Author: Lou Bloomfield

If living organisms maintain their order by exporting disorder to their environm…

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If living organisms maintain their order by exporting disorder to their environment, do they create more disorder than the order they maintain? — CC

Living organisms create more disorder in their surroundings than they create order in themselves. Overall the disorder of the combined system—organisms and environment—increases. This result is an unavoidable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which notes that the entropy (disorder) of an isolated system can never decrease. While it is possible in principle for a living organism to export disorder so efficiently that the overall disorder remains unchanged, that perfection is never achieved. Instead, living organisms export far more disorder than is required for them to maintain order in themselves. As a result, living organisms are net producers of disorder.

In that respect, people are much more vigorous producers of disorder than most other living organisms. People seek order not only in their bodies, but also in the objects around them and they achieve this ordering by consuming order in their environment—fossil fuels, minerals, pure water—at a furious pace and producing disorder in its place—burned gases, garbage, polluted water. Fortunately, sunlight is a tremendous source of order for our earth and it undoes some of the disordering caused by living organisms. However, we are consuming much of the order that sunlight stored on earth over millions of years in only a few generations. At this pace, we’re destined to have troubles with the disorder we’re creating. Many of the environmental issues that face us today can be viewed from this order/disorder perspective: we have to learn how to create less disorder.

Is there a standard time that one should wait before eating food that has been h…

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Is there a standard time that one should wait before eating food that has been heated in a microwave oven? – M

Apart from the usual precautions with hot food, there is nothing unsafe about food cooked in a microwave oven. You can eat it the instant the microwave oven turns off. The microwaves in the oven are absorbed so quickly that they vanish almost immediately after the oven stops producing them. By the time you get the oven door open, there is nothing hazardous left inside the cooking chamber or in the food. However, a microwave oven tends to heat foods unevenly, particularly if they were initially frozen. Thus you should be careful to stir the food or test its temperature at various places so that you don’t burn yourself. You should be particularly wary of solid foods, such as raisin biscuits, that are generally dry but have moist, microwave-absorbing objects inside them. Those moist objects can become dangerously hot and have been known to cause life-threatening burns in people who tried to swallow them without letting them cool off.

That said, a reader notes that the uneven cooking in a microwave oven can lead to bacterial safety problems—if parts of the food aren’t heated sufficiently to kill dangerous bacteria, then you could be exposing yourself to those bacteria. He suggests using the microwave oven for reheating only. He also notes that the lack of surface heating leaves the food relatively tasteless, as compared to more conventional cooking.

How do you determine the critical mass of a particular radioactive element or is…

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How do you determine the critical mass of a particular radioactive element or isotope? – F, United Kingdom

This questions asks how you can predict the amount of a fissionable nuclear fuel you must assemble in order for that fuel to experience self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reactions. A self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction can only occur when each fission within that material causes an average of one subsequent fission. The size, shape, and density of the nuclear fuel are important to the chain reaction because they determine how much opportunity fragments from one fission event will have at inducing subsequent events elsewhere within the fuel. A properly shaped piece of fuel that is just large enough and dense enough to experience a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction is said to be at critical mass. Below the critical mass, the chain reaction won’t be able to sustain itself and will gradually dwindle away. Above the critical mass, the chain reaction will grow stronger exponentially. Since crossing the threshold from below critical mass to above critical mass has dramatic consequences, it can be quite important to know the point at which it occurs.

The basic calculation of critical mass is straightforward in principle, but it requires a thorough understanding of the nuclear fuel. Because you need to know how likely one nuclear fission is to cause a subsequent nuclear fission, you must know both the types of fragments you can expect from the first nuclear fission and the likelihood that each fragment will induce a subsequent fission in another atomic nucleus before that it escapes from the nuclear fuel. Because the range of possible fragments, their kinetic energies, and their paths through the nuclear fuel are so vast, an accurate calculation of critical mass is extremely complicated. As an indication of the difficulty, note that fission fragments may bounce off nuclei without inducing fission, so that you must consider bent paths as well as straight ones. Not surprisingly, the calculation of critical mass is too difficult to do exactly, even with the help of computers. In fact, one of the reasons that Germany didn’t develop nuclear weapons during World War II was that its scientists miscalculated the critical mass of a fission bomb based on enriched uranium and thought that they would need many tons of enriched uranium rather than the true critical mass of about 52 kilograms. Certain that a critical mass of enriched uranium was unattainable, they didn’t pursue the project.

How is the high explosive used in a fission bomb detonated so precisely together…

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How is the high explosive used in a fission bomb detonated so precisely together? – F, United Kingdom

Most modern nuclear weapons produce a super-critical mass of fissionable nuclear fuel by crushing a sphere of that material with high explosives. As the material’s size shrinks, its density increases and it passes rapidly through critical mass to achieve a highly super-critical mass. Nuclear chain reactions then grow exponentially in the material and huge amounts of energy are released. However, the process of crushing a solid sphere of metal to several times its normal density requires sophisticated high explosives triggered at precisely the right moments. The triggering is done with very high-speed electronic devices and explosive detonators that respond almost instantly to high voltage pulses. Perhaps the most critical components in this system are high speed, high voltage switches known as krytron tubes. Because these devices have limited uses outside of nuclear weapons, their export is tightly controlled and it’s a big news story whenever someone is caught trying to smuggle them outside the United States.

What about the effects of microwaves on the cellular structure of the item in th…

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What about the effects of microwaves on the cellular structure of the item in the oven? I’ve heard that cells are ruptured violently by microwave radiation and that the ingestion of such materials affects the immune system. – AB

Just about any cooking damages the cells of the food being cooked, so microwave cooking is nothing unusual. Since our digestive systems destroy cells in the food we eat, cellular damage in cooking is inconsequential. As for the rumors about the unhealthiness of food cooked in a microwave oven, these are simply myths promulgated by people who don’t understand what microwaves are and fear them irrationally. The world was awash in microwaves from natural sources long before the developments of electricity and microwave ovens.

You stated that thermodynamics overwhelms just about everything sooner or later….

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You stated that thermodynamics overwhelms just about everything sooner or later. Could you explain why? — MT, San Antonio, Texas

Thermodynamics is a statistical science that deals with systems that are so complicated or vast that they can’t be followed in complete detail. It makes predictions of behavior based on probability theory and while some of its laws predict probable outcomes rather than certain outcomes, a sufficiently probably event is effectively a certain event. For example, I can say with near certainty that if you play the lottery 50 times, you won’t win the jackpot 50 times. I can’t be truly certain of that fact, but the likelihood of my prediction being correct is pretty good.

In a sense, probability is destiny. Thermodynamics observes that vast systems tend to evolve toward the mostly likely configurations. To understand this process, consider what happens when you mix hot and cold water. The most likely final configuration for the mixed water is for it to reach a uniform temperature about half way in between the two original temperatures. While it’s possible for the water to end up extremely hot in one place and extremely cold in another, that outcome is extremely unlikely. It’s so unlikely that it never happens.

So in what sense does thermodynamics overwhelm things? The world is filled with relatively ordered arrangements and these ordered arrangements are unlikely by themselves (how they came to be ordered in the first place is another matter for another questions). If you take a crystal vase and drop it on the floor, it’s going to evolve toward a more likely arrangement of atoms and dropping it a second time isn’t going to return it toward its original unlikely state. In short, ordered systems naturally drift toward disorder when given a chance. How quickly they drift depends on their situation. A coffee cup will remain a nicely ordered object for thousands or millions of years if you don’t disturb it. But in a hot environment, or one that is chemically aggressive, it may not last very long.

One last thought: how do living organisms maintain their order in the face of this tendency to disorder? They do it by consuming order and exporting disorder—they eat ordered foods and release disordered wastes to their surroundings.

I understand that an ear thermometer measures a person’s temperature by studying…

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I understand that an ear thermometer measures a person’s temperature by studying the thermal radiation emitted by their ear. What is the farthest range that a person can emit thermal radiation that can still be received? Does this range depend on how hot the inner person is? — M

The thermal radiation that a person emits is mostly infrared light and, like all light, it can travel forever if nothing gets in its way. In principle, if you can observe something through a telescope, you can also measure its temperature. For example, astronomers can measure the temperature of a distant star by studying the star’s spectrum of thermal radiation.

However, there are several complications when using this technique to measure a person’s temperature. First, anything that lies between the person and you, and that absorbs or emit thermal radiation, will affect your measurement. That’s because some of the thermal radiation that appears to be coming from the person may be coming from those in between things. Fortunately, air is moderately transparent to thermal radiation but many other things aren’t. In fact, to get an accurate reading of person’s temperature, you’d have to cool the telescope and the light detector so that they don’t add their own thermal radiation to what you observe. You’d also have to use a mirror telescope because glass optics absorb infrared light.

Second, the temperature that you observe will be that of the person’s skin and not their inner core temperature. That’s because the person’s skin absorbs any infrared light from inside the person and it emits its own infrared light to the world around the person. You can’t observe infrared light from inside the person because the person’s skin blocks your view. All you see is their skin temperature.

What do engineers have to consider about waves when they are building bridges?

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What do engineers have to consider about waves when they are building bridges? — K

There are two answers to this question because there are two possible interpretations of the word “waves.” If you mean waves in the water beneath the bridge, then naturally the engineers must plan for the forces exerted on the bridge by the moving water that flows around its surfaces. But a more interesting wave issue is waves in the bridge itself. The bridge’s surface can experience waves, just as a taut rope or a long beam can have waves running through it. For example, when a heavy object drops on the surface of the bridge, a ripple heads outward along the bridge surface and doesn’t stop completely until it reaches the ends of the bridge. In fact, the wave will reflect from various portions of the bridge and its effects may not disappear for many seconds after the incident that started the waves.

Most of the time, these waves aren’t important and can be ignored. But occasionally some special event will cause enormous waves to begin traveling through a bridge. The classic example was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State that collapsed in 1940 when wind-driven waves in its surface ripped it apart. The entire collapse was captured on film and is a fascinating to watch. When a large group of soldiers crosses a footbridge, they are often instructed to break step so that their rhythmic cadence doesn’t excite intense waves that might damage the bridge. In general, modern bridges are engineered to dampen these waves—wasting their energy through friction or friction-like effects so that they die away quickly. While it might be fun to watch waves traveling along the surface of a bridge from a safe vantage point, you probably wouldn’t want to be on a bridge when it was experiencing strong ones.

How does an ear thermometer work so quickly?

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How does an ear thermometer work so quickly? — SN, West Covina, California

An ear thermometer examines the spectrum of thermal radiation emitted by the inner surfaces of a person’s ear. All objects emit thermal electromagnetic radiation and that radiation is characteristic of their temperatures—the hotter an object is, the brighter its thermal radiation and the more that radiation shifts toward shorter wavelengths. The thermal radiation from a person’s ear is in the invisible infrared portion of the light spectrum, which is why you can’t see people glowing. But the ear thermometer can see this infrared light and it uses the light to determine the ear’s temperature. The thermometer’s thermal radiation sensor is very fast, which accounts for the speed of the measurement.