The smallest possible measurement of length is known as the Planck Length. Anything smaller than this would break everything we understand about physics.
100 Mind-Blowing Physics Facts
Marie Curie was the first person ever to win TWO Nobel Prizes – one for physics in 1903, and the other for chemistry in 1911 for her work on radioactivity.
Marie Curie’s belongings still have radioactive residue in the present day. Marie Curie’s contributions to science had her named by many as the mother of modern physics. One of the works she was most known for was her study of radioactive materials and the discovery of elements such as polonium and radium. However, her research took a toll on her health. Radioactive exposure not only led to her death due to aplastic anaemia – but her clothes, furniture, and books remain radioactive to this day. Now, over a century later, her notebooks have to be stored in a lead box, as they will still be radioactive for another 1,500 years.
The Nobel Prize is a highly coveted recognition in the scientific community. Most awardees spend so much of their time in one field to earn the prize. Marie Curie, however, is the only person to win the award in two different fields, Physics and Chemistry.
A “jiffy” is a real measurement. If you’ve ever said, “I’ll be back in a jiffy,” you were saying, “I’ll be back in 10 milliseconds.” A jiffy is an actual measurement of time, referring to the length of one cycle of the computer’s system clock – about 10 milliseconds. When used in physics, it stands for the amount of time that it takes light to travel one centimetre.
We can thank Albert Einstein for a lot of our current understanding of the physics of time. Rather than viewing time as a set order, he proved that it’s relative. For example, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, there’s an inverse relationship between your speed and the speed of time. The faster you move, the slower time moves. This is why someone blasting through space will age slower than the people still hanging out on Earth: Astronaut Scott Kelly was born several minutes after his twin brother, Mark, but after Scott spent 340 days living on the International Space Station, he returned to Earth around an extra 5 milliseconds younger than his “big” brother. Had Scott been travelling at a speed close to the speed of light, that age difference would have become much more pronounced.