Monday, October 13, 2008

Q&A

0. It takes 23 hours 56 min & a few seconds for earth to complete one rotation.Take it as 23hrs & 57 min.So there is a loss of 3 min daily in the watch or clock.But our watches and clocks are of 24 hrs(or 12*2). So after 240 days ther is a loss of 12 hours ie, when it is 12 noon actually the watch or clock will show 12 midnight yesterday.It is not happening.Why is it so?

It is because the earth also travels around the sun in its orbit. Hence, the time for the sun to go from exactly overhead to that position again is not the time it takes the earth to rotate once on its axis. The 3 minute difference makes sense: [(3 min lost per day)/(24x60 min/day)]x[365 days/year]=0.76 days lost per year, about three fourths. Hence, we need to add one day every fourth year to make it all come out right. Since it is not exactly 3/4 we do not add the extra day once each century.
1. 1. I have red that in troposphere temperature increases with height, then why doesn't the ice and snow in mountains melt?
Temperature decreases until about 20 km altitude, higher than any mountain. See Wikepedia for a graph of temperature in the troposphere.

2. Light is an electromagnetic wave, then why doesn't it get ionized in the ionosphere?
An electromagnetic wave has no electric charge, so how could it become ionized?


3.the rest mass of a photon is zero, it moves in the velocity of light.then according to einstein's equation m=m0/(sq:root of(1-v2/c2))& v=c so denominator will become 0 so it will have infinite mass.if it was happening we will die due to infinite mass on us when light fall on us.Why is it not happening?
Again we are dealing with E=mc2; if we consider a photon (which is a little bundle of light), it has energy. The shorter its wavelength, the more energy it has. For very energetic photons, called gamma-rays, their energy might exceed the mc2 energy of an electron plus a positron (the antiparticle of the electron, having the same mass but opposite charge as the electron). If this is the case, then it would not violate energy conservation if the photon suddenly turned into an electron-positron pair. For example, suppose that we have a 1.5 MeV (million electron volts, a unit of energy convenient for this kind of problem, look it up!) Now, the rest mass energy of an electron or positron is about mc2=0.5 MeV, so the photon could turn into a pair and that pair would have, in addition to their mc2 energy, about 0.5 MeV of kinetic energy. That is pair production. (By the way, this will not happen spontaneously because a photon is a stable particle; instead you must "tweak" it which is usually done by shooting the photons into a strong electric field like that near the nucleus of an atom.

Friday, October 5, 2007

NANOTECHNOLOGY
Nanotechnology, the creation and use of materials or devices at extremely small scales. These materials or devices fall in the range of 1 to 100 nanometers (nm). One nm is equal to one-billionth of a meter (.000000001 m), which is about 50,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Scientists refer to the dimensional range of 1 to 100 nm as the nanoscale, and materials at this scale are called nanocrystals or nanomaterials.
The nanoscale is unique because nothing solid can be made any smaller. It is also unique because many of the mechanisms of the biological and physical world operate on length scales from 0.1 to 100 nm. At these dimensions materials exhibit different physical properties; thus scientists expect that many novel effects at the nanoscale will be discovered and used for breakthrough technologies.
A number of important breakthroughs have already occurred in nanotechnology. These developments are found in products used throughout the world. Some examples are catalytic converters in automobiles that help remove air pollutants, devices in computers that read from and write to the hard disk, certain sunscreens and cosmetics that transparently block harmful radiation from the Sun, and special coatings for sports clothes and gear that help improve the gear and possibly enhance the athlete’s performance. Still, many scientists, engineers, and technologists believe they have only scratched the surface of nanotechnology’s potential.
Nanotechnology is in its infancy, and no one can predict with accuracy what will result from the full flowering of the field over the next several decades. Many scientists believe it can be said with confidence, however, that nanotechnology will have a major impact on medicine and health care; energy production and conservation; environmental cleanup and protection; electronics, computers, and sensors; and world security and defense.