When you are recording sound on the tape, the microphone measures the air pressure changes associated with the sound and produces a fluctuating electric current that represents those changes. This current is amplified and used to operate an electromagnet in the recording head. The electromagnet magnetizes the tape—it flips the magnetization of some of those tiny magnetic particles so that the tape becomes effectively magnetized in one direction or the other. The larger the pressure change at the microphone, the more current flows through the electromagnet and the deeper the magnetization penetrates into the tape’s surface. After recording, the tape is covered with tiny patches of magnetization, of various depths and directions. These magnetized patches retain the sound information indefinitely.

During playback, the tape moves past the playback head. As the magnetic fields from magnetized regions of the tape sweep past the playback head, they cause a fluctuating electric current to flow in that head. The process involved is called electromagnetic induction; a moving or changing magnetic field produces an electric field, which in turn pushes an electric current through a wire. The current from the playback head is amplified and used to operate speakers, which reproduce the original sound.

The rest of the cassette recorder is just transport mechanism—wheels and motors that move the tape smoothly and steadily past the recording or playback heads (which are often the same object). There is also an erase head that demagnetizes the tape prior to recording. It’s an electromagnet that flips its magnetic field back and forth very rapidly so that it leaves the tiny magnetic particles that pass near it with randomly oriented magnetizations.

I understand that the speed of electricity varies with the conductor, but is sup…

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I understand that the speed of electricity varies with the conductor, but is supposedly 2/3 the speed of light. I had thought the speed would equal the speed of light. Why isn’t it? — AP

Although electricity involves the movement of electrically charged particles through conducting materials, it can also be viewed in terms of electromagnetic waves. For example, programs that reach your home through a cable TV line are actually being carried by electromagnetic waves that travel in the cylindrical space between coaxial cable’s central wire and the tubular metal shield around it. These waves would travel at the speed of light, except that whenever charged particles in the wires interact with the passing waves, they introduce delays. The charged particles in the wires don’t respond as quickly as empty space does to changes in electric or magnetic fields, so they delay these changes and therefore slow down the waves. The materials that insulate the wires also influence the speed of the electricity by responding slowly to the changing fields. The fastest wires are ones with carefully chosen shapes and almost empty space for insulation. In general, the less the charges in the wire respond to the passing electromagnetic waves, the faster those waves can move.