The Physics of Everyday Miracles

Are there real miracles?

We are accustomed to hearing—and repeat—that the laws of physics are unalterable through time, and that every day there is a miracle—visible or not—around us.

All everyday activities are supposed to be ruled by immutable laws. The force of gravity is the most representative and easily recognized of all the physical laws.

In opposition to that, the miracles are supposed to be a break of some physical law.

If there is a deadly car accident but nobody dies, people say its a miracle, but if somebody dies in the same accident, its because "such is life", or that "its the will of God".

However, the awesome miracles and the immutable physical laws are the same things. It is hard to digest, but every time somebody comes alive out of a deadly accident is because of the same physical laws that provoked the accident.

Everything that happens around us has some physical explanation. If some action is unexplainable then it is just that: "not yet explained".

A book that explains many everyday physical phenomena.

Physics for entertainment

Physics for entertainment, by Jakov  Perelman, is a simple book easy to read and follow. It answers hundreds of questions like:

•  Is it possible to make a fire with ice?
• What's the secret of painting people and drawing faces that seem to follow us everywhere we move?
• Is it possible to make soap bubbles that last ... for years?

The Deluge Revisited ... Once More

The story of The Deluge has many interpretations.

The story of the Deluge is a narrative that is mythical for many, however historically true for millions.

The Deluge In The Light Of Modern Science, by William Denton is a critical analysis of this story as it is found in the Christian Bible.

A few extracts of his commentaries are sufficient to grasp Denton's style:

"Noah, his family, and the animals, went in seven days before this time, and left the ark the six hundred and first year of Noah’s life, the second month, and the twenty-seventh day of the month. They were therefore in the ark for one year and seventeen days.What a quantity of hay would be required, the material most easily obtained!"

"An elephant eats four hundred pounds of hay in twenty-four hours. Since there are two species of elephants, the African and the Indian, there must have been four elephants in the ark; and, supposing them to live upon hay, they would require three hundred tons."

"Many animals live upon insects; and this must have been the most difficult part of the provision to procure. There are nineteen species of goatsuckers; and there must have been in the ark two hundred and sixtysix individuals. These birds feed upon flies, moths, beetles, and other insects. What an innumerable multitude must have been provided for the goatsuckers alone! But there are a hundred and thirty-seven species of fly-catchers; and Noah must have had a fly-catcher family of nineteen hundred and eighteen individuals to supply with appropriate food. There are thirty-seven species of bee-eaters; and there must have been five hundred and eighteen of these birds to supply with bees. A very large apiary would be required to supply their needs."

The Deluge In The Light Of Modern Science.

Denton concentrates his analysis of the narrative of the Deluge on the many difficulties Noah had when collecting the animals for his Ark:

"How could the ostriches of Africa, the emus of Australia, and the rheas of South America, get there,–birds that never fly? There are three species of the rhea, or South-American ostrich; and forty-two of these would have a journey of eight thousand miles before them, by the shortest route: but how could they cross the Atlantic?"

However, some questions arise concerning all the water that fell during all those forty days of heavy continuous rain:

"It is as great a difficulty to discover where the water went when the flood was over. We are told that the fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain was restrained. But this could do nothing towards diminishing the water".

Alice in Wonderland

Alice In Wonderland is based on real characters.

Is the girl shown here in this oil paint Alice Liddell, the main character of Alice in Wonderland, the all-time hit in the children and adult's literature?

(Picture: One Summer's Day by William Brymner - 1884)

Maybe not, but the picture title and the walking little girl are evocative of the dedication that Lewis Carroll made for Alice in the book he wrote for Alice Liddell, which at this time he titled: Alice's Adventures Under Ground.

In fact, Lewis Carroll wrote the following dedication in the manuscript he handled to Alicia in November of 1864:

A Christmas Gift
to Dear Child
in Memory
of a Summer Day

Now you can download Alice in Wonderland in EBook format from Datum.

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.

This masterpiece of the children's literature is more than a fantastic narrative from the imagination of a prolific writer, photographer, and mathematician. Alice in Wonderland is also the product of an epoch in the search for new horizons in the science.

Previous to Alice in Wonderland, Ludvig Holberg, near a century before, in 1741, wrote an adventure story about a character that goes down a cave to explore the underground world: Niel’s Klim’s Underground Travels. And in 1692, Edmund Halley, a British astronomer, and mathematician put forth the idea of a hollow Earth when he tried to explain the deviations of the magnetic field of the Earth,

Not to mention that Athanasius Kircher, in 1664 published a geological and geographical investigation that culminated with his Mundus Subterraneus (Subterranean World) in which he suggested that the ocean tides were caused by water moving to and from a subterranean ocean.

Niels Klim's Journey Under The Ground.

Almost simultaneously with Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, in France, Jules Verne, in 1864, published his Journey to the Interior of the Earth.

So, the idea of a “habitable” underground was not new to the fiction and fantastic literature writers, and possibly Lewis Carroll was related with some of those published works.