981
speedometers
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
I’ve heard this, but then I asked once what speed water molecules in a room temperature glass of water would be going. Are they like walking, driving, flying in a jet, or much faster? I was told my question didn’t have an answer since it didn’t really work that way or something.
I often wondered if the person answering just wasn’t able to make some assumption needed to answer because I didn’t state it in the question, or if saying thermometers measure speed is just wrong.
See figure 3 here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_temperature
tl;dr Water be jiggly. Amount of jiggle is hard to put a number on
So if I were jiggling, I think I could come up with a speed. I’d figure out how far I'm moving, and how long it takes me to move. So I could measure from far left to far right of the jiggle (let’s say 18in.) and then how far to go from far left to far right and return to the original position. If that’s 2 seconds, then that’s 1½ feet per 2 seconds which can be converted to any other speed such as km/hr.
Here's an experiment that you could try at home:
Takes 2 cups of water of equal volume, one hot and one cold. Put a single drop of food coloring into each cup and time how long it takes for the color to fully disperse throughout the water.
Record your units in SI units like cm or mm, because inches are stupid and scientists have agreed to not like them. You are a scientist now, so you must join the club.
Submit your findings to the journal of Lemmy for peer review. Extrapolate into other forms of measurement if you want.
If you want it to be even better, measure 3 temperatures (in °C, mind you): room temp, hot, and cold. Then you can plot them on a curve of distance vs time.