Even in the case of floating severed feet, apparently!
Ebbesmeyer said it may not be a coincidence they were found in the same area. He said left shoes and right shoes often tend to wash up at different times at different places because they float differently.He added that there are beaches that collect mostly rights and others that collect mostly lefts because the winds or currents sort out left and right foot wear.
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tags: oceanography, plastic bathtub toys, duckies
Have you seen one of these duckies? (May be bleached white by now).
If so, please report your find to researcher, Curtis Ebbesmeyer.
Image: Simon de Bruxelles.
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Enantiomorphic objects can display divergent behavior in both chiral and achiral fields. Opposite shoes traversing an achiral medium tumble in opposite directions,
http://www.igf.fuw.edu.pl/KB/HKM/PDF/HKM_027_s.pdf
3.5 megabytes
pp. 25-27, calculation of the chiral case.
Physics postulates an isotropic vacuum in which everything vacuum free falls identically. Do solid single crystal quartz spheres (no direction bias) in enantiomorphic space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 vacuum free fall identically? A parity Eotvos experiment would be fun! Calorimetry is better, faster, and cheaper -
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2
Somebody should look.
I just watched CNN program on high gasoline prices and there were trying to tell that the gasoline price should be corrected to the fuel temperature like its done in Canada because warm gasoline is less dense. Their expert repeated four times in about five minutes that "gasoline molecules are expanding and getting bigger at higher temperatures" and I was bashing by forehrad. But I guess if they can repeatedly display a map of central Europe and have all these little states there named incorrectly (Austria as Swiss, Czech republic as Austria, ect) expanding gasoline molecules are just as good as any other explanation.
Come on Milkshake, imagine the fun you can have with chirality, gasoline, and the uninformed. Just start telling people "engines which turn clockwise can only burn right-handed molecules" sit back and wait for people to start demanding polarimeters on pumps.
I've always wondered: What if humans landed on a planet where all biologically active molecules were structurally identical except that everything was based on D-amino acids instead of the L variety? Would we be able to live on native foods (assuming they weren't outright poisonous), or would we become ghastly malnourished (or starve outright)?
I know that D-amino acids generally don't have much (if any) nutritional value for most animals (including humans) and that some racemization happens, but would it be enough to support us? I'm inclined to doubt it, but I'm curious as to what you think.
Would we be able to live on native foods (assuming they weren't outright poisonous), or would we become ghastly malnourished (or starve outright)?
Even if everything was based of L-variety amino acids, everything I know about biology would suggest that the chances of us being able to plop down into some completely alien ecosystem and start eating things is very, very small. The nutritional relationships we have with the organisms we eat have evolved very subtly over the eons; it would be like monkeys and Shakespeare. Maybe some Earth bacteria could grow, since they have relatively simple nutritional requirements (sugars, carbohydrates, growth factors, etc.)
As to whether we could exist on an Earth in some parallel universe where chirality is reversed, I'm just as unsure. It could be an interesting short story... "Today I woke up, and something felt different."