General Physics

Nichrome is the most common domestic heating element and is found in many household products. Commonly, items such as toasters, hair dryers and heaters use nichrome coils to pass electricity and give off heat. Nichrome is made of 80 percent nickel and 20 percent chromium, and its high melting point of 1,400 degrees Celsius. Nichrome is a non-magnetic alloy of nickel, chromium, and often iron, usually used as a resistance wire. Patented in 1905,

Cryogenics is the study of how to get to low temperatures and of how materials behave when they get there. Besides the familiar temperature scales of Fahrenheit and Celsius (Centigrade), cryogenicists use other temperature scales, the Kelvin and Rankine temperature scales.

Simple microscope - light microscope consisting of a short focus single convex lens is used to produce an enlarged image. The magnifying glass was invented by Roger Bacon in 1250. In the original ‘simple’ microscopes, a single light path went through the object viewed and one lens, increasing the visibility of the object by some amount (magnification).

Boyle’s law states that the absolute pressure and volume of a given mass of confined gas are inversely proportional, if the temperature remains unchanged within a closed system.

The Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a region within a large molecular cloud. Most of the matter gathered in the center, while the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that would become the Solar System. The central mass became increasingly hot and dense, eventually initiating thermonuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that almost all other stars form by this process.

A gas pycnometer is a laboratory device used for measuring the density — or more accurately the volume — of solids, be they regularly shaped, porous or non-porous, monolithic, powdered, granular or in some way comminuted, employing some method of gas displacement and the volume-pressure relationship known as Boyle’s Law.

A lightning rod is a metal rod or metallic object mounted on top of a building, electrically bonded using a wire or electrical conductor to interface with ground or “earth” through an electrode, engineered to protect the building in the event of lightning strike.

A hydrogen atom is very light. Most of the air on earth is made up of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. All of these elements are heavier than hydrogen, so the balloon is pushed upwards. Hydrogen weighs 0.08988 grams per liter.

Heat capacity (usually denoted by a capital C, often with subscripts), or thermal capacity, is the measurable physical quantity that characterizes the amount of heat required to change a substance’s temperature by a given amount.

Thermal energy, but in most cases coal is used for electricity. The steel industry uses coal (or coke rather) in blast furnaces. Thermal energy is the part of the total internal energy of a thermodynamic system or sample of matter that results in the system temperature.

In physics, elasticity is a physical property of materials which return to their original shape after the stress that caused their deformation is no longer applied. For very small deformations, most elastic materials, such as springs, exhibit linear elasticity. This means that they are characterized by a linear relationship between stress and strain (the relative amount of deformation).

Air is a good insulator. Therefore, we feel warmer as the heat can’t conduct away as easily. The reason layers work to keep us warm is that they form air pockets in between each layer which is insulated by our body heat. The more pocket of air we have, the more insulation we have, thus the warmer we are.

Atmospheric pressure is basically the weight of air in the atmosphere above the reservoir, so the level of mercury continues to change until the weight of mercury in the glass tube is exactly equal to the weight of air above the reservoir. In areas of low pressure, air is rising away from the surface of the earth more quickly than it can be replaced by air flowing in from surrounding areas. This reduces the weight of air above the reservoir so the mercury level drops to a lower level.

Work is defined as a force acting through a distance (a length of space), energy is always equivalent to the ability to exert pulls or pushes against the basic forces of nature, along a path of a certain length.

In particle physics, fundamental interactions (sometimes called interactive forces or fundamental forces) are the ways that elementary particles interact with one another. An interaction is fundamental when it cannot be described in terms of other interactions. The four known fundamental interactions are electromagnetism, strong interaction (“strong nuclear force”), weak interaction (“weak nuclear force”), and gravitation