In a previous article, I explored the powerful G-forces we experience on rollercoasters, which mimic the intense accelerations felt by Formula 1 drivers or astronauts. These forces create unmistakable sensations of disorientation and physical pressure.
Yet here we are, riding our very own galactic rollercoaster, planet Earth, which rotates at around 1,000 mph and orbits the Sun at 67,000 mph. Remarkably, we’re neither flung off into space by powerful centrifugal forces nor disoriented by Earth’s dizzying speeds. We don’t feel any sense of motion, G-forces, or even a breeze in our hair. So why is that?
Unlike the sudden, jolting accelerations we feel on a rollercoaster, Earth’s rotation and orbit are incredibly smooth and constant, with no sudden changes in speed. Because there’s no acceleration, there are no G-forces to register, and we feel nothing as a result. Putting G-forces aside for the moment, since we’re traveling at a mind-boggling 67,000 mph, shouldn’t we feel some sense of movement?
The concept of relative motion explains why we don’t feel the Earth’s speed. Everything on Earth’s surface, including the atmosphere, is moving with the planet at the same speed. This shared motion means there’s no relative difference to signal to our bodies that we’re moving. We feel stationary because we’re moving in perfect unison with our surroundings.
Stephanie Deppe, an astronomer at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, likens this to riding in a car: “If you’re in a car going at a constant speed on the highway, if you close your eyes and tune out the road noise, you’d feel stationary. But if that car were braking repeatedly, you’d sense the motion. Because it maintains a constant speed, you feel motionless.”
Finally, gravity plays a critical role. Earth’s rotation does create a centripetal acceleration (about 0.03 m/s²) that could, in theory, fling us outward. But gravity, at 9.8 m/s², is overwhelmingly stronger and holds us firmly to the ground. Gravity essentially “cancels out” the minor centrifugal effects we would otherwise feel.
In essence, Earth’s constant, smooth rotation and the overwhelming force of gravity make it impossible for us to feel the motion or G-forces of our planet’s high-speed journey through space.
If you would like to study Science, or specifically Physics, Oxford Open Learning offer the chance to do so at several levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us.
October is characterised by that cosy autumnal feel. Leafy, golden-brown hues, Halloween and gradually darkening evenings all signal the changing season and oncoming winter. But the growing darkness isn’t just an occurrence of seasonal change; it’s partly the result of the long-standing, and sometimes controversial, practice of changing the clocks.
The idea of changing the time deliberately and on a national scale seems somewhat absurd, when time itself is a matter of physics. However, it’s the human measure of time which is, in fact, adjusted, in accordance with the seasons. Known as British Summer Time (BST), changing the clocks is a mechanism to capitalise on the increased summer daylight hours in the northern hemisphere. BST begins when the clocks ‘spring forward’ one hour in the spring in March, and ends in October, when the clocks ‘fall back’ by one hour.
The American statesman, inventor and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, suggested the idea of summer time in 1784, but it was British William Willet who published the pamphlet ‘The Waste of Daylight’ in 1907. He proposed daylight savings time after becoming infuriated by the waste of daylight during the summer mornings. Germany was the first country to adopt daylight savings in 1916, followed by the UK a few weeks layer. The system was soon implemented by other countries worldwide.
Since its introduction, there has been ongoing controversy surrounding the benefits of BST. British Double Summer Time was temporarily introduced during the Second World War to increase productivity, while the clocks were put forward and not put back in an experiment between 1968 and 1971, but this was discontinued. Since then, campaigners have argued that permanent BST would save energy and increase the available time in the evenings, but this was opposed by arguments that it would create social disadvantages in the North, where darker mornings would leave children travelling to school in darkness.
Overall, despite the fact that most of our homes and workspaces are well lit, regardless of daylight, the benefits of daylight savings include reducing energy consumption, longer evenings for leisure, exercise and tourism, and reducing road accidents. So, for the time being at least, British Summer Time is here to stay.
Reference
Royal Museums Greenwich. (2024), When do the clocks go forward in 2025? Source: rmg.co.uk
If you are interested in studying Science, or specifically Physics, Oxford Open Learning offer the chance to do so at several levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us.
Do you remember the film “The 9 Days the Earth Shook”? No? That makes sense because it hasn’t been made yet—but it may soon be, at least in on-demand docu-movie format! That’s because, in September 2023, an event of seismic proportions occurred, worthy of hitting our screens. I suspect it might be some sort of “dramentary”, complete with post-doc experts from top universities explaining it all.
Around this time last year, a mysterious 9-day-long seismic signal sent vibrations through the Earth, baffling the world’s top seismologists. Seismometers across the globe, from pole to pole, detected this strange signal. Unlike typical earthquake tremors, which emit ‘frequency-rich rumbles and pings,’ this sound had a single, monotonous vibration—more like a continuous hum. A global wave of this type and duration had never been recorded before.
At the time, scientists dubbed it a USO, or Unidentified Seismic Object, and discussions largely stayed within scientific circles. It was probably for the best that the mainstream media didn’t latch on, as sensationalist coverage might have caused some unnecessary panic.
Adding to the mystery was a massive tsunami in a remote fjord in northeast Greenland, observed by local researchers. Was it just a coincidence, or were these events connected?
An interdisciplinary, international team of scientists, armed with advanced tools like seismometers, infrasound detectors, satellite imagery, tsunami simulations, and geological observations, set out to solve this riddle. Their investigation eventually revealed that the 4-meter-high tsunami—one of the largest in recent times—was caused by a massive glacial-thinning induced landslide. A staggering 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice (enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools) had crashed into the Greenland fjord.
Through mathematical modeling, scientists were able to simulate the fjord’s width and depth in high resolution. This confirmed that the rhythm of the displaced water matched the seismic signal perfectly. Thus the mystery was finally solved!
There is a great, deep-dive explainer video on YouTube here made by one of the investigating scientists and authors of the official scientific paper, Stephen Hicks. Interestingly the video refers to an initial 200-metre-high tsunami which vividly illustrates how big the landslide must have been. It also goes on to mention that the initial tsunami stabilized into a 7-meter wave while the UCL white paper press release refers to a four-meter wave. Either way, they would both have been devastating waves if they hit populated areas.
If you are interested in studying Science, Oxford Home Schooling offer the chance to do so at several levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us.
To put this discussion into context, we should identify the planets we are discussing. For example, colonising the inhospitable Mars would be a different technological challenge to colonise the earth-like exo-planet, Proxima Centauri which is a 4.2 light-year journey as opposed to a 9-month hop to Mars.
Let’s start with Mars. Colonising would require advances in propulsion systems, biomes, genetic engineering, bio-adaption, off-world agriculture and exo-nutrition. Even with these significant advances, however, life would be mostly confined to biomes.
The Eden Project is certainly an inspiring project showcasing how life can exist within a self-sustaining biome. But developing a biome in Cornwall is very different to creating a flawless off-world biome that can sustain human life on Mars indefinitely. The Eden Project is indeed proof of concept, but it is not an ISO-certified, Mars-ready, biome prototype that has been rigorously tested in a Mars planetary scenario. Further advances in materials science may also be necessary to make self-sustaining off-world biomes a practical reality.
As colonizers outgrow biomes, the situation could demand a mass Martian terraforming project, such as we saw in the film(s) Total Recall which featured a god-like technology that altered the composition of the Mars atmosphere to an earth-like one that could sustain human life. Colonisers could then live on the surface free of biomes.
However, this is thought to be an incredibly difficult challenge due to Mars’ low relative mass compared to Earth, meaning that it has such a low escape velocity that it cannot hold on to an atmosphere as well as Earth can.
While highly theoretical and ethically questionable, scientists at Weill Cornell University in New York have mooted the idea of bio-engineering humans to survive extreme space conditions. This might involve incorporating the DNA of tardigrades, (tiny micro animals that can survive extreme conditions even in the vacuum of space), into humans. This could allow humans to bio-adapt to extreme space-like conditions such as radiation, zero-G, vacuum and Mars’ thin atmosphere.
However, although it may be possible reach Mars, there are huge technological impracticalities when it comes to colonising such an inhospitable planet. That’s why it could be worth investing in colonising the more distant but supposedly hospitable earth-like exo-planets such Alpha Centauri. You wouldn’t need implausible terraforming technologies, ethically dubious genetic alteration or be required to live out your life in a planetary network of aircraft fuselages, (sorry, I mean, hi-tech biomes!) It would be like starting again on a new planet Earth, like Adam and Eve!
There is, of course, the more than a slight catch that Alpha Centauri is about 4.2 light years away. We would need to develop some kind of advanced, sub-light or faster-than-light propulsion system to make exo-planet colonisation plausible, and this could take centuries to master.
Even with the help of a light drive, the journey time to Proxima Centauri bottoms out at 4.2 years. Yes, that’s 4.2 years on a Spaceship which could put a potentially mission-jeopardising strain on onboard social systems. A simple way around this would be to develop hibernation technologies so people could sleep through this arduous journey. Recent reports suggest that scientists could be testing hibernation technology within 10 years.
If you are interested in studying Science or Physics, Oxford Open Learning offers you the chance to do so at several levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us here.
The first question that springs to mind is not, “What happened during the first few seconds of the Big Bang?”, but rather how can anyone possibly know what happened billions of years ago during the birth of the universe? Well, without sounding too poetic, the universe’s secrets can be found in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
By smashing sub-atomic particles together at high speeds, scientists can simulate the unique, sub-atomic conditions that existed at the start of the universe. The high-energy particle collisions yield fleeting sub-atomic byproducts that provide insights into the sub-atomic world and the laws governing it.
It has been theorised for some years that in the few milliseconds after the start of the universe there existed an exotic hot soup of elementary particles known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). A few microseconds later this particle soup began to cool to form the protons and neutrons which are the building blocks of matter (This is not to be confused with the primordial soup of organic compounds from which sprang forth life and existed billions of years later.)
For the past 20 years, scientists have been attempting to recreate this particle soup, QGP, by smashing together atoms at close to the speed of light, producing unimaginable trillion-degree temperatures. In 2005, researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory used accelerated gold atoms to create QGP. The 4 trillion-degree temperatures that ensued (250,000 times hotter than inside of the sun), were able to melt protons and neutrons into quarks and gluons, taking us back in time to the conditions at the start of the universe.
Now, one might understandably think that temperatures of 250,000 times hotter than the sun have no business being on earth. But, relax, this insanely hot QDP blob is about a trillionth of a centimetre wide and only exists for a few milliseconds and subsequently not a threat to existence.
In recent times, scientists at the University of Copenhagen have yielded more detailed insights into the first milliseconds of the universe following the Big Bang using the Hadron Collider. Their results found that QGP was separated into quarks and gluons by the hot expansion of the universe. The pieces of quark reformed into the hadrons, and a hadron containing 3 quarks makes a proton which is a part of atomic cores and are the building blocks of the humanity, earth and the universe.
If you are interested in studying Science or Physics, Oxford Open Learning offers the chance to so at several levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us here.
I was researching roller-coaster rides prior to my recent excursion to Alton Towers. It was hard to imagine what the ride would be like from simply reading descriptions, but one curious term seemed to appear prominently and that was G-Force.
Each Alton Towers roller-coaster ride had a G-Force (G) rating as follows:
● The Smiler (4.8 Gs)
● Nemesis and Oblivion (4.5 Gs)
● Galactica (3.5 Gs)
● Wickerman (3.0 Gs)
G-Forces are measured with the unit G, where 1 G is equivalent to the normal pull of gravity on earth’s surface above sea-level. This acceleration that we experience due to gravity is 32 feet/second2 (9.8 Metres/second2). This sounds like an extremely strong force, but because we have experienced it since birth our bodies have become so accustomed to it, we don’t really know it’s there. To illustrate, astronauts returning from a gravity free, zero-G environment, have reported returning to the 1-G Earth environment and actively feeling gravity pulling their arms and feet down!
The thrill of roller-coaster rides comes from the twists and turns and the rapid acceleration and deceleration of the roller-coaster carriage, with this motion generating G-Forces greater than 1. It was the intention of ride designers to build roller coasters that generate these excessive G-Forces and overload our nervous systems and provide that well-known theme park thrill, resulting in screams or the comically fearful facial expressions!
If you have been on these rides, you’ll know how out of this world these experiences are, but they are literally out of this world. For example, The Wicker Man ride at Alton Towers generates a force of 3Gs, which is the same speed that a space shuttle ascends at to reach escape velocity and break free of Earth’s gravitational field. Powerful as the Wicker man G-Forces are, it is the least intense big ride at Alton Towers; The flagship big rides of the Smiler, Nemesis and Oblivion accelerate at 1.5 times the G-Force of a space shuttle launch! But the tight-turning roller-coaster G-Force experience is probably more akin to what racing drivers experience on tracks which generate forces of almost 5G. This force is equal to five times their body weight pulling the driver’s head to the side. This is why racing drivers have such big necks, as they need to work their fast-twitch neck muscles to stabilise their head and vision under a big weight load. I also think it is why I kept banging my jaw on the headrest as I rattled through 4.8 G turns on the Smiler without appropriately trained and primed neck muscles! Still, it is an amazing experience and a great way to experience the real-life effects of G-Force. Wouldn’t it be fun if attending high G-Force roller-coasters was put on the school science curriculum?
There is a concept known as the butterfly effect, the idea that small changes such as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can lead to dramatic future events. Then there is the Grandfather Paradox, an argument presented against the possibility of time travel; if a person was able to go back in time and make changes that resulted in their grandfather not bearing children, then that person would not come into future existence.
This concept has been explored in literature and film, perhaps famously in “Back to the Future”, where the protagonist Marty inadvertently disrupts his parents’ relationship before they were married, but it has been mentioned in written stories from as early as the 1920s within the American science fiction magazine ‘Amazing Stories’ (such as above).
Einstein’s theory of relativity suggests that space and time are actually one single entity. Within the field of general relativity, mathematician Kurt Gödel came up with the idea of paths that could transcend this space-time entity, returning to a starting point without causing disruption. He called these paths closed timelike curves or CTCs.
The physicist Igor Novikov attempted to resolve the paradox with his theory of multiple universes. He suggested that if a time traveller did go back in time, this would create a separate, alternative reality which would leave the original branch of reality unaffected. Another alternative suggestion was that the self-consistency principle which suggests that any attempt to change the past would be stifled in order to maintain consistency of events and preserve the paradox.
The principle of self-consistency brings up another important issue, do we really have free will, or are our life decisions already predetermined? If we are unable to influence the choices that we have previously made, this suggests the existence of a deterministic universe that fulfils a self-consistent loop. These arguments challenge the nature of our concept of a continuous timeline. Temporal Ontology considers that only the present exists, and that the past and the future are non-linear in our concept of time.
If time travel were possible, it would raise important questions about the implications of making choices to the past and altering future events. Disrupting historical events, even with good intentions, could lead to future unforeseen events that could have negative connotations. It could also lead to a sense of powerlessness, where individuals and societies feel they have no control over their own destinies.
Most of us have heard the story of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree when one fell from a branch and bounced on his head, much to his surprise. Supposedly, this sudden impact of a falling object on his cranium caused some strange neurochemical event that led to a ‘Eureka moment’ of intellectual enlightenment, which in turn led to his momentous discovery of the force of gravity. Or so the story goes.
While there is a kernel of truth here, it is mostly a myth. Historians have found a manuscript written by his contemporaries that provides something more likely closer to the truth. It refers to an evening after dinner when a contemplative Newton took to the garden, watched the wind fall apples, and questioned why they always descended perpendicularly to the ground, rather than going sideways or upward. He concluded that the Earth draws things down and that there must be a drawing power in matter. This insight evolved into gravitational theory, which was tested and proven over several years.
Galileo is credited with dropping two spheres of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that they would hit the ground at the same time, challenging Aristotle’s theory that heavier objects fall faster. It has become part of physics folklore even though Galileo does not mention the Leaning Tower of Pisa in any publications. The only place that the Leaning Tower is mentioned as an experimental medium is in an isolated biographer’s account of Galileo’s work, which contained scientific inaccuracies done when Galileo was very old and blind. Obviously this has led the scientific community to doubt this version of events.
For many years a myth has circulated that humans only use 10% of their brains. It’s a seductive idea that a genius is locked inside all of us just waiting to get out. However, this has been debunked by a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have shown that most of our brain is being used most of the time, even when carrying out simple tasks. A lot of the brain remains active even while sleeping.
The term Neanderthal is often used in a derogatory way to describe behaviour or a person thought to be behaving in a primitive way. The metaphorical choice of the word reflects the fact that Neanderthals are widely considered to be mentally inferior to humans. Recent research has debunked this, suggesting that Neanderthals were not just most likely stronger than us, but also had bigger brains and were probably just as smart as Homo Sapiens. They made jewellery, buried their dead, probably had some level of spoken language, and had tools to create fire.
One of the great zoological myths is that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when frightened. They don’t bury their heads in sand to avoid danger for two reasons. The first is that they would not be able to breathe and the second is that they are the fastest animal on two legs and their 40 mph running speed would be a more effective solution to any threat! Also, at 9 feet tall and 350 pounds in weight an Ostrich can kick hard enough to kill a lion.
If you are interested in studying a Science subject or History, Oxford Open Learning offer you the chance to do so at several levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us.
Human Biology IGCSE Fast Track
“Ye Cannae Change the Laws of Physics,” is a famous quote from the original series of Star Trek, uttered by a desperate Scotty, Chief Engineer to an expectant Captain Kirk in one of the Starship Enterprise’s many crisis scenarios.
However, if you watch enough Star Trek you’ll find they contradict this statement frequently, as the Enterprise regularly travels at Warp 2 or more. This is faster than the speed of light, which arguably breaks the inherent law of physics that renders faster-than-light travel impossible.
Back in the sobering reality of our world, it would be unscientific of us not to ask whether the laws of physics are not so constant after all. To do so would of course be going against orthodoxy, set down by the likes of Newton and Einstein and the entire scientific community who assert the constancy status quo.
Back in 2001 a group of astronomers and physicists made the controversial observation that the Fine Structure Constant (used to calculate the inherent strength of sub-atomic electromagnetic interactions), was not constant at all. These scientists looked at the absorption patterns of light passing through clouds containing magnesium, iron, nickel, and other atoms in 72 distant quasars. Their observations indicated that the Fine Structure Constant was 0.001% smaller billions of years ago. This suggested variability and not constancy in the fine structure constant, undermining a fundamental law of physics.
Peers in the scientific community reviewed the findings and identified likely shortcomings in their analysis. Although the astronomers countered these objections, they admitted that another independent team needed to repeat the findings with a different telescope to take it further. This has not yet happened.
Makan Mohageg and graduate student James Kentosh of California State University in Northridge asked a similar question in 2012. They used GPS (which relies on atomic clocks), to test the constancy of the Planck Constant h, which is a component of the Fine Structure Constant, mentioned above. They wanted to see if Planck’s constant h changed based on location rather than time. If Planck’s constant h changes from place to place then the frequencies and ticking rates of atomic clocks also change, leading to tiny timing discrepancies between different GPS-clocks.
Drum Roll…
So, what did they find? The scientists analysed data from seven GPS satellites and found that h is identical in different locations to an accuracy of 7 parts in a thousand, which was a minuscule and scientifically insignificant error margin, given the underlying sub-atomic parameters.
In practice, this suggests that the h constant is stable between London and the far side of the world, and even between our Galaxy and the next one.
So, in conclusion, there are some crumbs of evidence questioning the constancy of some universal constants but not enough to make a credible challenge to the status quo. So, for now, the laws of physics are safe and sound!
If you are interested in studying a Science subject, Oxford Open Learning offer you the chance to do so at a number of levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us.
Human Biology IGCSE Fast Track
The June, the 30th, is famous for different reasons. Back in 1894, London’s Tower Bridge opened across the River Thames. Aside from this, though, it is also known as International Asteroid Day.
So, how did such an important day come about? Well, interestingly, Brian May, of the famous rock group Queen, who is also a doctor (with a PhD) founded the day along with four others: an astrophysicist, an astronaut, a film maker, and the president of the B612 Foundation, which helps to make people aware of the risk of asteroids across the world. This group set up the day to educate the general public about the role asteroids play in the solar system – and the importance of defending the earth from future impacts. But why specifically 30th June, you may be thinking? Well, the world’s largest asteroid impact on written record took place in Siberia on 30th June, 1908. Even though it happened in 1908, it is deemed to be, potentially, a very serious issue, so recognising this draws necessary attention to it. The United Nations sanction this date as a day for this purpose.
All around the world on 30th June, many events take place to recognise this day. In Athens, Greece, there is a festival on 29th and 30th June. In Virginia, USA, a Celebrate Asteroids Day takes place as well. There are events everywhere, taking place in libraries, museums, universities and elsewhere – so if you see anything you are interested in, maybe you could take part.
Essentially it is a rocky, or metallic, object that orbits the sun, but is much smaller than a planet. They can exist in large numbers and the largest, such as those pictured, are sometimes called planetoids. There are some massive asteroid craters all over the world, such as Acraman in Australia (this is 85-90 kilometres in diameter – and it even contains a lake itself with a 20-kilometre diameter!). There are many more around the world, in places like Canada and Mexico.
NASA has a very important role to play in identifying potential asteroid dangers – all in the name of keeping earth safe but also to learn more about how asteroids form.
So, on 30th June this year, maybe you could think a little more about asteroids. If you do, you can find out more by visiting this website: https://asteroidday.org/
If you are interested in studying a Science subject, Oxford Open Learning offers the chance to do so at several levels, listed below. You can also Contact Us.