Our colleagues over at scienceblogs.com of Germany have a new cool video. My German is rusty but let me try to translate:
If you mix warm and cold (liquid or gas) you get a temperature that is in between. But what if the "warm" is burning thermite (at thousands of degrees C) and the cold is liquid N, at hundreds of degrees below zero?
What happens is that the temperature difference is just too high so that one can not be sure what to expect. And then my translation kind of trails off, but if you look at the video, I think what happens is that the liquid nitrogen is transferred into an alternative dimension or possibly a different universe.
I might have that wrong, but it is a cool video. Here.
More like this
Here is another question from Ask a ScienceBlogger. Reader Uday Panta asks:
How does water evaporate in the seas? Doesn't water evaporate at 100 C?
"Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.
'This porridge is too hot!' she exclaimed.
So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.
'This porridge is too cold,' she said.
So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.
I somehow forgot to draw your attention to Kurt Cobb's wonderful essay on the difference between oil and "liquids" - he does a better job than anyone I know in making clear
“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” –Rabindranath Tagore
Actually, the sentence about the temperature difference translates to something like: "What else could you expect? The temperature difference is simply too high." It continues: "Would anyone like to calculate how much N it would take for a draw?"
Cool video, however. Somehow ironic that I need an English-speaking blog to direct me to a page in my mother tongue.
Not all that interesting from a scientific POV -- but very satsifying for the Stuff Going Kablooie factor (as are several of the other videos on that YouTube. Recommended viewing: Alkali Metals).
I'm with this guy "wir haben das wohl beide bei Wired gefunden."
Danzig, mein Krauten es ein sheiter....
*das sheisser
Here's an English version: Fun With Thermite
"Adding something cold to Thermite won't cancel it out; it just makes it angry!"
Ugh, I was just complaining about this video over here: http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/03/superhot_beats_supercold_in_a.php
:-D