Why our sewers are plagued by fatbergs

Don't pour grease and oil down the drain...pretty much ever.

See, sewage is washed down the pipes by the way of water. 

Water takes along with it things that are soluble in water...like salt...food coloring...the eventual product of goldfish 'sent back to the sea'...

...but not things that are NOT soluble in water...like oil...grease...

But it's even worse (as Hank Green tells us in the above video) because of the hydrogen sulfide created by bacteria in human waste. The hydrogen sulfide eventually turns to sulfuric acid which reacts with lime in concrete (which most of our sewers are made of) which eventually crumbles the concrete and releases calcium sulfate. The calcium sulfate then reacts with fatty acids (oils, grease) and turns them into soaps (a la Fight Club).

And whatever non-waste stuff you're flushing down the toilet ('flushable' wipes, tampons, whatever) is just making that stuff stick to the walls even worse.

Sewage stuff is gross, man...gross.

So, don't pour oil and fat down the drain.

Don't flush anything but poop, pee, and toilet paper.

Water in Boiling Oil

Do NOT ever pour water on an oil or grease fire!

Ever!

NEVER EVER!

See - as the above video shows - if the oil is hot enough to burn, it's probably hot enough to boil the water you're splashing on it. If the water is hot enough to boil, then its volume will increase about 1600 times meaning that even a tiny drop of water will expand massively and push the oil above it out of the way.

If enough water drops do that, the oil splashes out of the put and will often turn into tiny liquid droplets in the air. That's called aerosolizing (like how liquid droplets come out of an aerosol can).

Those tiny oil droplets then can ALL catch fire at once, turning a tiny fire into a conflagration. (That's a big fire, donchaknow).

Let's let the Slo Mo Guys (and a few other folks) show us that happening.

Large Number Formats

Source - https://xkcd.com/2319/

See, it's funny because the distance from Earth to Jupiter (a constantly changing distance, admittedly) is a really big number (citation needed), and really big numbers can be written in different ways.

First, as a normal person would write the number, it's 25,259,974,097,204 inches (not the most practical of units for this) from Earth to Jupiter. Admittedly, if we're using inches, your location on Earth very much matters as to the precision (14 significant figures???) of that measurement.

Rounding that off, that would be about 25 trillion inches. That's the same number but to only two digits of precision.

In British numbers - at least a while ago - a billion meant a 'million million' whereas in American English a billion meant a 'thousand million'. Hence the confusion there.

The 2.526 x 10¹³ is the same but to four significant digits and using proper scientific notation (something some of my students struggle with but that I continue to insist that they use, especially when we're dealing with numbers of atoms).

The scientist trying to avoid rounding up just kept everything until he or she got to a zero. Forget sig figs.

The software developer doesn't have superscripts. I don't get that, but I see students try to write that all the time - especially if they're just using a calculator with an E display.

I really don't understand floating point numbers, though I understand that programmers do.

The astronomer only cares about the order of magnitude involved. Everything else is just rounding at that level.

The set theorist includes every number underneath the actual number starting with the empty set.

And Abe would just divide the number by twenty and add the remainder. 

See, funny...

Spooky

Source - http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/spooky

See, it's funny because Schrödinger's (the umlaut is important, don't forget it) cat is a famous thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat is placed in a hypothetical box along with a flask of poison, a radioactive source, and some kind of monitor that detects radioactivity. If the monitor detects radioactivity (something that happens with 50% frequency in a certain amount of time), the monitor breaks the flask with the poison, killing the cat. If not, the flask remains unbroken, and the cat lives.

Until the box is opened, however, the cat's fate is unknown, leading to a quantum superposition in which the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened, collapsing the two possibilities into one reality.

It's a thing that shows up in popular culture from time to time, most famously on the AWFUL SERIES The Big Bang Theory.

But here's the deal, yo...

Schrödinger wasn't in favor of the thought experiment. He didn't like it. He was using it to suggest that the idea of quantum superposition was absurd.

From wikipedia...

Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.

...

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

...

(Written by Einstein to Schrödinger) You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.

So, I would imagine that Schrödinger would be appalled that his non-scientific legacy has come down to people knowing him for a theoretical experiment that he came up with in an attempt to point out how ludicrous quantum superpositions are.

And I love the idea that Schrödinger's ghost haunts the world embracing anyone who recognizes that 'his experiment' is ridiculous and stupid.

That was his point.

(Though I would be remiss if I didn't point out that quantum superpositions have turned out probably to be 100% true and real.)