Author: Lou Bloomfield

What is an H-Bomb made of?

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What is an H-Bomb made of?

A hydrogen bomb or thermonuclear bomb is a nuclear weapon that obtains most of its energy from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei. This fusion typically involves deuterium and tritium nuclei, the heavy isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium is a stable, naturally occurring isotope with one proton and one neutron in its nucleus, and can be extracted from normal water. Tritium is an artificial, radioactive isotope with one proton and two neutrons in its nucleus, and can be formed in nuclear reactors or, during a nuclear explosion, by the exposure of lithium nuclei to the neutrons formed in that explosion.

Since hydrogen nuclei are positively charged, they repel one another. To get these heavy hydrogen nuclei close enough together to fuse into helium nuclei, the hydrogen nuclei must be heated to fantastic temperatures. This heating is done with a fission bomb—a uranium or plutonium bomb. When the fission bomb explodes, its heat is enough to trigger the hydrogen bomb.

What is convection?

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What is convection? — DB, Corona, CA

Convection is the transfer of heat by a circulating fluid, such as air or water. This heat is carried from a hotter object to a colder object. The fluid first passes near the hotter object and receives heat. The fluid becomes warmer and more buoyant, and it’s lifted upward by the colder fluid around it—just as a hot air balloon is lifted upward by the colder air around it. The rising fluid carries the heat with it. Eventually the rising fluid spreads outward and it pass near colder objects, giving up its heat. The fluid becomes cooler and less buoyant, and soon it begins to descend back toward the ground. Eventually it’s drawn back past the hotter object and this cycle begins again.

How do sound waves travel in space?

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How do sound waves travel in space? — PS

When sound travels in air, it takes the form of compressions and rarefactions of that air. Similar compressions and rarefactions occur when sound travels in a liquid or in a solid. But sound can’t travel through space because space is entirely empty. Sound requires a medium in which to travel and space doesn’t contain any such medium. Astronauts talk to each other by radio during space walks. With nothing at all between them, they simply can’t hear one another directly.

How does a snow making machine work?

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How does a snow making machine work? — IB, Blue Ash, OH

A snow-making machine simply sprays a fine mist of water high into the cold air overhead, so that that mist can freeze into tiny particles of ice before falling back to the ground. If the air is cold enough, the mist will solidify before it hits the ground and before it has time to evaporate into water vapor. This freezing process isn’t as simple as it sounds because water can’t turn into an ice crystal without a seed on which that crystal can grow. Forming a seed crystal is a random process in which a couple of water molecules accidentally arrange themselves in a crystalline lattice. In snow making, each water droplet has only a few seconds in which to freeze and it can easily take that long for a seed crystal to form. However, people have found that adding certain chemicals or other materials to the water before spraying it into the air can speed the formation of seed crystals and dramatically increase the fraction of water that becomes artificial snow.

What is a vortex?

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What is a vortex? — M

A vortex is a region of fluid that’s circulating in one direction around a line passing through that region. If you imagine yourself looking along that line, you would see the fluid flowing either clockwise or counter-clockwise around the line itself. Tornadoes and whirlpools are both vortices since they involve fluids circulating in one direction around a central line.

Is it possible to construct “home-made” thermal windows (double pan) so conden…

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Is it possible to construct “home-made” thermal windows (double pan) so condensation can be avoided? I work in stained glass and want to make an energy efficient window. — JAA, York, PA

Yes, you should be able to make your own thermal windows. The value of having two vertical panes of glass that are separated by a narrow gap is that heat has trouble flowing across gap. While air is a poor conductor of heat, it carries heat reasonably well via convection. But with only a narrow gap of air between two vertical glass panes, convection doesn’t work well. Air heated by its contact with the warmer pane tends to flow directly upward, rather than toward the cooler pane. Similarly, air cooled by its contact with the cooler pane tends to flow directly downward, rather than toward the warmer pane.

But as you’ve anticipated, you may have trouble with condensation on the inside surface of the cooler pan. Your best bet at avoiding this problem is to completely seal the space between the two panes and to fill it with very dry air or even bottled nitrogen gas—which can be obtained cheaply from a local gas supply company. You’d have to blow the dry air or nitrogen in through one hole and allow the trapped air to flow out through another hole. After the trapped air has been replaced several times with dry gas and you’re sure there is little moisture left between the panes, you can stop replacing the air and seal both holes. But with stained glass, you have many potential gaps through which moisture can enter the trapped air, so achieving a seal could be very difficult. In that case, you might just put a desiccant at one edge of the window. Drierite is an inexpensive material that resembles little white pebbles and that can absorb quite a bit of moisture. If you put some Drierite between the two panes before you did your best to seal the space between them, I would expect the Drierite to remove enough moisture from the trapped air to avoid condensation problems. After a few years, enough moisture may have leaked in through cracks to cause trouble, in which case you would simply replace the Drierite. One useful type of Drierite is blue when fresh and turns pink when it has absorbed its fill of moisture.

My husband and I watch Star Trek often. He says that travel at warp speeds (fast…

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My husband and I watch Star Trek often. He says that travel at warp speeds (faster than the speed of light) is impossible and that Einstein’s theories prove it. Is this true? — JL, Las Cruces, NM

I’m afraid that travel at or above light speed is simply impossible and that “warp speed” travel is just a Hollywood fantasy. Einstein’s special relativity forbids objects with mass from reaching or exceeding the speed of light and even if there were some way to travel vast distances in less time than it would take light to cover those distances, but without actually traveling at light speed, such travel would violate some important principles of causality—you would be able to meet your own grandparents as children and that sort of thing.

One of the reasons that Hollywood ignores real physics so often is that real physics is almost wilder than fiction. Suppose that you decided to travel to a star 5 light-years away from the earth and that you have a starship that can almost reach the speed of light (another nearly impossible thing, but let’s ignore that problem). If you travel to the star at almost the speed of light, make one loop around it, and head right back to earth, I will have aged 10 years while waiting for you to return. However, you will only have aged days or weeks, depending on just how close you came to the speed of light. During the trip, we will have disagreed on many physical quantities, particularly the times at which various events occurred and the distances between objects. The mixing of time and space that occur when two people move rapidly relative to one another would be so disorienting to movie or television viewers that Hollywood ignores or simplifies these effects.

Our area has been flooded recently (Kentucky, Indiana) by about 15 inches of rai…

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Our area has been flooded recently (Kentucky, Indiana) by about 15 inches of rain. How is it that the Ohio River has risen so many feet and not just 15 inches? — RK

The Ohio River is carrying water collected by vast areas surrounding the river and this accumulated volume of water is enough to raise the river’s level by many feet. Similarly, if you collected all the rain water that accumulated on your yard and poured that water into a bathtub, the level of water in the bathtub would rise far more than 15 inches.

Can a rocket, starting back toward the earth from 30,000 feet, reach the speed o…

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Can a rocket, starting back toward the earth from 30,000 feet, reach the speed of sound before reaching the earth? — WJT, Crystal, MN

Some rockets probably reach the speed of sound in a few hundred feet heading upward, so that reaching the speed of sound in 30,000 feet heading downward would be a simple task. In fact, if you dropped a highly aerodynamic object such as a rocket from 30,000 feet, it could reach the speed of sound even without any propulsion! Gravity alone will accelerate it to about 130% of the speed of sound.

Can an object be heated no hotter than the temperature of the flame beneath it? …

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Can an object be heated no hotter than the temperature of the flame beneath it? For example, if the temperature of a candle flame is 1770° C and the melting point of the solid being heated above it is 1800° C, would the solid ever melt if the flame were held under it long enough? — MR, Ohio

The answer is a qualified no. Heat always flows from hotter objects to colder objects, so the solid can’t get any hotter than the flame that’s heating it. But this observation is stems from the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics. Unlike Newton’s laws of motion, which are rigid, inviolable laws that are never, even violated in our universe, the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical laws—it says that certain events are extremely unlikely but doesn’t say that they are truly impossible. The flow of heat from hotter to colder is a statistical law, not a rigid mechanical law. So it is possible, although extraordinarily unlikely, that heat can flow from the 1770° C flame to the 1799° C solid and warm that solid all the way to 1800° C. However, for any reasonable sized solid (say, more than 10 atoms), the possibility of this occurring is going to be so unbelievably small as to be ridiculous. It’s as unlikely as taken a crystal wineglass that has been crushed into dust and then dropping it on the floor and having the impact reassemble the wineglass into its original pristine form. The laws of motion don’t forbid such as fantastic result, but it sure would be unlikely. I’ve tried it several times myself, without success. But then, you’re not going to be able to melt your solid with a not-hot-enough flame, either. You’d have to wait a few ages of the universe just to have that solid climb a tiny fraction of a degree above the temperature of the flame. For 20 degrees… forget it.