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.)

on Good Water

Source - http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-good-water

See, it's funny because hucksters say all sorts of crazy stuff about the water that they sell.

Whether they're selling ionized water...



...or anti-oxidizing, micro-clustering, alkalinized water...



These claims are bunk...hokum...pseudoscience. They would fail any psuedoscience test readily. Their 'scientific' evidence is anything but.

And the fact that Ian (the artist of Three Panel Soul - sometimes snsfw, you've been warned) mocks these claims by saying that the pitchman's (kind of looks like the Shamwow guy to me) water uses magnets to make the water molecules 25% smaller (impossible, atoms cannot be shrunk) and more efficient (at doing what, huh?).

See, it's funny...once you understand the science and explain it all to heck.

Tasks at Hand

Source - http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/tasks-at-hand

See, it's funny because you might think that a mountain made of rock candy would dissolve into the alcohol streams.

For those of you who aren't aware, "Big Rock Candy Mountain" is a song first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928 based partially on older hobo ballads telling tales of a more perfect world just a little further down the road.



That's Harry there singing the song.

In the chorus, you can hear the lines...

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
...
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws, nor picks,
I'ma goin' to stay
Where you sleep all day
Where they hung the Turk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain

Most of it isn't about chemistry but rather about a fantasy world where hobos were always heading to.

But would those alcohol streams really have such deleterious effects on a Big Rock Candy Mountain?

Well, assuming the rock candy is primarily sucrose and that alcohol streams are pure ethanol, not so much. See, the literature value for solubility of sucrose in ethanol is 0.6g / 100mL. That's much lower than sucrose's solubility in water (210g / 100mL). You can see that here.



If the 'little streams of alcohol' were actually spirits that you could purchase from a liquor store, though, they would be mixtures of alcohol and water (the percentage of alcohol is roughly equal to half the proof of the alcohol - 80 proof ~ 40% ethanol in water), then you'd have a much bigger problem.

But not as bad an erosion problem as you would have with just little steams of water.

Who knew?

What Causes Beef Rainbows?

Source - https://9gag.com/gag/anj1VRV/should-i-be-concerned-if-this-prepackaged-meat-is-shiny

I've seen those roast beef rainbows before, and I'll admit to having been a little freaked out by them.

I assumed that any greenish - even if it was iridescent greenish - wasn't good on meat. Turns out it's nothing to be worried about.

See, there are a few ways to make colors.

One is for there to be a light-absorbing dye. Like if you have a red shirt, it's been soaked in a chemical (a dye) that absorbs most of the colors of light except for the red wavelengths. That means that white light shone upon the shirt will reflect only the red light.

That's not what causes the roast beef rainbows.

Instead, they're formed by interference of light waves - as slightly explained in this Atlantic article or this Daily Mail article.

Source - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2287287/Why-beef-rainbow-NOT-tainted-Popular-myth-debunked-Department-Agriculture.html

When light is reflected off of a wet surface, some of the light reflects from different depths of the liquid. As the same white light reflects from different depths, the reflected light comes back slightly out of phase from the other light. This causes a diffraction pattern which leads to shimmering, shifting colors - like the rainbow from an oil slick on a puddle or a butterfly's wing.

Apparently the rainbow on roast beef is common enough that the USDA even has a page answering the following...

Meat contains iron, fat, and other compounds. When light hits a slice of meat, it splits into colors like a rainbow. There are various pigments in meat compounds that can give it an iridescent or greenish cast when exposed to heat and processing. Wrapping the meat in airtight packages and storing it away from light will help prevent this situation. Iridescence does not represent decreased quality or safety of the meat.

So, as Pink Floyd told us, you should eat your [rainbow] meat...how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

I guess that's one way to wash your glassware

That's my upload of a video I originally found here (warning, adult word in the link - video is school-appropriate, though).

So, what's happening here (I think)...

Clearly, something is burning. I don't see any fire, but the lighter lights 'something' inside the beaker. Because the fire is 'invisible', I'm assuming the inside of the beaker is coated in methanol. It might be ethanol or some other alcohol, but the fire isn't visible enough for me to think it's anything else.

The vapors burn, momentarily heating the inside of the beaker and pushing lots of gas out. Depending on the stoichiometry, it also uses up more moles of gas than it produces. If the water vapor then cools quickly enough, there's an even greater drop in moles of gas.

If the moles of gas inside the beaker decrease and the temperature decreases, the pressure is going to drop. That lets the outside air push the blue water into the beaker.

It's sort of like the ammonia fountain or the can crush demo, but this drop in gas moles is due primarily to combustion and temperature changes (I think.)

All that being said, the idea of igniting methanol vapors just seems stupid.

When you burn steel wool, it gets heavier

Anti-phlogiston at work, clearly!

Back in the day (primarily the 1700s), one of the prevailing theories of chemistry was that as materials burned, they released phlogiston, a gas that was somehow stored in the material (the wood, paper, whatever). That release of phlogiston made the material lighter.

It makes sense, right.

Sure, until you look at something like what you see above. The burning metal gets heavier as it burns. Maybe phlogiston has negative mass...or there's anti-phlogiston...or phlogiston just doesn't exist.

Along came Antoine Lavoisier in the 1770s and the discovery of oxygen. Now we know that the metallic oxide has metal AND oxygen, so it has more mass, more stuff, more weight.

But that took a looooong while to figure out.