50 fairy tales about science

Astrophysicist, doct. physical. Sciences, the leading analyst in the group of Suomi satellite (NASA) Nikolai Gorky sent one of his stories to the editorial office of the TRV-FROM, included in his new collection "Creators of the times" (Astrel-ACT). We would like to attract readers' attention to this unusual popular-popular genre-a scientific fairy tale.

Preface

The author is an astronomer. He moves freely inside the solar system and knows every corner, and also looks into planetary systems and other stars - Beta Pictoris, Epsilon Eridan and Blue Vega.

Once the author wanted to look into the future. I wanted so sharply that it became clear that something should be done with this. But the machines of time have not yet been invented - and they will hardly invent, because the future that you want to fly has not yet been realized. And if you get to this future with a slow move-like everyone who does not have a time machine, it turns out that there is nowhere to return-the past in which he once lived.

Then the author decided to write a book about the most likely future, so that, reading it, one could find himself in this future with the heroes of the book. Of course, this is only a probable future - but it is no worse than the other, because any future, until it has realized, balances on the point of probability, obeying the will of people - and what it will be, depends only on us.

The author wrote such a book about the future, and it came out under the name "Astrovite." The book tells about the world of the XXIII century, in which people fly on comfortable and fast spaceships, talk in their souls with smart computers, create cities on Mars and observatory on Oberon.

Children of the XXIII century who want to become scientists, engineers or writers, dream of getting to the famous Einstein boarding school on the Moon. They have been preparing for the exam in this school from early childhood - often parents even read them not ordinary magical, but completely unusual scientific tales for the night.

One of the heroines of the book, Princess Dzintar, told her children the stories from the thick book “One hundred Scientific Tales”-and the readers of “Astrovy-Stanka” were able to read one of them.

When the “Astrovity woman” was printed, the questions of readers fell - and where can I buy the book “One hundred Scientific Tales”?

The answer was simple - nowhere, because such a book does not exist yet. But such simple answers do not bring happiness.

The author thought and promised readers to write such a book, thereby realizing at least a small part of the described. Why not implement the future in which you want to find yourself?

The first collection of scientific fairy tales “Star Vitamin” was published in 2012, the second - “Heavenly Mechanics” - in 2013. Both books were adopted by the reader very well - and now you have the third collection of scientific fairy tales, which tells about the creators of the times, about the people who created our future, despite the fact that they often lived in the distant past.

These three books contain 50 scientific fairy tales in total - and the author is determined to fulfill his promise and bring this amount to 100.

Tale of stones flying in the sky

The clusters of amber berries forced the vine to bend to the ground. The peasants working in the fields near the French town of Lusee were in a hurry with harvesting: sharp knives sparkled in tanned hands, and baskets were quickly filled with tight grape brushes. Two teenagers attributed the braid creaking from the weight to the edge of the field. The September sun was turning to the west, but there was enough time before sunset. Suddenly, in a pure blue sky, something flashed brightly and a strange cloud appeared. Many peasants left their jobs and straightened up, looking at sinister smoke. Slowly talking, they looked at the cloud, blocking from the sun with visors of corpus callosum of palms. Suddenly an unexpected thunder struck, which made many screams in fright. Those who carefully followed the cloud managed to see the dark object, flashed against the backdrop of the blue sky and crashed very close to the vineyard.

The teenagers were the first to rush to the place of the fall of heavenly stone. Having been hesitated, the rest went for them.

In a shallow pit lay a black stone, like a charred. The peasants carefully approached the alien, surrounded him with a ring. The nerves of everyone were tense, many were baptized and whispered prayers. The most restless guy Jacques held out his hand, touched the stone - and cried out! The peasants could not stand this - and together shied away from the terrible stone that flew from the sky.

Only Jacques remained in place, exclaiming:

- It's okay, he just turned out to be cold! I thought - it would be hot, and he is like ice!

Indeed, the heavenly stone was frozen, as if flew from winter.

All the peasants abandoned the work and together went to the mayor of the city of Lusee. The proud Jacques dragged the heavenly stone - no one else wanted to deal with him.

The mayor listened to excited eyewitnesses to the fall of stone - and immediately believed them. These hardworking people will not invent absurdities in order to fool his head. Yes, here is the stone itself - still strangely cool, as if the heavens were made of ice. The mayor thanked the peasants, took the find and sent it to the French Academy of Sciences along with an accompanying letter telling about the fall of heavenly stone in the early evening of September 13, 1768.

No one knew where such stones came from. In those days, many inhabitants believed that these were “thunder stones” that are born in the sky with thunder. And most scientists considered stories about stones from the sky folk superstitions.
The French Academy of Sciences has appointed a special commission for the study of thunder stone, supposedly falling near the city of Lusee. The famous chemist of Lavoisier, an oxygen opener in the Earth’s atmosphere, included there. The commission investigated the stone and recognized it as the result of a lightning strike in the sand. "Stones from the sky cannot fall!" - the commission said firmly. And the French Academy held on this position for a very long time, ridicuating all gullible and superstitious inhabitants.

In the middle of the same century, in 1749, in the distant taiga near Krasnoyarsk, Siberian Cossack Yakov Medvedev stumbled upon a strange block - it was clearly metal, but included many yellow translucent stones. The metal was covered with moss, but they will not be touched by rust. Cossack Medvedev was a blacksmith and decided to attach a block to business. With great difficulty, he transported a seven -kilogram block to Krasnoyarsk. But the strange metal did not give in to the hammer - the blacksmith could not forge anything from it. For more than twenty years she lay a block until in 1772 the St. Petersburg academician Pallas, who traveled through Siberia on the instructions of the Academy of Sciences, arrived in Krasnoyarsk. The iron block found by Medvedev interested the scientist and was soon delivered to St. Petersburg, where many pieces were drank from it - and they went to many countries of Europe. Samples of Pallasov Iron also fell into the Paris Academy of Sciences, as well as to the German scientist Ernst Khladni, a former foreign corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

The French academics, having learned that this heavy stone fell, according to the Siberian Cossacks and hunters, from the sky, only laughed at the wild superstitions of the inhabitants of distant Siberia. The academicians did not believe the next message about the celestial stones that came from the mayor of the Gascon city of Julyak. Although the letter was signed by three hundred eyewitnesses of the meteorite fall, the French academics called the mayor of the city of Julyak with a superstitious fool.

But Ernst Khladni was not afraid to go against the opinions of French academicians and published in 1794 a book about the Pallas gland. In his book, Khladni proved that such “blocks of native iron”, as well as stones falling from the sky, flew out of space and are apparently fragments of large cosmic bodies. The labor of Khladni marked the beginning of a new science - meteorics that studies stones falling from the sky.

To support the bold cold, in the same year the stones from the sky simply sprinkled. And scientists of different countries began to recognize the case of the theory of heavenly stones.

Only the French academicians kept stubbornly and did not want to cancel their decree on the impossibility of falling heavenly stones. Only when in 1803 a real meteorite rain fell in France, only then the academics surrendered, gritting their teeth.

Now meteorics is an actively developing science that explores the chemical and physical composition of stones arriving from the sky.

Meteorites are stone, iron and iron -shaped. Traces of melting are visible on the surface of iron meteorites in the form of characteristic dents - regmaliptes - or, on stone meteorites, in the form of grooves, noting the movement of drops of molten stone, which were defeated by an overwhelming air flow. But although the surface of the heavenly stone melts when falling, inside it stores the cold of interplanetary space. A few seconds of rapid flight in the atmosphere are insufficient for warming up a massive stone, and often there is a form of frosty around the fallen large meteorites. It is easier for small meteorites to heat up and they, on the contrary, can be warm to the touch and even melt the snow into which they fell.

Stone meteorites fall much more often than iron, but it is more difficult to find them on Earth. Stone meteorites consist mainly of minerals such as Olivins and Pyroxene. Among stone meteorites, chondrites are distinguished - meteorites, including rounded grains of an ancient cosmic substance - chondra. This is a clear sign of cosmic origin of the stone.

Iron -shaped meteorites are an iron sponge, in the pores of which there are stones (like Pallasites), or vice versa - a rocky sponge with metal veins. On Earth, such breeds are not found.

Iron meteorites consist of nickel -iron iron or a solid nickel solution in iron. When the German scientist Vidmanstetten sawed the iron meteorite and pulled the surface of the saw with acid, he found mysterious patterns, which are now called “Vidman-Stetthenic figures”. Scientists broke their heads a lot over their formation, until they finally proved that these patterns are formed by the complex mutual penetration of iron and nickel, possible only in space conditions.

Very rare meteorites include lunar and Martian meteorites.

- Moon and even Martian? How did they get to Earth? - Andrei was surprised.

- Both the Moon and Mars are fired at asteroids, which, when hit, form craters and a cloud of fragments of fragments. Thanks to the rarefied atmosphere of Mars and almost its complete absence on the moon, some fragments go into space and wander between the planets until they fall on some other cosmic body. Occasionally, such cosmic wanderers fall on the ground.

“But how can you determine that this meteorite is from Mars?” Galatea asked with interest.

- Scientists determine the origin of the meteorite by its chemical composition. Cosmochemists are real wizards, with the help of chemical tests and modern devices, they can tell many interesting stories about meteorites.

One scientific group even found signs of fossilized bacteria in one of the Martian meteorites selected in Antarctica. True, other scientists reacted skeptical of these "Martian bacteria."

- In Antarctica? - raised her eyebrows Galatea. - In the same place, all meteorites are immediately falling asleep with snow!

Dzintara explained:

- Antarctica turned out to be a convenient place to search for meteorites. They fall on the glacier and, indeed, are quickly covered with snow. But the glacier with stuck meteorites flows to the ocean, like a very slow river. And on the warmer coast, where the ice melts, a large number of meteorites gradually accumulate, made by the ice river from the center of the continent.

Gradually, the danger of such heavenly aliens was also realized by scientists.

In 1908, in the area of ​​the Siberian River Podkamennaya Tunguska, a stone asteroid in the size of 60 m exploded. It fell a forest on an area of ​​a thousand kilometers. Numerous victims were avoided only thanks to the sparse of this deaf Siberian taiga.

In Arizona there is a crater with a diameter of more than a kilometer. It arose 50 thousand years ago due to the impact of the iron roller asteroid 50 m in diameter.

66 million years ago, an asteroid 10 km in diameter- “murderer of dinosaurs”, as it is often called, left in Central America a crater chixilub in size 180 km. The blow of the supermeteorite caused the super -cities and a powerful seismic wave, which gave rise to surge of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Due to the dusting of the atmosphere, the climate of the planet changed, and dinosaurs died out.

But even small asteroids are dangerous. On February 15, 2013, a stone asteroid of 20 m and weighing more than 10 thousand tons exploded over Chelyabinsk. In the millionth city, glasses were broken in thousands of houses, and the roofs of some buildings were seriously damaged. One and a half thousand residents turned to medical help - to treat cuts from glasses and bruises.

- Why did the asteroid explode? Can stones explode? Galatea asked in surprise.

- The stone explodes perfectly if it flies at a speed of almost 20 km/s. The kinetic energy of the kilogram of such heavenly stone is 40 times greater than the energy of a kilogram of powerful explosives. If such a stone collides with the atmosphere, then the kinetic energy is destroyed and its kinetic energy is released in the form of light radiation and the shock air wave.

The power of the explosion of the Chelyabinsk car reached 500 thousand tons of conventional explosives or 30 Hiroshimic atomic bombs. The Chelyabinsk car showed that the body even ten meters can be deadly for the whole city. The inhabitants of the Ural city were saved only by the gending path of the car, which entered the atmosphere at an angle of less than 20 °, which is why its path in the atmosphere lengthened and it burned at an altitude of 30 km. If the trajectory were cooler, then the car would explode below - and the city would have received serious destruction.

We live on a spaceship - planet Earth. This planet is enormous for us, but in terms of space, this is a fragile ship. It is well protected from meteorites and dangerous radiation with an atmosphere and a magnetic field, but any natural defense has their own limits - and if people do not want to experience the fate of dinosaurs, they must learn to defend themselves from bodies falling from the cosmos, and also set themselves the task of gradual resettlement on other bodies of the solar system. If cities arise on the moon and Mars, then humanity will become cosmic - and will cease to be afraid of threats from random aliens.

- On the moon, people like to live! - Galatea authoritatively stated. - On the moon, a person can fly on wings like a bird!

Notes for the curious

Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794)-the famous French scientist, one of the founders of modern chemistry. Executed by revolutionaries.

Ernst Khladni (1756-1827)-a prominent German physicist. Laid the foundations of meteorics.

Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811)-the famous natural scientist. Born in Germany, moved to Russia at the age of 26, where he lived for 43 years - almost all his life, making traveling in Siberia and publishing many books.

Pallasovo iron is an iron -stone meteorite that Pallas saw in Siberia and brought to St. Petersburg. This class of meteorites is now called "Pallasites."

Aloza Vidmanstetten (1753-1849) is a famous Austrian researcher of meteorites.

Olivina - translucent minerals (silicates) greenish. They are found in meteorites and in volcanic rocks on Earth.

Pyroxenes are dark silicates.