STRANGE FACTS

Evening Star, Issue 22720, 6 August 1937, Page 1

STRANGE FACTS

MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE “ If all the people in Europe talked at once the energy would just run a motor cycle,” says Cyril Dalmaine, in a book review. Take air pressure. As you read this article there’s a pressure of air on your back far greater than you could lift—--1,1201b. A mile down in the sea the pressure on, say, an average-sized cod is about 120 tons—tho weight of a large railway engine. Yet the cod, like you, feels nothing. Glance round‘the room. The air in it weighs as much as a small woman. Loot at your electric lamp. _ The amount of current it consumes in a minute is enough to produce a flash of storm lightning. Feel your heart. Your blood may be pumping through it at the rate of eight gallons a minute. Compare with your kitchen tap, which only gives you an average of four gallons. Tho sun throws off into snace energy at the rate of 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 h.p. One inch of the sun gives enough energy to run a 50 h.p. engine continuously.

Similarly, should you wish to boil a kettle of water on' the moon, you’d leave it standing about in the sunlight and it would boil. So, probably, would you! You remember “ Big Bertha ” shelling Paris from 7G miles away ? Those shells, at the top of their course, reached a height of 24 miles! Look at two locomotives standing in a goods yard. Two inanimate objects, you may think. Not at all. They’re attracted to one another-with “ a force of gravity equal to the weight of a penny.” Down we go through London’s gravel, clay, sand, chalk, sandstones, granite, iron until we come to tho vast, raging furnaces of the earth’s interior. And there you would find heating power equivalent to the burning of some 80,000 tons of coal a second.