Why are the laws of physics needed in everyday life?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The action of physical laws can be observed not only in laboratories, they also work in our kitchen. Physicist Helen Cherski explains how the most common objects can help you better understand the structure of the world around you.

When it comes to physics, we imagine some formulas, something strange and incomprehensible, unnecessary for an ordinary person. We may have heard something about quantum mechanics and cosmology. But between these two poles, everything that makes up our daily life is located: planets and sandwiches, clouds and volcanoes, bubbles and musical instruments. And all of them are governed by a relatively small number of physical laws.

We can constantly observe these laws in action. Take, for example, two eggs - raw and boiled - and roll them up and then stop. The boiled egg will remain stationary, the raw egg will start spinning again. This is because you have stopped only the shell, and the liquid inside continues to rotate.

This is a clear demonstration of the law of conservation of angular momentum. Simplified, it can be formulated as follows: having started to rotate around a constant axis, the system will continue to rotate until something stops it. This is one of the fundamental laws of the universe.

It comes in handy not only when you need to distinguish a boiled egg from a raw one. It can also explain how the Hubble Space Telescope, being without any support in space, aims the lens at a certain area of the sky. It just has spinning gyroscopes inside, which, in essence, behave like a raw egg. The telescope itself rotates around them and thus changes its position. It turns out that the law that we can test in our kitchen explains the device of one of the most outstanding technologies of mankind.

Knowing the basic laws that govern our daily life, we stop feeling helpless.

To understand how the world around us works, we must first understand its foundations - physical laws. We must understand that physics is not only about eccentric scientists in laboratories or complex formulas. She is right in front of us, available to everyone.

Where to start, you might think. Surely you noticed something strange or incomprehensible, but instead of thinking about it, you told yourself that you are an adult and you do not have time for this. Cherski advises not to dismiss such things, but to start with them.

If you don't want to wait for something curious to come across, put the raisins in a soda and see what happens. Watch the spilled coffee dry. Tap the rim of the cup with a spoon and listen for the sound. Finally, try dropping the sandwich so that it does not fall in the butter down.