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    Why?: Answers to everyday scientific questions
    Why?: Answers to everyday scientific questions
    Why?: Answers to everyday scientific questions
    Ebook184 pages1 hour

    Why?: Answers to everyday scientific questions

    By Joel Levy

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    About this ebook

    Why?: Scientific Answers to Fundamental Questions sets out to provide simple answers to the most fundamental questions about the world. Asking why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? Why do we need sleep? Why are there 24 hours in a day? Why is light faster than sound?, this book gets to grips with concepts that appear so basic and everyday, yet we struggle to find an answer for. For each question the author provides a simple, single line answer followed by more in-depth information that casts light onto the murkiest of scientific questions. The book covers the whole lot: physics, biology, chemistry, geology, geography, meteorology, palaeontology and planetary science, with over 50 fundamental questions answered, allowing you to wow friends and family alike with smart answers to the obvious questions they never thought to ask.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateOct 4, 2012
    ISBN9781843179771
    Why?: Answers to everyday scientific questions
    Author

    Joel Levy

    Joel Levy is a science writer and journalist with a special interest in psychology. His writing explores both mainstream and fringe psychology, from cognitive boosting to anomalous experiences. After taking degrees in molecular biology and psychology at Warwick and Edinburgh universities, he has gone on to write several books.

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    • 4/5
      Great answers to all those nagging questions like "why is the sky blue?" and "why is blood red?" Includes an appendix with websites to consult and books for future reading.

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    Why? - Joel Levy

    Why does the sun shine?

    The sun shines because it is constantly exploding like a giant nuclear bomb.

    A nuclear bomb explodes because of a process called nuclear fusion, in which the nuclei (the bits in the middle) of atoms are fused together, releasing huge amounts of energy. Some of this energy is in the form of heat, and some in the form of light. The sun is like a massive nuclear bomb exploding all the time, and so it gives out loads of heat and light – so much that it warms and brightens the Earth 92 million miles away, where we see and feel the sun’s energy as sunshine.

    The sun is a huge ball of gas, 2,000 trillion trillion tonnes of it (that’s 333,000 times heavier than the Earth). Most of this gas is hydrogen. The enormous gravity of the sun squeezes this gas so tightly that the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium nuclei. In the process a tiny fraction of the mass of each nucleus is converted into energy, so that the sun is exploding more fiercely than 4 million nuclear bombs a second!

    Burning away

    The sun burns through so much fuel that it loses the equivalent of a supertanker every heartbeat. Fortunately the sun is so immense that this missing chunk of matter makes little difference. Even though it has been burning matter at this rate for billions of years, the sun has only lost 0.1 per cent of its mass, and it will be another 5 billion years before it runs out of hydrogen for fusion.

    What exactly happens in the sun during nuclear fusion? The nucleus is the bit in the centre of an atom, which is normally surrounded by electrons (see here). The intense heat of the sun strips these electrons off atoms of hydrogen, leaving behind a big soup of hydrogen nuclei. Hydrogen is the smallest and simplest element, and its nuclei consist of single nuclear particles. Under the intense gravity of the sun, four of these nuclear particles are crushed together until they fuse into a new type of atomic nucleus – a helium nucleus. During this process, the sun generates energy at the same rate as 400 million billion power stations working at full capacity (a billion is one thousand million).

    Only in the centre of the sun is the gravitational pressure strong enough to trigger fusion. The sunshine we see and feel is generated by the intensely hot surface. If you heat a metal spoon to a high enough temperature it will become white hot and glow with intense heat and light; similarly, solar fusion is not the direct source of sunshine, but it is the ultimate cause.

    If the sun is exploding with the force of more than 4 million nuclear bombs a second, why doesn’t it fly apart? The answer is gravity. The size of the sun is the result of the balance between the outwards and inwards forces affecting it: gravity is pulling its matter in towards the centre, while the explosive power of nuclear fusion is blasting it outwards. When the sun does finally begin to run out of fuel, this balance will change and gravity will eventually triumph; the sun will end up as a white dwarf – a solidly compacted mass of atomic nuclei, gradually cooling down until it is a dead cinder floating in space.

    Why are plants green?

    Plants are green because they soak up red and blue light. If you take the red and blue colours out of white light, what you are left with is green.

    Humans and other animals get their energy by eating and digesting food, but plants make their own food by harvesting sunlight. They use the energy from sunlight to drive a chemical reaction called photosynthesis that converts carbon dioxide and water into sugar.

    Sunlight is a mixture of different colours – or wavelengths – that combine to form white light. When white sunlight falls on a leaf, the red and blue wavelengths are absorbed by a pigment called chlorophyll. A pigment is a chemical that is very good at absorbing some wavelengths of light and reflecting others, giving it an intense colour. Once the pigment has done its work, green light is all that is left to reflect back to our eyes.

    Chlorophyll is a complex molecule that has evolved to capture light energy and transfer it to other molecules. It works in a similar fashion to a dish you might use to pick up television signals. A satellite dish collects radio waves carrying television transmissions from a wide area and focuses them onto a single point, concentrating lots of weak signals into a strong one. Similarly, chlorophyll collects light over a wide area and concentrates the energy into a single channel. This concentrated light energy is powerful enough to drive a biochemical cycle that makes sugars, which in turn act as a kind of biochemical fuel store, easily burned by the plant’s cells to release energy when it is needed.

    A mammoth task

    There is a lot of photosynthesis going on; every year photosynthesizing plants and microbes make 105 petagrams of sugar and similar substances. That’s 105 billion tonnes, equivalent to about 26 billion elephants, which is enough elephants to make a tower stretching to the moon and back 136 times over.

    But why does chlorophyll absorb only red and blue light? If plants need light energy for photosynthesis, why don’t they use a pigment that absorbs all the light; in other words, why not use a black pigment? Why are plants green and not black? Sunshine is a mix of different colours (or wavelengths), but it doesn’t contain all the colours equally. The spectrum of light coming from the sun (the full range of wavelengths) is more intense in some bands than in others. A pigment that absorbs across all bands equally would be inefficient. It takes energy to build pigments, and the more colours the pigment has to absorb, the more energy it costs to build. Evolution favours the most efficient solution to a problem, and plants that wasted energy-building pigments to absorb weak colours would be out-competed by more efficient plants. In theory, the colours absorbed most strongly by chlorophyll are those that are most intense in sunlight. An obvious explanation for why chlorophyll reflects green and absorbs red and blue would be that red and blue are the most intense colours in the spectrum of sunshine and green is the weakest.

    In reality, the opposite is true. The most intense part of the solar spectrum is the green-yellow band. Why are most plants not using a pigment that absorbs it? No one really knows, but there are various explanations. It is possible that the green part of sunshine is too intense, and the delicate molecules involved in photosynthesis might be damaged by it (by analogy, humans need some oxygen in the air that we breathe, but oxygen is a very reactive element and becomes toxic at high levels. If you are given 100 per cent oxygen to breathe you will soon die). Another explanation is that when chlorophyll originally evolved, the Earth was already dominated by micro-organisms using a different pigment, called retinol, which does absorb green-yellow light, so that the dominant colour of life on the planet was purple. These purple microbes soaked up all the green-yellow light, leaving only red and blue light for chlorophyll-bearing microbes to exploit.

    Why are there 365 days in a year?

    There are 365 days in a year because the Earth turns round 365 times in the time it takes to go all the way around the sun.

    To be precise, there are 365.25 days in a year according to NASA but our calendars only make room for whole days, so the extra quarter from each year is saved up and used all at once every four years in a leap year, when the calendar has 366 days. The actual time it takes for the Earth to go around the sun and get back to the exact same spot is 1.0000174 years.

    Other planets have longer or shorter years, depending on how far out from the sun they are. Neptune is 4.5 billion km (2.8 billion miles) from the sun and takes 164.79 Earth years to go around it, although its day is shorter than an Earth day (just sixteen hours long) because it spins round faster. Mercury takes just 88 days to complete an orbit at a speed of 173,326 kph (107,700 mph) as it is the closest planet to the sun and experiences much greater gravitational pull. However, Earth is no slouch: in a year it travels 945.5 million km (587.5 million miles) around the sun at about 107, 826 kph (67,000 mph).

    The Earth didn’t always take 365.25 days to orbit the sun because early in its history it spun round much faster. This meant that days were shorter, so there were more of them in a year. Then a few million years after it formed, the young Earth was hit by an object as big as a small planet causing huge amounts of rock to fly out into space. This rock soon collected together to form the moon, and ever since the moon’s gravity has been slowing down the rotation of the Earth. Before the moon was formed, an Earth day was

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