Saturday, 21 November 2020

So Cold

Well, the British home secretary has been accused of bullying some of the civil servants. I don't know anything about it, I don't know the details, the rules or the truth. 

What I do know is carbon dioxide freezes solid at -78.5 °c at earth's atmospheric pressure, I was reading about it on Wikipedia while I lay in bed to sleep. They call frozen carbon dioxide 'Dry Ice' because it turns back into carbon dioxide when it thaws without going into a liquid stage. Dry ice has many uses, it can make food freeze so fast that it has no ice crystals in it and would thaw without any side effects. Dry ice can also be used as bait to trap mosquitos, the cabon dioxide gas given off by the thawing ice attracts them. Dry ice isn't magnetic, frozen oxygen is. 

I also learned that dry ice is about 50% heavier than water and also would sink in liquid carbon dioxide. What I don't know is what would happen if they froze oxygen and carbon dioxide as a mixture. What would they call it? Would the ice mixture be magnetic? Would it behave differently? I imagine it would be hard to make mixed ice because the freezing points of the two gasses are very different, the carbon dioxide would freeze long before the oxygen so it would be very hard to mix them together. Perhaps that is why they don't bother naming the hypothetical ice. 


Blog Archive

Speck in the Cosmos

One of the scariest things I would do is look out into the sky in a car park at night time. I would become aware of how big space is, a huge...