How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

by Randall Munroe

The saga of the government’s nuclear war on beer is cataloged in a 17-page report titled The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages

Siphons are driven by atmospheric pressure, and Earth’s air pressure is only capable of pushing water up 30 feet against gravity.

High-frequency sounds are absorbed by air as they travel through it, so they fade out quickly. That’s why nearby thunder makes a higher-pitched “cracking” sound, while faraway thunder makes a low rumble. They both sound the same at the source, but over a long distance, the high-frequency components of the thunder are muffled and only the low-frequency ones reach your ear.

Heat energy naturally flows from warmer areas to cooler ones. When you put ice cubes in a warm drink, the heat leaves the drink and flows into the ice cubes, warming the ice while cooling the drink, bringing them both toward equilibrium. The second law of thermodynamics says that heat energy always wants to flow in this direction: the ice never spontaneously heats up the drink while getting colder. Moving heat from a colder area to a warmer one, against this natural flow, requires a heat pump, which takes energy to operate.

different countries and organizations often use slightly different latitude and longitude grids—geodetic datums—which are anchored to a particular tectonic plate. These grids move with the plate, and may differ from one another by several meters or more. Thanks to these different grids, no latitude/longitude coordinates are ever really precise and unambiguous without lots of information about the datum they’re in.

Usain Bolt is the current world record holder in most sprinting events. He’s the fastest person in the world . . . unless you need to run farther than a few hundred meters. His time in the 400-meter sprint is good, but more than two seconds behind the world record.* At distances beyond that, he doesn’t even match a good high school sprinter. Bolt’s agent told The New Yorker that Bolt has never run a mile.

You can use Google’s walking directions to try to find the two points on Earth with the longest walking distance between them. The points change over time as Google updates its maps, but science artist Martin Krzywinski has collected a list of them. One promising candidate is a trip from Quoin Point, in South Africa, to Magadan, a city on the eastern coast of Russia. This route is about 14,000 miles long. It crosses through 16 countries, involves ferries over a number of rivers and canals,* and makes more than two dozen total border crossings. All in all, the walking itinerary includes roughly 2,000 individual directions.

Given how much time modern physics spends on deep and abstract mysteries like searching for gravitational waves or the Higgs boson, it can be surprising how many basic everyday phenomena aren’t well understood. In addition to ice skates, physicists don’t really understand what causes electric charges to build up in thunderstorms, why sand in an hourglass flows at the speed it does, or why your hair gets a static charge when you rub it with a balloon. Fortunately, skiers and skaters can slide on snow and ice without waiting for physicists to finish figuring things out.

When large spacecraft enter the atmosphere without a heat shield, between 10 percent and 40 percent of their mass usually makes it to the surface, and the rest melts or evaporates. This is why heat shields are so popular.

a team of Japanese researchers planned to try this by launching paper airplanes from the ISS. They designed the planes to survive the heat and pressure of reentry, but, sadly, the project never went through.