And Then You're Dead E-Book

Paul Doherty

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 260

Beschreibung

"Entertaining - if harrowing." - New York Times Book Review What would happen if you took a swim outside a deep-sea submarine wearing only Speedos? How long could you last if you stood on the surface of the sun? How far could you actually get in digging a hole to China? And Then You're Dead offers serious answers to these horribly interesting questions. Paul Doherty and Cody Cassidy explore the real science behind these and other fantastical scenarios, offering insights into physics, astronomy, anatomy and more along the way. Illustrated with straightforward technical art and leavened by small doses of dry humour, And Then You're Dead is both scientifically informative and gruesomely entertaining.

Leseprobe

CODY CASSIDY has worked as the sports editor for Zimbio.com, a sports reporter for Stanford Athletics, and a writer for Coach magazine. He has no firsthand experience with any of the scenarios described in this book.

PAUL DOHERTY is codirector and senior staff scientist at San Francisco’s famed Exploratorium Museum. He has cowritten numerous books, including The Exploratorium Science Snackbook, Explorabook, and the Klutz Book of Magnetic Magic. He received his PhD in solid state physics from MIT.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Allen & UnwinFirst published in the United States in 2017 byPenguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright © Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty, 2017

The moral right of Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

Fax:      [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Web:      www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design by Katy Riegel

Illustrations by Cody Cassidy

Set in Scala OT

Paperback ISBN 978 1 76029 113 6

E-Book ISBN 978 1 92557 522 4

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

CODY:

To Mom and Dad

PAUL:

To Professor Paul Tipler,who showed me how to inspire students to learn science by making it interesting,relevant, fun, and correct

Introduction

What Would Happen If . . .

You Were in an Airplane and Your Window Popped Out?

You Were Attacked by a Great White Shark?

You Slipped on a Banana Peel?

You Were Buried Alive?

You Were Attacked by a Swarm of Bees?

You Were Hit by a Meteorite?

You Lost Your Head?

You Put on the World’s Loudest Headphones?

You Stowed Away on the Next Moon Mission?

You Were Strapped into Dr. Frankenstein’s Machine?

Your Elevator Cable Broke?

You Barreled over Niagara Falls?

You Couldn’t Fall Asleep?

You Were Struck by Lightning?

You Took a Bath in the World’s Coldest Tub?

You Skydived from Outer Space?

You Time Traveled?

You Were Caught in a Human Stampede?

You Jumped into a Black Hole?

You Were on the Titanic and Didn’t Make It into a Lifeboat?

You Were Killed by This Book?

You Died from “Old Age”?

You Were Stuck in . . . ?

You Were Raised by Buzzards?

You Were Sacrificed into a Volcano?

You Just Stayed in Bed?

You Dug a Hole to China and Jumped In?

You Toured the Pringles Factory and Fell off the Catwalk?

You Played Russian Roulette with a Really, Really Big Gun?

You Traveled to Jupiter?

You Ate the World’s Deadliest Substances?

You Lived in a Nuclear Winter?

You Vacationed on Venus?

You Were Swarmed by Mosquitoes?

You Became an Actual Human Cannonball?

You Were Hit by a Penny Dropped from the Top of the Empire State Building?

You Actually Shook Someone’s Hand?

You Were the Ant Under the Magnifying Glass?

You Stuck Your Hand in a Particle Accelerator?

You Were Holding This Book and It Instantly Collapsed into a Black Hole?

You Stuck a Really, Really Powerful Magnet to Your Forehead?

You Were Swallowed by a Whale?

You Took a Swim Outside a Deep-Sea Submarine?

You Stood on the Surface of the Sun?

You Ate as Many Cookies as Cookie Monster?

References and Further Reading

Acknowledgments

BE HONEST. WHEN you are reading a random obituary do you sometimes find yourself skipping to the bottom, searching for the cause of death, only to be frustrated by the lack of an explanation or a maddeningly vague “death by fluke accident”? Did the poor sap freeze while ice swimming? Was he squished by an asteroid or was he swallowed by a whale? Sometimes they won’t even tell you!

And when they do reveal a cause of death—say the obituary provides a tantalizing detail like “tragically killed by an oversize magnet”—the story quickly moves on to next of kin while you’re left wondering if magnetism even can be lethal. They are skipping the most interesting part!

We understand your frustration, so we set out to resolve it. We pick up where even the most elucidating obituary leaves off.

We tell you what really happens when you jump into space wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. We explain why Boeing doesn’t let you roll your window down on the 747, and we explore the problems with swimming in the deepest part of the ocean with as much science and gruesome detail as your stomach will allow.

In other words: Stephen King meets Stephen Hawking.

The upside in wading through all this gruesomeness is you may accidentally learn some science, a bit of medicine, and what to do if a shark begins circling you (encourage him to eat your entire leg—not just a chunk).

How did we get our answers?

When we could we used the experiences (or autopsies) of daredevils (or the unlucky) to figure out what actually happens when you go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, stick your hand in a particle accelerator, or get stung in the testicle.

For some of the scenarios there weren’t firsthand accounts. So far nobody has actually jumped into a black hole, taken a bath in the world’s coldest tub, or dug a hole to China and leapt into it.

To get answers to these questions we used military studies (thank you, 1950s-era U.S. Air Force, for subjecting real people to life-threatening experiments), medical journals, astrophysicists’ hypotheses, and the research of professors curious about the slipperiness of banana peels.

Sometimes our answers took us to the edge of human knowledge. If this book were written just twenty years ago we would have sworn that, at least in this universe, you could not die from an oversize kitchen magnet. Fortunately, we didn’t write it back then because you absolutely can and it’s glorious.

Because we were often reaching the frontiers of science in search of gruesome deaths, we also relied on speculation—the most science-based, as-accurate-as-we-think-anyone-could-get speculation. But it’s still speculation.

Meaning if you try one of these scenarios, say, if you skydive from the space station, swan dive into a black hole, or leap into a volcano, and your experience does not mimic what we have described or, worst of all, you don’t even die, we sincerely apologize.

Send us a note and we will amend our second edition.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE who have traveled in a modern airplane, you have probably spent a good bit of time staring out the window at the lovely clouds, sunsets, and beautiful views. And, like most people, you have probably wondered, what happens if this thing pops out?

The answer depends on your altitude. If you were within the first few minutes of flight and still under 20,000 feet, you would probably be okay. You could still breathe for a half hour before you passed out at that altitude, and the pressure difference wouldn’t be great enough to suck you out. It would be a little chilly, but as long as you’re wearing a sweatshirt you should be fine.

It would also be noisy. The wind blowing past your open window would turn the plane into the world’s largest flute, so getting the attention of a flight attendant would be a problem. All in all, though, not bad, and a lot better than if the window popped out at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet.

The air inside a plane’s cabin is pressurized to around 7,000 feet because of the whole breathing thing. If you’re at 35,000 feet and the window pops out, the plane rapidly depressurizes, and that leads to some issues.

The first thing you would notice is all the air getting sucked out of every orifice in your body. And because it’s humid air, it would condense and come out as a fog. That would happen to everybody, so the entire plane would be a thick fog of everyone’s body air. Gross.

Fortunately that would clear up in a few seconds, because the air in the plane is getting sucked out of the open window. Unfortunately, it’s not a neighbor’s window, it’s yours, and that makes a big difference.

If you were sitting just two seats away from the missing window, the wind would be rushing out of the plane with hurricane speed, but that’s still slow enough that if you were wearing a seat belt you would be held fast. Unfortunately, you chose the window seat, where the air would rush out at 300 miles per hour—fast enough to pull you up and out of your seat even if you’re strapped in. (One of the less-mentioned cons of choosing the window over the aisle.)*

Another reason your friend in the aisle seat would be saved is because airplane windows are smaller in diameter than your shoulders. According to research by Harvard University on the human body, the average American has 18-inch-wide shoulders, and the Boeing 747 aircraft’s windows are only 15.3 inches tall—so you would not be sucked all the way out of the plane, just partway.* That’s good for everyone in the plane. It would save you from a long fall, for one, and for everyone else your body would serve as a decent plug. It would slow down the air’s escape from the plane and give people more time to put on their oxygen masks.

Your troubles, on the other hand, would only be beginning.

The first thing you might notice about your new environment would be the wind. The 600-miles-per-hour gale blasting you in the face would push you against the aircraft, wrapping you in a J-shaped figure around the side of the plane.†

The second thing you would notice would be the cold. The temperature at 35,000 feet is 65 degrees below zero. In that chill your nose would become frostbitten within a few seconds.

The third issue is not something you would notice but is probably the most life-threatening. In addition to the abrupt drop in temperature, there would be a more serious change in air pressure. At 35,000 feet the air is so thin you wouldn’t get enough oxygen molecules per breath to survive, only you would not know you were suffocating. Your body cannot detect when there’s too little oxygen; the only thing that gives you that running-out-of-breath feeling is too much carbon dioxide in your blood. So you would keep breathing like everything was fine, but it wouldn’t be. You would have less than fifteen seconds of consciousness before you passed out—and four minutes before brain death.

That goes for people inside the plane as well. As soon as your window popped out they would have fifteen seconds to put on their masks before they passed out—maybe a bit more if your upper body formed a good seal on the window—and really only eight seconds before their brains became so oxygen starved they would be too confused to put on their masks.*

So to recap, you would be halfway out of the airplane, your face would be slamming against the side of the plane, you would have frostbite, and you would be on your way to unconsciousness. But you wouldn’t be dead yet and, surprisingly, if the pilot acted quickly and got down below 20,000 feet within four minutes, you might survive the experience. We know this because it’s happened.

Captain Tim Lancaster was climbing past 20,000 feet in his British Airways flight in 1990 when the front windscreen popped off. He was immediately sucked out of his seat belt and out the window. Everything loose in the cockpit flew out and the flight door jammed into the controls, sending the plane into a steep dive. Nigel Ogden, a flight attendant who happened to be in the cockpit, managed to grab the pilot on his way out and reported the following to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Everything was being sucked out of the aircraft: even an oxygen bottle that had been bolted down went flying and nearly knocked my head off. I was holding on for grim death but I could feel myself being sucked out, too. John rushed in behind me and saw me disappearing, so he grabbed my trouser belt to stop me slipping further, then wrapped the captain’s shoulder strap around me . . .

I thought I was going to lose him, but he ended up bent in a U-shape around the windows. His face was banging against the window with blood coming out of his nose . . . and his arms were flailing.

Eighteen minutes after losing the windscreen the copilot managed to land the aircraft, with his pilot staring at him from the other side of the window the entire time.

Somehow, after firefighters managed to extract the pilot from his awkward position, he survived with only frostbite and a few broken ribs.

Because of the smaller window, you may not need to rely on heroics from your fellow passengers—with just quick action from your pilot, you could enjoy an uncomfortable but scenic trip down.

___________________

*Why do a few feet make such a difference? Picture it this way: When you plug up your bathtub, the power of the water sucking the plug into place gets exponentially greater the closer it gets. Same thing when it comes to airplane windows, and you’re the plug.

*This is where real life differs from the James Bond movie Goldfinger. Goldfinger would not have been sucked out of the window; he just would have been stuffed into it.

†Instead of being pressed into the plane, you would bang against it because of something called reverberation dynamics, which is the same principle that explains a flag flapping in the wind instead of being held in one position. Even if it seems like the wind is constant, it isn’t, and the flag is in a perpetual state of change and adjustment. Your changes and adjustments would be your face slamming against the aircraft repeatedly.

*This happened on professional golfer Payne Stewart’s private jet in 1999. His plane decompressed at 30,000 feet and the pilots weren’t able to put their masks on in time. Because the plane was on autopilot when it depressurized, it continued flying for 1,500 miles before it ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota.

LIKE ALL PREDATORS, sharks are not interested in fair fights. Even for the winners, fair fights lead to injuries, and injuries mean a slow and hungry animal. So predators prefer devastating blowouts with as little risk as possible, which makes you the perfect opponent: You’re slow, weak, and completely oblivious in the water. Fortunately, you don’t taste very good. You’re the squirrel of the ocean, too much bone and not enough fat. Still, sharks are curious creatures and attacks happen—usually from the smaller species that aren’t as dangerous.

But not always. Big sharks can attack. The great white can grow to twenty feet, and even its exploratory nibbles are devastating. Why might the shark go for a bite?

It probably would not be for food. Researchers have stitched shark victims back together and discovered not a single morsel missing. When great white sharks bite a human, they are like children scrambling peas on their plate. Careful reconstruction reveals nary a pea eaten. We must taste so terrible to sharks that, frankly, we should be a little insulted.

So if we taste so horrible, why bite us at all? One popular explanation is that it’s a case of mistaken identity. The theory goes that sharks mistake human swimmers for normal seal prey and take a bite, only then realizing their error and spitting the person out like a diner mistaking the salt for the sugar. It is plausible, but there is little science to back up this theory. There are visual similarities between a surfer and a seal from a shark’s point of view, but that does not explain important differences in the way a shark attacks a swimmer versus the way it strikes a seal.

Researchers placed dummies in chummed water to observe the way sharks approached them. Unlike seal attacks, in which the shark comes from below and hits the animal with one devastating surprise attack, the sharks swam in circles around the dummies—checking them out with multiple passes before striking. The nature of the bite was also a more exploratory, open-bite slash as opposed to the full-gusto chomping bite a shark uses with a seal—like the difference in how you approach a carton of fresh milk as opposed to one close to its expiration date.

So far the evidence suggests that it is not confusion at work when a great white shark attacks, but mere curiosity. Sharks can sense movement by detecting small changes in water pressure, and swimmers are moving, particularly if they have just spotted a fin. This motion can pique a great white’s interest, and sharks seem to operate under a “when in doubt, bite it” policy.*

Incidentally, this is common behavior for many predators—if you have a cat you may have seen this explore-the-world-via-biting behavior. But exploratory biting by sharks significantly differs from your cat’s. There aren’t any reliable measurements of exactly how strong a great white’s bite is, but the few experiments that have been done all come to the same general conclusion: It’s strong enough. In at least one instance a great white bit a man in half as clean as any guillotine.

So let’s say you’re splashing about in the waves and, unbeknownst to you, you attract the attention of a curious great white.

First of all, you would have every right to be upset. Not because you could be slashed to death in a moment, but because the odds of this happening are infinitesimal. If you’re headed for a day at the beach, you’re ten times more likely to fall down your stairs and die on your way to your car. Once you get in your car you’re way more likely to die in an accident driving to the beach, and once you get to the beach you’re far more likely to die in a collapsing sand pit on your way to the water. And even if you avoid those sand pits and make it to the waves, you face the greatest threat of all: drowning. Once you hit the waves, you’re a hundred times more likely to drown than die from a shark attack.

But let’s say you’re lucky and dodge all these bullets. And then you get really unlucky and a great white decides to go for a nibble.

Sharks like to attack from below and behind, so you would probably be struck in the legs. They also have bad table manners: They don’t chew. They tear and rip by thrashing their heads from side to side and rolling their bodies. From spiral teeth markings on bone we can see that sharks like to saw flesh off and then swallow it whole.

The good news is that 70 percent of attacks are one bite only. The bad news is that a single bite and rip from a great white shark is more than enough to remove your leg. However, that can actually work for you.

The great danger in a leg chomping is a cut to your femoral artery. In general, injuries to arteries are more dangerous than those to veins because arteries carry blood from your heart and are under pressure, so when they’re severed they squirt—as opposed to veins, which just drool.

The femoral is one of the worst arteries to sever. It’s responsible for oxygenating your entire leg, and nearly 5 percent of your blood volume passes through it every minute.

Exactly how the shark bites your leg would determine whether you have any chance at all. The human body cannot afford to lose 5 percent of its blood volume per minute—that equates to death in four minutes—so you would think that if your femoral artery was severed, your story would be a short one. But that’s not always the case.

Right now, as you read these words, your femoral artery is under a small bit of tension, like a stretched rubber band. If it were severed cleanly by the shark, it would snap back into the stump of your leg, where your muscles could pinch it shut—slowing the leak and giving you time to get a tourniquet on. But if it were slashed unevenly, or at an angle, it wouldn’t recede correctly—that’s bad. You would black out in thirty seconds. From there you would go into circulatory shock—a deadly positive feedback loop wherein your tissues die from lack of blood, swell up, and compound the problem by blocking blood flow elsewhere in the body.

Four minutes after the attack, if your femoral was cut unevenly, you would have lost 20 percent of your blood and you would enter a critical stage. Your heart needs a minimum blood pressure to keep beating, and once you lost 20 percent of your blood volume you would drop below that threshold. After that it would only be a few minutes until complete brain death.

All of this assumes you were lucky and the shark did the expected and attacked from behind. A frontal attack on your head and torso is less likely but worse. Losing your head is bad because, one, your brain is in it and, two, tourniquets are far less effective on your neck than they are on your legs (for details, see Wikipedia for “Hanging”).

Lawyer’s note: Seriously—do not put a tourniquet around your neck.

___________________

*It’s important to note that we’re talking about great white sharks here—which kill the most people but don’t appear to do it out of hunger. Another breed of shark, called the oceanic whitetip, has intentionally killed and eaten humans. However, attacks from whitetips are uncommon (usually survivors of shipwrecks) because they frequent open ocean, far away from people, whereas great whites often patrol beaches.

The most famous oceanic whitetip attack occurred in 1945 just before Japan’s surrender when a navy ship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed near the Philippines. Nine hundred men hit the water alive, but because of a miscommunication they weren’t rescued for four days. Oceanic whitetip sharks, attracted to all the commotion, began feeding on the sailors. By the time the survivors were rescued, the sharks had killed and eaten as many as 150 men.

IF YOU SEE a banana peel on the floor, how concerned should you be? If the cartoons are to be believed, the answer is, of course, very. Cartoons might understate banana peel danger by overstating the strength of your skull, but the cartoons aren’t kidding about the slipperiness of banana peels. Rigorous scientific study has confirmed bananas as the most dangerous of all fruit peels.

Slipperiness is measured by placing a block of a given material on a ramp of another material and then slowly increasing the angle of the ramp. The tangent of the angle of the ramp when the object starts to slide gives the coefficient of friction (CoF), and it usually scales from 0 (the slipperiest) to 1 (stickiest), though in some stickier situations it can go as high as 4.* Rubber on a cement sidewalk has a near slip-proof CoF of 1.04.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum. Sliding on socks across a wooden floor has a CoF of only 0.23, and ice is even slipperier. A walk across an ice rink can have embarrassing consequences because rubber on ice registers a potentially painful CoF of 0.15.*

Banana peels put all that to shame.

We know this thanks to a few daring professors at Kitasato University in Minato, Japan, who decided to double-check the cartoons. Dr. Kiyoshi Mabuchi and his team peeled a bunch of bananas, threw them on a wooden floor, and stepped on them with rubber-soled shoes (hopefully they had a spotter). Then they measured the forces involved.

It turns out Elmer Fudd might not have been as clumsy as we all thought. Banana peels on wood have a CoF of only 0. 07—twice as slippery as ice and five times slipperier than wood. Mabuchi and his team of researchers weren’t done, though. Was the banana peel slippery merely because of its water content? Would other fruit peels result in similar slippage?

To find out they peeled apples and tangerines and ran the same rigorous experiment: They stepped on them. The apple peel came in a distant second, at 0.1, and the tangerine peel was by far the stickiest, with a CoF of 0.225 (about the same as stepping on a wooden floor without a peel).

So if you’re walking through a fruit factory and have a choice of peels to step on, remember this: It’s not just a joke; banana peels are the worst. Under pressure, a banana peel oozes a gel that turns out to be extremely slippery. Your foot and body weight provide the pressure. The gel provides the humor.

Why is slipperiness so important? Walking is really just a series of falls and catches. With each step you fall forward, and with the next one you catch yourself and begin the process over again. Banana peels mess up the catching part. If you just stand on a slippery surface, you will probably be okay. But if you take a step, you initiate a fall. To stop it, your leading foot hits the ground with forward momentum at a strike angle of 15 degrees. If you know you’re walking on a slippery substance, you will change your gait to decrease that angle, demand less friction from the floor, and lessen your chances of taking a tumble. Stray banana peels have a way of sneaking up on you, though, and research suggests that taking a normal step on a substance with a CoF of less than 0.1 results in a fall 90 percent of the time.

Of course, the real danger with falling is injuring your brain, an essential organ that lives high off the ground. Learning to walk upright sometime 4 to 6 million years ago was a big advancement for the human species, but it did introduce the problem of a slip-and-fall. If you were, say, the height of a small dog and you fell, your head would not build up enough speed to do any damage when it hit the sidewalk.* You could dance on banana peels, because the difference between falling twelve inches and hitting your head and falling six feet on the same organ is the difference between a bruise and a broken skull.

The force generated by an unrestrained falling adult onto something solid is more than enough to crack a skull. In ballpark terms (everyone’s head is a little different) your skull would crack with as little as an unrestrained three-foot fall onto a hard surface. The skull is stronger in the front and back, and weaker on the sides, but even if you fall onto the stronger frontal bone, a fall of six feet is enough to crack it—especially if you pitch forward.

Either way, if you cannot protect your head from a fall of six feet, your skull would fracture. Fractures are dangerous for a few reasons, but bleeding is the big one. Your brain is a blood hog, which means cracking it results in a lot of bleeding inside, putting you in immediate and deep trouble.

Bleeding inside your skull can be far more dangerous than bleeding anywhere else. And it’s not just because you can bandage a leg wound and you can’t an internal skull bleed. It’s because your skull is a solid container carrying fragile cargo. If your head starts filling with blood, your brain gets squeezed. Too much blood within your skull creates pressure that strangles the rest of your brain and chokes off and kills critical brain functions, like remembering to breathe.

Of course your brain knows how fragile it is, and if you slip it works very hard to put something in the way to break your fall—hands, elbows, knees—anything but itself. Which is why you see more bruised butts than broken heads and why banana peels are usually funny, not lethal.

But “usually” isn’t the same as “always.” And that brings us to Mr. Bobby Leach, the English daredevil of Niagara Falls.

Since 1901, roughly fifteen people have attempted to go over Niagara Falls for the fame or the thrill (see p. 57 for what happened when they did). Five of them drowned; most never went back. (“I’d rather stand in front of a cannon and be blown to death,” responded the first survivor, “than do that again.”)

But Bobby Leach was a professional stuntman, daredevil, and circus performer who cheated death for a living. In 1911, he climbed into a steel barrel and went over the falls. He survived, although he needed six months of hospitalization to recover from two wrecked knees and a broken jaw.

Afterward, he went on to a successful lecturing career, touring the world with his barrel and posing for photos. In 1926, he was in New Zealand when he slipped on an unidentified fruit peel on a sidewalk in Auckland and gashed his leg. A few days later, Bobby Leach died from the complications.

___________________

*A CoF larger than 1 means the object slips at an angle greater than 45 degrees. The highest CoF we can find is the rubber on the tires of top fuel dragsters, which when spinning have a CoF on pavement of 4 (they could climb a 75-degree wall).

*Lubricated surfaces have even less friction. The synovial fluid that lubricates your joints, for example, is one of the slipperiest substances in the world—registering at a CoF of .0003, which is a good thing, otherwise it would give cracking your knuckles a more literal interpretation.

*This is where bugs really have us beat. No bug in the history of bugs has ever fallen to its death.