Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (27 page)

Mt. Lassen became a National Park in 1916, and it hasn’t completely quieted down—you can still see its boiling mud pots, sulfur pools, and roaring
fumaroles
(steam venting out of the ground).

Because nighttime is when ghosts come out to play. Don’t believe in ghosts? Here’s the scientific answer: Houses creak more at night because the temperature drops, which causes the wood and metal parts to contract and rub against each other. This isn’t to say that houses don’t creak in the daytime; they do, but not nearly as much. In addition, there’s often so much going on during the day that it’s harder to notice.

What would happen to a helium balloon on the moon?

How come we can only see one side of the moon?

What amazing fact about the sun and the moon makes it possible for eclipses to occur?

The balloon would instantly drop to the surface. Here on Earth, it’s not that helium simply rises by itself; air is heavier than helium, so the air “slides” underneath the balloon and pushes it upward. On the moon, the gravity isn’t strong enough to hold an atmosphere. No atmosphere means no air, and with no air on the moon, the balloon might as well be a bowling ball.

Technically, a balloon on the moon wouldn’t even last long enough to fall to the ground. With no atmosphere to push back against its outer surface, the helium inside would keep expanding and burst the balloon, thus ruining the astronaut’s birthday party.

Over billions of years, the Earth’s enormous gravitational force has exerted enough “drag” on the moon’s rotation (the speed at which it revolves around its axis) so that now the moon only rotates once per orbit around the Earth. Result: The same side of the moon always faces us.

The sun is 400 times larger than the moon…and it’s also 400 times farther away. Result: The two bodies appear almost the
exact same size
in our sky. So when one of the bodies crosses directly in front of the other, we get an eclipse. The odds of this occurring are truly astronomical.

In 1992 teenager Michelle Knapp bought her grandmother’s 1980 Chevy Malibu for $100. A few months later, she sold it for $30,000. What happened?

What is historically significant about a piece of garbage that was found on a Wisconsin road in the 1960s?

On Friday night, October 9, 1992, Michelle Knapp’s red Malibu coupe was hit by a meteorite in Peekskill, New York, destroying the trunk of the car. Because it was such a clear night, thousands of people up and down the East Coast witnessed the shooting star as it broke up into many pieces. But the only fragment that did any damage was the 28-pound space rock that struck the Malibu. And that’s what made it famous. Knapp sold the car (at 300 times what she paid for it) to a specialty company called R.A. Langheinrich Meteorites, which still exhibits both the Malibu and the “Peekskill Meteor” all over the world.

Early Wednesday morning on September 5, 1962, a 20-pound chunk of the Russian satellite
Sputnik IV
fell out of orbit and landed at the intersection of Park and N. 8th Street in Mantiwoc, Wisconsin. It was the first man-made object to go into space and then fall back to Earth. No one saw it as it hit just after dawn, but an hour or so later, two cops found the chunk of metal embedded in the road. They assumed it fell off a truck, so they just kicked it into the gutter. But by that afternoon, the news was buzzing with reports of a bright object having fallen from the sky, so the cops retrieved it and sent it to a lab for identification. It turned out to be a piece of history. Today, there’s a plaque marking the spot where the Russians dropped their garbage.

What would happen to Earth if it were to move three million miles closer to the sun? What would happen if it were to move three million miles farther away from the sun?

What was the first man-made object to create a sonic boom?

Doomsday? Not quite. The only effect would be that we’d put on coats in the winter and shorts in the summer, which we do anyway. That’s because our planet
already
moves three million miles closer to and farther away from the sun every year due to its elliptical orbit. That, along with the slight tilt of Earth’s axis, is what gives us four seasons. During the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, Earth reaches its orbit’s
apogee
(the farthest outward point), which is 94.5 million miles from the sun. In winter, Earth reaches its
perigee
, three million miles closer. So far, we’ve managed to survive unscathed. Now, if some celestial event were to make our planet move
more
than three million miles closer to or farther away from the sun…

You might be thinking Chuck Yeager’s 1947 supersonic jet flight, but the answer is the bullwhip, which has been used for controlling livestock (and slaves) at least since ancient Egypt. The whip’s distinctive “crack” is actually a sonic boom. Here’s how it works: A fast-moving object creates pressure waves (like a ship does in water) that travel at the speed of sound, which is 768 mph. When the object—be it a plane or the tip of a whip—exceeds the speed of sound, the pressure waves are all “pushed together,” resulting in a sonic boom. Scientists using high-speed cameras have clocked a whip’s crack at about 25 percent faster than the speed of sound.

What’s the historical significance of the following message: “Lo”?