Methinks swimming in the outdoor pool is over for this summer. I emerged from the pool at lunchtime feeling that I’d just spent a day in Antarctica. I’m told that the peak daily temperature has now dropped to about 22 degrees. Twenty-two? It doesn’t sound that bad. If the air temperature were 22 it would […]
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Kitchen Physics
The Baked Alaska is an experiment that is certainly worth doing at home. The idea is that you place a block of icecream on a sponge base, and then smother it in meringue (for those who have only ever bought a pavlova, that means well beaten (stiff) egg white, with sugar folded in, about 50 grammes […]
Continue readingThe second law of thermodynamics
So now you know the first law – what’s the second law? This one is a whole lot easier to define since you don’t need to fret over what exactly energy IS, and, historically speaking, it was understood long before the first law. (It is relegated to being the second law of thermodynamics since the first […]
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