• Question: what is the best fact you know

    Asked by anon-217585 to Savannah, Philippe, Lucy, Joanna, Harrison, Edoardo on 10 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Harrison Prosper

      Harrison Prosper answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      You and everything else on this planet is made of stardust, the ash of stars that exploded a long time ago.

    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      My friends and colleagues always think it is funny that I know more about the ATLAS detector (that I work with) in terms of animals and buses than I do in actual numbers! My favourite facts about ATLAS and the LHC at CERN are that if you were to lay out all of the filaments from the wires of the LHC end-to-end, they would stretch to the Sun and back 6 times, with enough left over to go to the moon and back 150 times! The ATLAS detector is as long as 4 double-decker buses, tall as 5 giraffes, and weighs almost as much as the Eiffel tower!
      Also, I got taught on a radiation safety course that if you were to stand in the LHC tunnel when it was turned on, the radiation would be so intense that it would kill you in 2 minutes! Luckily, the ground between us and the LHC is enough to shield us all when it is running – phew!

    • Photo: Joanna Huang

      Joanna Huang answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Billions of dark matter particles are passing through you every second! Also, racecar spelt backwards is still racecar.

    • Photo: Edoardo Vescovi

      Edoardo Vescovi answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      One of the most important and beautiful ideas is that everything is made of (almost) indivisible parts called atoms. “Scientists” in ancient times came up with the idea of the world as a huge LEGO set where all things around us — and us too — are made of few types of building blocks.

    • Photo: Lucy Budge

      Lucy Budge answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      That there is one kitten’s worth of dark matter within the Earth at any moment. (Dark matter makes up about 85% of the matter (“stuff”) in the universe but we don’t know what it is!).

    • Photo: Philippe Gambron

      Philippe Gambron answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      What I find really compelling is the fact that light follows the light that takes the least time. It is for that reason that it changes direction when it goes through glass. It is to minimise the distance traveled in glass because it moves more slowly there. By the way, did you know that, each second, there are 100 billion neutrinos going through the tip of your finger? And yet we don’t feel anything because they interact very little. It is even possible to take a picture of the Sun at night by detecting the neutrinos that pass through the Earth. https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/2402/the-sun-at-night

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