Monday, February 7, 2022

Why Metals Spontaneously Fuse Together In Space

There is nothing cooler than space.

Nothing...

I'm willing to watch just about the most mundane bit of nothing if it's being done in space because nothing happens in space the same way that it happens here on the surface of Earth.

On Earth, two metals put next to each other stay fairly distinct from each other. (I don't want to hear about your dendritic growth causing shorts.)

In space, however, metals spontaneously weld to each other if the metals are in close enough contact because any sort of oxide layer - immediately formed here on Earth pretty much no matter how well we polish the two surfaces - simply doesn't form. As Dr Derek paraphrases from Richard Feynman's lecture, "when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to 'know' that they are in different pieces of [metal]." 

Seriously, space is so totally foreign to our experiences.

No comments:

Post a Comment