Saturday, June 25, 2022

Idiocracy and Energy: If you forget physics, you'll suffer the consequences

Forgetting about simple physics makes people do stupid and dangerous things. See, for instance, the "water bubble" a fashionable toy. This is NOT a good idea. The concentration of CO2 inside the ball will rapidly rise and if you stay in there for more than a few minutes you'll suffer CO2-generated hypoxia. At the very minimum, you may suffer headaches, vomit, dizziness, and the like. Staying inside for a long time, you might faint (it has happened) or even die (it has not happened, so far, fortunately). The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued an alert in 2011 about these water bubbles, but it seems to have gone unheeded. Unfortunately, until someone suffers brain damage or dies, these dangerous things will remain freely available.  

But it seems that plenty of people don't know the most elementary rules of physics, those, for instance, that rule the functioning of the human metabolism. Look at this:


In 2019, Hyundai produced this image as an ad for their "Nexo" hydrogen car. It was meant as a demonstration that their car produces no harmful gases. Obviously, the image is photoshopped, not the photo of a real test. Remarkably, though, nobody at Hyundai thought that this image shows a risky situation. And no one felt as necessary to add an alert such as "Do not try that at home."

To be fair, if this experiment were done for real, it would not be as dangerous as staying inside a water bubble for a long time. In this case, the flow of the exhaust of the car would remove part of the CO2 in the bubble. Still, it would be a risky experiment, given the small size of the bubble and the high metabolic activity of the running lady. Remarkably, though, this image seems to be understood as a demonstration of what a great idea is the hydrogen car. It still makes the rounds on social media. 

It is always the same problem: not knowing the elementary laws of physics causes you to make stupid and dangerous things, like putting your child inside a plastic bubble, or just stupid things, like buying a hydrogen car.  





 

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