Interesting tidbits from this book:
Lewin believes that Newton is the greatest physicist of all time (Einstein is next) because “his discoveries were so fundamental and so diverse.”
Though the universe’s age is estimated to be “about” 13.7 billion years old, Lewin writes that “the edge of the observable universe is about 47 billion light-years away from us in every direction.” This is because space has “expanded enormously since the big bang,” noting Hubble’s law (“the velocity at which galaxies move away from us is directly proportional to their distance from us. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is racing away.”)
Lewin clarifies the somewhat confusing free fall terminology: “Free fall is when the force acting upon you is exclusively gravitational, and no other forces act on you.”
The author writes that less that 20% of an airplane’s lift due to the shape of the wing where the air passing above the shaped wing speeds up relative to the air passing underneath. (Bernoulli’s principle). Reactive lift accounts for the rest (80% or greater). It is named for Newton’s third law. It occurs when air, “moving from the front of the wing to the back, is pushed downward by the wing. That’s the ‘action.’ That action must be met by an equal reaction of air pushing upward, so there is upward lift on the wing.” Controlling reaction lift is tricky, he states, especially at takeoffs and landings.
“Interstellar and intergalactic space,” Lewin writes, “are millions of times closer to a vacuum than the best vacuum we can make on Earth.” But, even so, space is not empty. Matter that floats “around in space has…identifiable characteristics,” which is plasma (ionized gasses – charged particles “such as hydrogen nuclei [protons] and electrons-of widely varying density.”) Lewin goes on the state that “more than 99.9 percent of all observable matter in the universe is plasma.”
On a night flight from the northeastern U.S. to Europe, sit on the left side of the airplane to see the aurora Borealis (northern lights – where the sun’s charged particles (solar wind) are directed into our atmosphere at the magnetic poles.
“The temperature at the core of our own sun…produces energy at a rate equivalent to more than a billion hydrogen bombs per second.”
In a supernova core collapse, “the pressure in the core can no longer hold out against the powerful pressure due to gravity, and the core collapses onto itself, causing an outward supernova explosion….The core collapses in milliseconds, and the matter falling in -- it actually races in at fantastic speeds, nearly a quarter the speed of light – raises the temperature inside to …about ten thousand times hotter than the core of our Sun.” Lewin also writes that “a core-collapse supernova emits two hundred times the energy that our sun has produced in the past 5 billion years, and all that energy is released in roughly 1 second—and 99 percent comes out in neutrinos!”
After some supernova core collapses, neutron stars are formed as remnants, with mass 1.4 times the sun’s tightly compacted into a city size space, and that “a teaspoon of neutron matter would weigh 100 million tons on Earth.” The neutron star in the Crab Nebula rotates 30 times a second; the fastest known neutron star rotates at 716 times per second.
After other supernova core collapses, a black hole is formed. At the center of a black hole lies a singularity, “a point with zero volume and infinite density.”
A third of the stars in the night sky are actually binary stars (“binaries”). Sirius, “the brightest star in the sky,” is a “binary system made up of two stars known as Sirius A and Sirius B.”
The Earth and the Moon are a binary system. “If you draw a line from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon, there is a point on that line where the gravitational force toward the Moon is equal but opposite to the gravitational force toward the Earth.” What’s interesting about this statement is that “relative intensity” beyond any exact balance point seems inherent to gravitational and electromagnetic forces.
Lewin writes that gravity distorts the fabric of spacetime, “pushing bodies into orbit through geometry.” It’s interesting that he uses “pushing” as opposed to the pulling of gravity’s attractive force.