S.A.U.- Ch. 12

The building of the Panama Canal alarmed the french and other Europeans. They thought that the canal would let the currents go through, and that it would erase the Gulf Stream's warmth, causing colder winters. It did not do that, but the ocean currents do effect the weather. The Gulf Stream (like a warm water tap) brings warm water to Europe, while the two cold currents (like cold water taps) mix with it to bring down the heat.(The Atlantic is the bathtub.) The Gulf Stream is sometimes warmer than on previous years, meaning less snow and ice for Europe.

The ocean is a heat regulator. The ocean currents and the winds together distribute the heat and cold over the whole globe, making up in this way for the fact that the Sun heats the Earth unevenly.

The ocean and the air work together, and they have a lot of influence over each other. The atmosphere warms or cools the ocean, and gets the vapor from the ocean when it evaporates. The weight of the air determines how high the ocean is. The moving air, winds, make some of the waves.

The ocean has even more influence over the air. It gives back the heat given to it by the air with interest. By doing this, the ocean directs storms. How? The air gets heavier when cold, and lighter when warm. And that means that the pressure changes too. Cold air, high pressure, warm air, low pressure. 

More later,
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The S.A.U.

The currents of the oceans are amazing. They are a study  all by themselves. One of the first things that impressed the author  is their permananance. Their primary driving power is the wind, and the modifying forces are the sun, the revolving of the earth ever towards the east, and the obstructing masses of the continents.

The surface of the sea is heated by the sun unequally, the warmer water expands and becomes lighter, while the cold water becomes heavier and more dense. Probably this brings about a slow exchange of water between the Poles and the equator.

The currents can be quite strong. Take the Gulf Stream, for example. A Spanish ship with the trade winds at her back was pushed back when in the current. The Rode Island merchant ships knew this current, so they got back faster than the English mail ships, who did not know where it was, or how to make headway against it. Benjamin Franklin, when he was postmaster, received a complaint about this speed difference between the ships, and so, perplexed, he asked a Nantucket sea captain. The sea captain told Franklin the reason (the difference of knowledge above), and Franklin asked him to mark the current on a map.

If you ever wonder why the water is so cold at some seaside resorts, remember that the water of the Labrador current is between you and the Gulf Stream.

Bell 

About the S. A. U.

The Sea Around Us was written about the 1960's. It is not an up-to-date science book. So don't go on it for up-to-date science. Nor do I believe in Evolution. It is a good book, though.

Bell

The S. A. U.

There is a new king of weather forecasting. It comes from the waves. They cry out a warning of a coming storm. A trained person can tell if a storm is coming. It will be useful on islands where you can't put a weather station, or a weather station won't work as well. A plane can take a lot of overlapping pictures, from which could be told the depth of the water. This is useful where to sound would be a tedious and difficult job.

 There are several places where a stormy and rough sea is created by strong tidal currents crossing, or coming in the opposite direction of, the waves. These are dangerous places. A magazine is quoted as saying that many ships are lost, while others are tossed about and escape destruction. There are several, and small ships would find it wise when in the Pentland Firth to secure their hatches, and all vessels to be prepared to batten down. (This is from a magazine.) Oil has a soothing effect on rough waters, but it has very little on surf.

More Later,
Bell  

The Sea Around Us

Island are fragile things, destroyed at last. They are, for the most part, created by volcanoes, far out from land. It may take millions  of years to make just one island! It is one of the paradoxes in the ways of the earth that such a force, seemingly so destructive, can create. A volcanic eruption in the sea is different than a land one. It has the water pressing down and resisting it. When one occurs, ship in volcanic zones may suddenly find themselves in violently disturbed water. The sea appears to boil or bubble turbulently Floating up from the deep, hidden places of the actual eruption com the bodies of fishes and other deep-sea creatures, and quanities of ash and pumice.

Almost from the moment of its creation, a volcanic island is doomed to destruction. Another eruption may actually hasten its own destruction by exploding it. A landslide may occur. Something will happen.

It is a mystery how island are colonized by animals, but they may arrive by air. Charles Darwin raised, from a ball of mud off a bird, 82 plants! So they may arrive from the air, and the animals may come from the water, floating on log rafts.   



That's all for now!
Bell

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

When Rachel Carson thinks of the sea floor, she thinks of sedimentation, of the layers of rock, soil, shells, and ash slowly (or quickly) drifting down and becoming part of the sea floor. And the ice burgs carry rocks down, the rives carry stones and shells, and dirt.
The millions of shells drift down, and become fossils. They are the most plentiful, for there are many little creatures with shells in the sea. It is like a Great Snowfall, with all of the shell, rocks, and the rest as flakes in this blizzard.
There is an interesting shell-creature, the Globigerina, a unicellular creature, and it makes its own shell! It divides in two, and then makes two new shells, letting the old one fall. In lime-rich, warm waters this creature multiples rapidly. This little creature adds its bit to the Great Snowfall.

More later!
Bell   

Science

Here are some Q.&A. for a science book: Matter and Energy.

Here they are:

1. Scientists define energy as: the ability to do work 
2. State the law of conservation of energy: Energy may change forms, but it can neither be created or destroyed. 
3. Which two scientists are most often named for discovering this law of conservation of energy?:English scientist J.P. Joules and German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz.
4. What is kinetic energy?: Energy of motion.
5. What does the word thermodynamics mean? The study of heat-motion. Thermo- means heat, and dynamics is the study of motion.  

      6.  What is the metric unit used to measure work called and why?: The Joule, because he did so much    work in the study of energy.  


That's all for now!
 Bell 

The Sea Around Us

You might think that the sea is forever the same, and you would be right, about the sea as a whole. But the surface of the sea changes with the seasons.

During the winter, the surface water has been collecting cold from the air, and in the spring, the cold, heavy waters sink to the bottom, and the warmer water, full of minerals that have been collected over the winter, rises to the top. The plants that make up plankton are dependent on those minerals, just as land plants are.
  Diatoms need silica to make their shells, and also phosphorus. They must tide themselves over the winter as best they can. To do this, they are dormant, not demanding anything from the sea, that already denied them everything except the bare necessities of life.

In the autumn, a plant appears that shows its presence by glowing. This plant, Gonyaulax,  is poisonous, and the Indians knew long before the white men came that when the sea began to glow red or green or blue, the tribal leaders forbid the catching of seafood, and they even set guards out to tell strangers about the poisonous plant. The reason why you can't catch seafood while Gonyaulax is there, is because fish eat it, and mussels get it in their livers. It reacts on people, so along the Pacific coast people know not to catch seafood in summer and fall.

More Later,
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The Sea Around Us--Ch. 2

     In the summer of 1947, a man named Thor Heyerdahl and five companions drifted across the Pacific Ocean on a raft of balsa logs to see if the inhabitants of Polynesia could have from to South America on a raft. He saw, on this trip at night, many strange fish that he thought must have come from the deeper regions of the sea, because they had large eyes, and had been seldom seen. He saw a kind of fish that had not before been seen alive.

   The sea has many layers, and the surface layer is full of life. The plankton is algae and other such plants. Small animals, such as crab's young, live in the plants. The first flesh-eaters of the life chain feed on the small animals, and others feed on them. The plankton is not in the colder areas, because the life is farther below the surface than in the warmer areas. Coral remains are found in the arctic, but they cannot live and grow in water under 70 degrees F. Therefore, the waters in that area must have been warmer some time ago.

     There is a part of the ocean called the Sargasso Sea because the currents bring the Sargasso weed in great quantity. This is the birthplace of all the currents of the North Atlantic. The animals that lived in the Sargasso weed stay there, and the poor swimmers stayed on the weed. The flying fish use it for nests. The early sailors thought that ships were wrecked by the weed clinging to the ships and trapping it, but that is not so.

More Later,
Bell  

I'm back! and About Science posts

Hey! Happy New Years! I'm back posting again!

About the Science posts, I do different books at different times, so I don't say when a new book is narrated.

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The Sea Around Us Ch. 1

In the beginning, the earth was detached from its parent planet the sun. The earth was a ball of swirling gases, propelled through space super fast. They gases slowly cooled and liquified. The heavier liquids slowly settled to the bottom, so the core of the earth is hot liquid iron, the outer core is basalt, and the last layer is graphite, mixed with some basalt. This layer is relatively thin compared to the other layers.

 Now, all the oceans except the Pacific have a thin layer of graphite at the bottom. Where is the graphite on the Pacific's bottom? The most convenient assumption is that when the earth was still in a liquid state, that the tides created by the sun, enhanced by the movement of the earth, grew higher day by day, until they created a tidal wave, and that flew off and created the moon, which was then thrown into orbit. This probably took place after some of the cooling had taken place, because the moon have less density than the earth (5.5 to 3.3), suggesting that it picked up none of the iron, but only the basalt and graphite of the last layer. The earth was covered in thick clouds that held all the water. Rain poured down into waiting basins.

In the beginning, the sea probably was only slightly salty, but as the rain washed down rock and minerals, it became saltier.



This is just a written narration. I do not hold these views.
more later,
Bell  

     

The Boy Scientist : Hydraulic Jacks

The Principle of Hydraulic Jacks 

The principle of hydraulic jacks is that if you apply force to a non-compressing liquid, it can raise a larger weight. How much weight you can raise depends on the amount of pressure the liquid is under. If you had a teakettle with a spout 1 square inch in diameter, and you put a plunger in the spout, and put a piston instead of the lid, and you had 10 square inches of water inside, if you put 10 pounds of pressure on the plunger, you could raise 100 pounds!! Each square inch of water is putting 10 pounds of pressure on the piston, so you are applying a weight of 100 pounds to the piston! If the spout was only a quarter of a square inch, you could raise 400 pounds! Hydraulic jacks make it very easy to lift big heavy things.

A Hydraulic Jack

Bell 

 

 

 

The Boy Scientist: Ch. 5, Part 2

Boyle's Law 

Boyle's law is: The volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure exerted on that gas. He did an experiment to prove this:

First he took a tube with one end closed, and bent that end into a J, or a shepherd's crook, and filled the tube with a little mercury so that it did not rise more in either side of the tube, but stayed on the bottom. There was air in the closed end. Then he poured in 29 inches of mercury, so that the air in the closed end occupied 1/2 the space it had occupied before. Then he poured in 29 more inches of mercury so that the air in the closed space occupied 1/3 the space it had originally occupied before the mercury was poured in. Can you tell me why the mercury did not take up the whole space? 

Here is the answer: It doesn't because the air still has the same number of particles, but it is squeezed into a smaller space. The air has a minimal amount of space it can be squeezed into. 

How a jet engine works

There is a compartment that is full of air, and there is a kind of fuel in the other. The compressor compresses the air as much as 6 times to greatly increase be greatly increased force exerted  when the air is mixed with the fuel and exploded. Some of this gas is released in thrust, flying the airplane. Before the gas escapes, it drives a turbine that works the compressor.

Bell          
    

Science Part 1

This is from a book called "The Boy Scientist".

 About Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle was born 15 years before Newton. He discovered a lot about Gases. He was born in 1627.  He learned to speak Latin and French almost as soon as he could speak English! When he was 8, went to Eton collage. When he was 11, he went on an extended tour of Europe with a French teacher. In the year 1641, when he was 14, he studied with Galileo, the year before Galileo died. When he came back to England, he studied science. He made many discoveries about gases and how they behave.

Gases

There are 3 forms which everything in the world assumes: Liquids, such as water, solids, such as wood, and gases, such as oxygen. All of these are made up of molecules. In a solid they are close together, in a liquid they are farther apart, and in a gas they are even farther apart. The molecules move very fast in a gas, slower in a liquid, and slower still in a solid. If you cool down steam (a gas), it changes into water, and if you cool down water, it changes into ice. If  you heat ice, it changes first to water and then to steam. Gas has a very interesting feature: If you put a pint of air into a gallon jar, it spreads our and fills the whole jar. It spreads our to fill the whole container it is in, to the boundaries. Any gas can be reduced to a liquid if under the proper pressure and temperature. It is so cold, 312 degrees below 0, that if you left your finger in it for 2 seconds, you could break that finger off like an icicle! A rubber ball dipped in it will shatter like glass if you tried to bounce it, and mercury dipped in it can be used as a hammer! Any liquid can be reduced to a gas, and any gas or liquid can be reduced to a solid, or the other way round.

Part 2 soon,
Bell  

Waves ch. 1 Optics part 2

1. Explain diffraction and interference as related to waves: When an object is placed in the path of waves, they go around it. That is diffraction.  When two sets of waves overlap and cross, some waves cancel each other out, and some add to each others' speed. That is Interference.
2. What did Young prove that seemed to settle the particle/wave question of how light moves: Young proved that light does diffract and does produce interference, like waves.
3. Light intensity from any source varies rapidly as the distance form the source increases. 
4. What was Albert Michelson's contribution to the field of Optics: Albert Michelson devoted most of his life to accurately finding the speed of light.
5. What is the speed of light and what can travel faster that that: The speed of light is 186,281.7 miles per second! Nothing can travel faster than that. 

Bell 

Waves ch. 1 Optics part 1

1. What is optics: the branch of physics that studies
light.
2. What is the law of reflection: the angle of incidence is
equal to the angle of refraction.
3. What is refraction and where does it take place:
refraction is when light slows down, i.e. when light goes from air into water it slows down and makes an object half in the  water appear bent.
4. Does light travel faster through water than  through air: Light travels faster through water than air or glass.
5. What is one thing Newton did for optics: Newton  discovered that sunlight is made up of coloured beams of light.
6.Herchel discovered that there was invisible light  when he measured the heat of the coloured beams of light. Next to the red beam he found it was the hottest, but no visible light was there.
7. Name three invisible kinds of light: Gamma rays radio waves and infared rays.
8. Why did Newton believe that light was made of particles:  Because shadows are sharp, not blurry, like they would be if lght was made of waves. Particles produce sharp shadows.



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Science

I have 5 Q. and A. for Science. Here they are:

1. Define linear momentum:  Momentum in a straight line. 
2. Define angular momentum: The momentum of spinning objects
3. Write the equation for linear momentum and define the terms: p = m x v. P- momentum, M- mass, V-velocity.
4. Define the law of conservation of momentum: The linear momentum of any object stays the same unless an outside force interferes.
5. What three things do you need to measure angular momentum?: Mass, radius, and velocity. 

Bell 

Science

These are some questions, and the answers are from a book on science. Here they are:

1. Define mechanics: The study of motion 
2. State Newton's first law of motion: If an object is moving, it will keep moving. If an object is still, it will remain still. 
3. What is another name for Newton's first law?: The law of inertia.
4. Define mass and acceleration: Mass is how much substance an object has, and acceleration is any change in the motion of an object. 
5. State Newton's second law of motion: The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force applied to the object and inversely proportional to the  mass of the object. 
6. What is another name for Newton's second law of motion?: The law of acceleration.
7. Explain directly proportional and inversely proportional: If two measurements are directly proportional, than when one increases the other increases too. If two measurements are  inversely proportional, then when one increases the other decreases.  
8. Write the law if acceleration in simple equation form: acceleration = force/mass
9. Write Newton's second law of motion as force = ?: Force = mass x acceleration.
10. State Newton's third law of motion: For every action, there is a equal reaction.