Ik had het grootste deel van de serie van Brian Cox reeds eerder bekeken, maar eenmaal is - volgens mij - niet voldoende om onze innerlijke driehoek 'Weten - Zijn - Begrijpen' aan te scherpen. Daarom keek ik vanavond naar een opgenomen heruitzending, die met de volgende woorden begon...
"The natural world is beautiful, but complex. The skies dance with colour. (Yay! Yes!) Shapes form, and disappear. But this seemingly infinite complexity is just a shadow of something deeper, the underlying laws of nature.
The world is beautiful to look at, but it's even more beautiful to understand.
(Come on.) A regular day in the snow..., but if you look carefully, there's something deeper. (This is fun!) Every one is perfect, pretty much. It looks like they've been cut out of thin paper. (I got one.)
Snowflakes are complex, intricate things. They are all different but there's something similar about them. They are beautiful, but there is also, I think, a deeper beauty. And that beauty is in an idea. The idea is that all the similarities and difference, the structure of snowflakes can be explained using a few simple laws of nature. And that idea goes to the very heart of science, because those laws themselves are beautiful, and they're universal. They can explain so many things, from snowflakes to stars.
How do snowflakes form? Why are they all different, and yet tantalisingly similar? These are questions that can be asked about any naturally occurring structure...
Why are beehives regular hexagons? Why do icebergs float? Why are planets spherical? And what has this got to do with free-diving grannies? The answers allow us to glimpse the underlying laws of nature that shape them."
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Een uittreksel...
"Why does ice float? That's not a naive question, because no other commonly occurring solid floats on its own liquid. The answer lies in the structure of the water molecule itself. Think of what a molecule is. Take a water molecule, for example. It's two hydrogen atoms stuck to an oxygen atom. That's two hydrogen nuclei, which have a positive electric charge, sticking to an oxygen nucleus, which has a positive electric charge. And they're surrounded by negatively-charged electrons. That's what sticks the atoms together. The negatively-charged electrons tend to cluster around the oxygen nucleus, leaving those two legs of hydrogen slightly positively charged. That means that those positive charges can attract other negatively-charged ends of other water molecules. So an oxygen can come and orientate itself and bond to that leg. On the other side, another oxygen from another water molecule will be attracted to the positive charge and bond to that leg. On the top, you get a hydrogen bonding to that leg. So you can see you build up a structure, an open crystal structure. A shape which is actually hexagonal. And it's that property, that open structure, which is a reflection of the underlying structure of the water molecule itself that leads to the solid ice being less dense than the liquid. And that is why ice cubes and icebergs float on liquid water."
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