We learn about some awesome science in high school - like Newton theory of gravitation, the Periodic table, and DNA replication.
The knowledge we pick up there sets the foundations for all the other amazing things we go on to study. But science definitely doesn't end at high school, and it's once you take your learning to the next level that things get really interesting.
In no particular order, here are some mind-bendingly incredible facts that we didn't learn at high school, but wish we did. Because I certainly would have paid a whole lot more attention if my teacher had shared a few of these insights in class.
Water can boil and freeze at the same time.
Yes it is indeed true and this phenomena is known as the triple point.
It occurs when the pressure and the temperature are just right for all the three states- Liquid, solid and water, of a substance to coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium.
The single combination of pressure and temperature at which liquid water, solid ice, and water vapour can coexist in a stable equilibrium occurs at exactly 0.01°C (273.16 K) and a partial vapor pressure of 611.657 pascals.
At this point, water can exist in all three states!
It takes a photon up to 40,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to its surface, but only 8 minutes to travel the rest of the way to Earth.
A photon travels, on average, a particular distance before being briefly absorbed and released by an atom, which scatters it in a new random direction. To travel from the sun’s core to the sun’s surface (696,000 kilometers) so it can escape into space, a photon needs to make a huge number of drunken jumps.
The calculation is a little tricky, but the conclusion is that a photon takes many thousands and many millions of years to drunkenly wander to the surface of the Sun. In a way, some of the light that reaches us today is energy produced millions of years ago. Amazing!
If you put Saturn on water it will float. Saturn is made of gas and is lighter than water.
It's just a bombastic and pointless way of saying that the average density of Saturn is less than the average density of water at standard ambient conditions on Earth (25ºC, 1 atm). Objects less dense than water would float on water, ergo, Saturn would float on water.
Of course, that should read: if it was possible to have a body of water large enough to contain Saturn (it's not) and if it was possible to keep it at standard ambient conditions (it's not) and if it was possible to place Saturn on it while retaining its current structure (it's not) then Saturn would float. As you can guess, that's a lot of impossible ifs.
Some Quick facts about Avogadro Number
• If there were a mole of rice grains, all the land area in the whole world would be covered with rice to a depth of about 75 meters.
• One mole of rice grains is more grains than all the grain that has been grown since the beginning of time.
• One mole of rice would occupy a cube about 190 kilometres on an edge!
• Computers can count at the rate of over 800 million counts per second. At this rate it would take a computer over 25 million years to count to 6.02 x 10²³
A laser can get trapped in water.
Yes, it is actually possible to trap a laser beam in water. It happens due to a phenomenon called total internal reflection which occurs when light travels through a dense material and hits boundary of a material which has lesser density. If the critical angle is shallow enough, then, the light will reflect.
That's all fascinating, but the coolest part about this whole experiment is that it's actually a perfect demonstration of how optical fibers work - you know, the fibers that are inside those cables that give us the internet.
Because they're made up of long fibers of glass or plastic, these fiber optic cables can trap beams of light, just like the waterfalls, and can guide it anywhere it is needed.
If you took out all the empty space in our atoms, the human race could fit in the volume of a sugar cube.
The atoms that make up the world around us seem solid but are in fact over 99.99999 per cent empty space. An atom consists of a tiny, dense nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons, spread over a proportionately vast area. This is because as well as being particles, electrons act like waves. Electrons can only exist where the crests and troughs of these waves add up correctly. And instead of existing in one point, each electron’s location is spread over a range of probabilities – an orbital. They thus occupy a huge amount of space.
Every hydrogen atom in your body is likely 13.5 billion years old because they were created at the birth of the universe.
At ground zero, during the Universe’s singularity, the very first chemical element was hydrogen. All the other followed by fusing hydrogen into helium, which then fused into carbon and so on. Approximately 73% of the mass of the visible universe is in the form of hydrogen. Helium makes up about 25% of the mass, and everything else represents only 2%. By mass, hydrogen and helium combined make up less than 1% of the Earth.
