Fantastic Physics

1. Dead of Night is a 1945 British horror film in which a young architect goes to a cottage and meets strangers who he has seen in his dreams before. On telling his story he gets strangled, but just before he dies he wakes up from a dream and the whole thing happens again. Basically the film changes but ends up the same and could continue for eternity. “This inspired three scientists in the theatre-Gold, Bondi and Hoyle, who had met while working at a radar station that had been erected to warn about bombing in London. “They came up with a revolutionary theory that explained a failed concept proposed by Albert Einstein fifteen years earlier as an alternative to the Big Bang Theory. What is this theory, which is now almost abandoned?

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2. The Moon is 3,747 km across. The Sun is 375 times bigger at 1.39 million km across. The Moon is currently 3,84,400 km from Earth. The sun is 390 times further at 149.6 million km. This extraordinarily close coincidence is responsible for what optical illusion?

3. On 21 April, 1820, during a lecture, Hans Christian Ørsted noticed a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off. He began intensive research and soon showed that electric current produces a circular magnetic field as it flows through a wire. This heralded the beginning of a new field that led to scientific innovation which accelerated technology rapidly. What important scientific property is credited to Ørsted?

4. The Large Hadron Collider has had an eventful existence since it was first switched on in 2008. At that time, the LHC had to be shut down due to a helium leak. When it was back up and running in 2009, it had to be shut down again when a section started overheating. Investigations revealed a surprising possible source for the power failure that caused the overheating, although CERN later published a clarification stating that it was all circumstantial evidence and it was likely just an electrical failure. What was this object that was supposed to have nearly become toast?

5. In yet another unfortunate incident, the LHC lost power again, when wiring connected to a 66,000 volt transformer was destroyed. This time there was no doubting the cause of the damage. What had brought down one of the most powerful machines in the world?

6. A famous scientist predicted that contrary to popular imagination, ‘black holes’ were not really black. They theoretically proved that these entities emitted light across the spectrum! What is the name given to this radiation from Black Holes, named after the scientist?

7. This scientist is credited with two important scientific breakthroughs. One is the discovery of methane, which eventually led to the production of cheaper fuels. The other is an invention that involved copper and zinc discs stacked on top of each other with weak acid in between each pair. Who was this amazing scientist and what was the name of his invention, which revolutionised science?

8. In 1903, three scientists were awarded the NobelPrize in Physics for work on a certain phenomenonknown as ‘Becquerel rays’. Two of the scientists had also done seminal work related to this by discovering and isolating two new elements. However, this was not mentioned in their citation, as certain chemists on the Nobel committee had surmised that that work by itself might also earn them a Nobel in Chemistry (it did!). Who were these three scientists?

ANSWERS:

1. Steady State Theory
2. That the sun and the moon are of almost the same size
3. Electromagnetism
4. A piece of bread dropped by a bird! While CERN admitted feathers and bread were found at the scene, their final statement claimed it was just an electrical malfunction
5. The wires had been chewed through by a beech marten, an animal from the weasel family
6. Hawking Radiation, after Stephen Hawking
7. Alessandro Volta; the Voltaic Pile (battery)
8. Henri Becquerel and Marie and Pierre Curie