Dear Friends: Today we are going to use physics to boil an egg!
I was reading an article in 'livescience.com' about something or other and even though it had nothing to do with what I was trying to find out, there was a paragraph that explained how long a neutron existed before it decayed after being tossed out of the nucleus of an atom.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this: "Neutrons are stable inside atoms, but on their own they decay in about 15 minutes, more or less, into a few other particles."
Yup, most things in science are either ridiculously short or really long, but these little buggers hang around for......., "Oh, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes!"
So, if you were going to boil an egg you could put it in cold water and then turn the stove on. This is because it should then take 15 minutes to bring the temperature up to boiling and cook the egg! (This also means that you should turn on your stove and then at the same time eject the neutron from the nucleus of an atom and wait for it to decay!)
When it does..........., your egg is done!
Sure beats an egg timer, eh?
I was reading an article in 'livescience.com' about something or other and even though it had nothing to do with what I was trying to find out, there was a paragraph that explained how long a neutron existed before it decayed after being tossed out of the nucleus of an atom.
To measure how long neutrons last before decaying, scientists look for either the disappearance of neutrons or the appearance of their decay products. Neutrons disappear through a process called neutron beta decay, transforming themselves into protons by emitting an electron.O.K. nothing too fancy there and I idly wondered how long that decay process took, since most scientific stuff seems to be measured in 'millionths' of a second.........., or at the other extreme in millions of years.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this: "Neutrons are stable inside atoms, but on their own they decay in about 15 minutes, more or less, into a few other particles."
Yup, most things in science are either ridiculously short or really long, but these little buggers hang around for......., "Oh, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes!"
So, if you were going to boil an egg you could put it in cold water and then turn the stove on. This is because it should then take 15 minutes to bring the temperature up to boiling and cook the egg! (This also means that you should turn on your stove and then at the same time eject the neutron from the nucleus of an atom and wait for it to decay!)
When it does..........., your egg is done!
Sure beats an egg timer, eh?
The way I see it anyway!
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