Questions tagged [everyday-life]
Concerns the application of the laws of physics to analyze common situations encountered in everyday life.
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Why does sunset over a body of water cause a path of light stretching towards the horizon?
Have you ever notice the sunset's image in the sea? It's like long light path to the end of the horizon! I've attached a sample of this:
How can we explain this? I know that it can happen even in ...
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How does buoyancy work?
I realised, reading another Phys.SE question about balloons moving forwards in an accelerating car that I don't really understand how buoyancy works. Particularly concerning, for a SCUBA diver.
The ...
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Why do sunbeams diverge even though the sun is much more than a few kilometers away?
Consider this picture of sun beams streaming onto the valley through the clouds.
Given that the valley is only (at a guess) 3km wide, with simple trigonometry and the angles of the beams, this gives ...
user56903
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Why is filling a balloon from your mouth much harder initially?
Why is it that when you first fill up a balloon, it's hard to get air through, but after inflating it a bit, it becomes much easier to further inflate the balloon?
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Why do the big nuts always remain at top? The Brazil-nut Effect
Most of the time when I mixed different nuts in a bowl, I observed that the big Brazil nuts were always on top while the small peanuts settled near the base. No matter how you take it, if the big nuts ...
user36790
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Ice skating, how does it really work?
Some textbooks I came across, and a homework assignment I had to do several years ago, suggested that the reason we can skate on ice is the peculiar $p(T)$-curve of the ice-water boundary. The ...
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What's the difference between running up a hill and running up an inclined treadmill?
Clearly there will be differences like air resistance; I'm not interested in that. It seems like you're working against gravity when you're actually running in a way that you're not if you're on a ...
aaron
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Why do we use kilograms instead of newtons to measure weight in everyday life?
What was the reason to use kilograms to measure weight (e.g. body weight, market vegetables etc.) instead of using newtons in everyday life?
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How does light bend around my finger tip?
When I close one eye and put the tip of my finger near my open eye, it seems as if the light from the background image bends around my finger slightly, warping the image near the edges of my blurry ...
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What makes running so much less energy-efficient than bicycling?
Most people can ride 10 km on their bike. However, running 10 km is a lot harder to do. Why?
According to the law of conservation of energy, bicycling should be more intensive because you have to ...
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Why is boiling water loud, then quiet? [duplicate]
Water in my electric kettle makes the most noise sixty to ninety seconds before the water comes to a full boil. I have been fooled many times by the noisy kettle, only to discover that the water was ...
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Why do I always hear remote train horn at night?
This is definitely not an illusion, as many people have the same experience. I have usually lived in places miles away from train stations, which makes it unlikely to hear any train horns during the ...
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Why does soda fizz when it meets ice?
I read that the soda's temperature allows it to contain its $\text{CO}_2$: colder means it can retain its bubbles better.
So, why does soda fizz when it meets ice?
If anything, because the soda is ...
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Why are mirror images flipped horizontally but not vertically?
Why is it that when you look in the mirror left and right directions appear flipped, but not the up and down?
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Why does dust stick to rotating fan propeller?
Why does dust stick to rotating fan propeller?
Intuitively, most people (including I) think of the dust will not stick to rotating fan propellers.
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