Scientists faced too many obstacles when they tried to find out how humanity could escape collision with an asteroid. Their research, however, was based on two solutions. First, by crashing the space object with nuclear weapons, and second, by changing its trajectory. The last one, though, it remained at a paper-calculation level.
Speaking of solutions, there is a 100-year old physics problem which needed a clarification more than anything. Scientists could not solve it, and they remained for too much with the question of why air bubbles in a thin vertical tube wouldn’t rise, staying positioned to the insides.
Recent news about a student’s successful discovery changed scientists’ perspectives, and of course, it calmed their nerves. The student is part of the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne research institute, and university, Wassim Dhaouadi, did the impossible. He used the interferometric method of research, finding an ultrathin layer between the bubble and the liquid.
A Student Succeeded to Discover a Solution to An Old Physics Problem
His discovery is contrary to one of the latest suggested theories. The ultrathin layer doesn’t cling to the tube, but moves very slow, instead. Such a rate of movement is so low that differences couldn’t be seen with the human eye.
Moreover, the action of the bubble itself depends on that layer, and it is now known that it is its features that modify whether the air will rise or not. Dhaouadi detailed, “It is a new way of thinking and learning and was quite different from a Homework set… At first, we did not know if there would even be a solution to this problem.”
Back to asteroids, Alan Fitzsimmons, professor of mathematics and physics at the Queens University Belfast, asked for amateur astronomers’ help to find a solution at the collision’s issue. Fitzsimmons stated, “Asteroid research is one area of astronomy where amateur observes continue to make an essential contribution. That’s […] what we’re looking for – these advanced amateurs.”
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