Name: Fake or Physics?
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What the Physics?!

FQXI

Fetzer Franklin Fund

Guess which of these five unbelievable facts are real physics in this April Fools' Day episode of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj1gfrsi8H8zTrmR0ft1Kjw/">What the Physics?!</a>

Guess which of these five unbelievable facts are real physics.

Fake or Physics?

Guess which of these five unbelievable facts are real physics.

Physics & Math

Fake or Physics?Published April 2, 2018Greg Kestin: Here are five unbelievable facts. Or...are they facts?Welcome to our April Fools' Day game: Fake or Physics?Number one: Sound can travel 99% the speed of light. Fake or physics?It's physics. Sound travels faster in denser materials. In a neutron star, which is so dense that a teaspoon of it weighs as much as a mountain, the speed of sound is nearly the speed of light.Number two: Is this picture fake or physics?It's physics. Using carefully arranged lenses, physicists have created a kind of invisibility cloak that bends light around objects. It makes it look like there's nothing there.Three: If you were flying in a rocket really, really fast, you would see rainbows all around you.It's physics. When you travel toward light, the light that you're traveling toward becomes bluer. The light that you're traveling away from gets redder, and you'll see the whole spectrum in between. That's Doppler effect.Number four: These little balls are floating in mid-air. No strings attached.Again, it's physics. This is acoustic levitation. Pressure from the high-pitched sound that you can see here is holding the balls up against gravity. That is, until it's turned off.Number five: It's impossible to make a perfect copy of something without destroying the original.And...it's physics. If you want to copy something all the way down to the quantum level, you have to collect information from the original to make that copy. But you can't observe anything on the quantum level without altering it or destroying it.So all five of these riddles are physics. And if you want to know more about any of them, there are links and details in the description.

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