How Metric Measurements Relate

In metric, one millilier of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to ehat up by one degree centigrade--which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to "How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?" is "Go fuck yourself," because you can't directly ...

 An Example of the Joy of Hard Science Fiction

If they are going to sink below, then the pressure on the vessel is going to rise as Verne talked about in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. If the pressure on the vessel is going to rise, then it's going to collapse unless the pressure within the vessel rises. So the captain is slowly letting the vessel sink into the Moon dust, while the crew is not letting onto the tourists that anything is wrong, but the pressure is slowly going up. Now just as we don't typically notice the pressure go up or ...

 Understanding Heat and Temperature

Our sense of touch tells us quite definitely that one body is hot and another cold. But this is a purely quali- tative criterion, not sufficient for a quantitative descrip- tion and sometimes even ambiguous. This is shown by a well-known experiment: we have three vessels con- taining, respectively, cold, warm and hot water. If we dip one hand into the cold water and the other into the hot, we receive a message from the first that it is cold and from the second that it is hot. If we th...