Our science guy is grateful for the big & small advances in tech
Thanksgiving is next week, so I thought I’d use this month’s column to list out a few scientific breakthroughs that I’m personally very thankful for, and that may or may not be directly related to the holiday itself. So, let’s get right to it…
X-Rays
A couple months ago I became very ill. Turned out it was kidney stones, and a series of simple x-rays told me how many there were and where they were located. They also helped me decide on a course of treatment with my doctor, and I’m now on the mend. I’m very thankful for that.
Of course, x-rays are also a feature of a visit to the dentist’s office, and we can’t forget the x-ray machines that all your bags will have to go through before you can board your flight home to see grandma for Thanksgiving.
Microwaves
Staying in the realm of physics, we’ll all be thankful for microwaves this Thanksgiving day. Without microwaves, preparing the big meal would be even more time-consuming and tedious than it already is. (Frankly, some of us could live off of nothing but microwaved food. Which, I’ll admit, might be the source of some of my health problems.)
As handy and commonplace as microwaves are, very few people know how they actually cook our food. It’s actually pretty simple: The waves blasted into the microwave chamber are just the right length to hit near the center of the chamber. Since this is where you put your food, that means that the waves are passing through, and interacting with, the molecules of your food.
That interaction transfers some of the energy of the wave to the food molecules themselves. That energy bump causes the molecules to move really fast, which in turn causes the food to heat up.
The interior of the oven itself is made of a material that reflects the microwaves, so they bounce around the chamber until they end up in the food. But, to cook evenly, you still need that rotating platform so that the food is “attacked” by the microwaves on all sides.
GPS
Ah yes, the Global Positioning System. It’s that magic service that tells your phone where you are so you can get where you’re going without having to ask an actual person for directions. (Unless, you know, you really want to.)
Now, GPS might seem like magic, but it’s built on top of physics and, believe it or not, Einstein’s theory of relativity.
You see, the GPS satellites that circle the Earth are so high, and they move so fast that, for them, time passes at a different rate than it does here on the ground. So, GPS satellites (and devices, like your phone) have to account for this time dilation in order to give you accurate position, speed and arrival time information.
In fact, GPS has to deal with at least three different time dilation factors: The speed of the satellite in orbit (faster speed means time moves slower relative to us here on Earth), the height of the satellite (lower gravity means time moves faster relative to us here on Earth) and the elevation of the user on Earth. The further you are from the center of the Earth, the lower the gravity is. So, again, time would move faster for you than for someone at a lower elevation.
Of course, all these differences are tiny, but they do add up, and the entire system has to compensate for all those difference in every second of drive time. (Maybe it is magic! No. It’s not.)
Heartburn Meds
Finally, the biggie. The single most important thing science has given us (well, me, anyway) for the holidays: The Heartburn Pill. As a child I remember my father being racked with heartburn after almost every meal. It made his life fairly miserable, and made his dietary options pretty limited in his later years.
Fortunately, modern medicine has given us these fairly miraculous pills that you can take before a meal to (almost always) prevent heartburn from occurring. You can even take them during a heartburn attack to mitigate the effect and shut it down fairly quickly. I certainly wouldn’t want to experience Thanksgiving (or Christmas) without them!
So, enjoy your time at home with your loved ones, and, be sure to spare a thought for all the ways that science, and scientists, have made the holiday (and every other day) better for all of us.
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.