Physics Myths Busted: 5G, Airplane Toilets, and Cats with Toast

A few weeks ago, we had the amazing physicist, science writer, and communicator Laurie Winkless on the podcast. She was so great, one episode wasn’t enough... so she’s back to do some mythbusting!

Consider this your guide to physics, technology, and everyday curiosities - from 5G and microwaves to planes, coins, and even toast on cats.

Transcript

Laurie
Something that I think a lot of people have heard or feel like they know, which is actually wrong, is that glass in old windows is thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top because glass is some sort of liquid that just flows over a really long timescale. But that's not really true.

Brianne
What?

Laurie
Yeah, I'm afraid not.

Brianne
I feel lied to.

Laurie
Scientists have looked into this, right? So there's actually been measurements done and proper research into it. And back in the 90s, there was a paper from a Brazilian researcher who basically wanted to debunk this idea that old glass is thicker at the bottom because it has flowed over time. He looked at a series of different glass compositions over the years, mostly kind of in theory rather than in practice, but looking at their chemistry. And he figured out that you would need to get glass, I think it's to 200 or 250 degrees C, before you would see any sort of actual flow. So we can turn glass into a liquid that flows, but at room temperature, it does not.

And then about 10 years ago, researchers who really know glass, who are at a company called Corning in the US — they're like the glass research institute for the world, really — they did a proper, detailed study. They actually looked specifically at Westminster Abbey as an example for this theory. And they found that at room temperature, glass cannot flow.

Now, I will say that glass does have a lower viscosity than we thought. Viscosity is resistance to flow — its stickiness. So if it’s very gloopy, it has a high viscosity; if it’s very runny, it has a low viscosity. Glass is a little bit lower in viscosity than we thought previously before this research. But even so, they found that glass will flow about one nanometre in a billion years.

Yeah. Okay. Super imperceptible. I don't think we can even measure it. So, yeah, I’m afraid glass does not flow.

Brianne
Well, so why is glass thicker at the bottom? Is it just the way it was made?

Laurie
Yeah, probably. And it was probably sensible from the viewpoint of the people who were installing the glass to put the heavier bit at the bottom. It would just be a bit more stable than having the heavier bit up the top. There are examples in some castles and churches where the glass has been put up the other way — so the thicker end is at the top — and that was probably a bit of carelessness on the behalf of the person putting it in.

Brianne
But that's good because that helps to prove the theory as well.

Laurie
Yeah. Sorry to debunk that one, because it comes up a lot.

Brianne
It does. You've ruined my whole understanding of glass.

Laurie
Apologies.

Brianne
I'm devastated. It's a very complicated material. It really is. Yep. I have spent probably three, maybe four seconds of my entire life thinking about glass before. So it's good to expand our horizons. Welcome back to MicroGreens. Today we are debunking a whole bunch of different physics myths with Laurie, the physicist, who was not at all boring — which I should stop saying.

So thank you for joining and putting up with, I think, what, an hour and a half of withering on about things last week. And thank you for coming back.

Laurie
My pleasure.

Brianne
I've written a bunch of different myths for you, and I’ve allowed Laurie to have a look at these so we're not springing them on her, because that would probably be a little bit harsh. Conspiracy theories: do 5G towers kill and control people? Do they melt your brain?

Laurie
No, is the straight answer.

Brianne
I'm surprised.

Laurie
I know, you're shocked. But I do think it's valuable to take a wee step back and talk about what 5G actually is. So, the universe is full of electromagnetic radiation. This is energy that travels through space in the form of waves, and there are loads of forms of it. Now, there are loads of ways we can categorise electromagnetic radiation, but if we're thinking about human health — about making people sick — the most important way to categorise it is whether it is ionising or non-ionising.

What defines that is the wavelength of the radiation, or how much energy it has. Most of the radiation we interact with on an everyday basis has longer wavelengths and low energy. So this is stuff like microwaves, radio waves, visible light. These are all low-energy, non-ionising radiation. They're called non-ionising because this form of radiation literally does not have enough energy to rip electrons off atoms or break chemical bonds. That means it cannot damage our cells.

5G is a form of non-ionising radiation. It sits somewhere between radio waves and microwaves on the scale. So if we put all electromagnetic radiation on a scale with low-energy non-ionising radiation on the left and high-energy ionising radiation on the right, 5G is down in that left section. It does not have the energy to damage our DNA or do anything like that.

There are, of course, forms of radiation that can do that. Up on the right end of the scale, we’ve got ionising radiation — things like x-rays or CT scanners. They produce ionising radiation that, with a high enough dose, can cause damage to our bodies. This is why doctors try to limit how many x-rays you get in a year or in your lifetime. The dose you get is tiny, but still enough that we don’t want to take that risk.

So 5G is right down in the non-ionising, low-energy, not-going-to-rip-apart-atoms, not-going-to-rip-apart-DNA end of the scale. So no, 5G will not give you cancer or make you sick.

Brianne
I don't know why, but I have a weird fascination with radiation. I'm quite excited. I bullied my student advisor at uni to allow me to do a radiation paper. She was like, "You’ve done no physics, and you want to do a 400-level radiation paper?" Okay. It's going to be fun, but it's fascinating.

I did a mini-series on nuclear energy, and the first episode was specifically on radiation. Now Laurie, do not go listen to it, because you'll probably be like, "Not how I’d have worded it." But if you are interested in the basics of radiation, you may find it useful because it goes into the nitty-gritty.

Laurie
And also, it goes without saying that without causing damage to DNA, it doesn't control us.

Brianne
No.

Laurie
I mean, we don't have the ability to mind control. We don’t have technology to control people’s minds.

Brianne
That we know about.

Laurie
That we know about, yeah of course. But it's really difficult, man. The brain is incredibly complicated.

Brianne
Yeah. Incredibly complicated, but also we can be incredibly stupid at the same time. It's amazing, isn't it, that those two things exist simultaneously?

So this is another one that you hear people mention, and it's very much the same answer. Microwaves — you don't have to worry about them. People don’t like to stand in front of them because they’re worried about radiation leakage, but it’s completely the wrong wavelength for that.

Laurie
Yeah, it is. It’s right down in that non-ionising end of the spectrum, so it can’t do anything to you. And microwave ovens are designed to keep microwaves inside them. They all have a metallic cage built into them. Even through the glass, there’s a cage that keeps the microwaves inside the oven.

Brianne
Is it a Faraday cage, or is it a different thing?

Laurie
Yeah, it kind of is, but it’s for microwaves specifically — designed for those wavelengths. And the reason I think people worry is because they think, you know, a microwave is where you cook food and that’s probably bad for our cells if it sneaks out. But what a microwave is actually doing when it cooks food is heating up the water inside the food. It gives the water energy, which then heats up the rest of the food. It’s not doing chemistry — it’s just warming stuff up.

So you don’t have any reason to be concerned standing in front of a modern-day microwave oven. It’s completely safe.

Brianne
You say modern-day?

Laurie
Yeah, well, you know, stuff rusts, stuff breaks, you might get some damage. But even so, microwaves aren’t going to do anything to you.

Brianne
No, because it’s not the right kind of ray. And that’s the key — these things may technically be a form of radiation, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right form. I think it’d be good if people understood the difference between ionising and non-ionising.

And actually, I noticed this warning sign no longer seems to appear, but at petrol stations it used to say, “Don’t use your mobile phone” because of the likelihood, I think, of them creating a spark.

Laurie
So first of all, we don’t produce sparks when we use our mobile phone. That’s probably the big misunderstanding.

Brianne
I would have thought we’d have noticed.

Laurie
Yeah, I would have thought so too. But we can produce sparks at a petrol station forecourt if we’re not careful — just not generally because of our mobile phones.

I did look into this because I didn’t know whether it had ever been reported as actually happening. From what I found, it’s never happened. There’s never been a case where a spark or something from a mobile phone has caused a fire at a petrol station forecourt.

What I did read is that some of the cautiousness around using mobile phones was partly about timing. When mobile phones started to become common, we were also getting more electronics within petrol pumps. I think there was concern that the mobile phone was somehow interfering with the electronics at petrol stations, you know, in the early days of mobile phone tech.

But what we do see is that sparks can and do ignite flammable vapour — like the vapour at the end of the fuel nozzle. That can cause ignition. So something you should never do, for example, is refill a jerry can while it’s sitting in the boot of your car, especially where there’s carpet. You can get charges building up between the materials, and a spark can happen in that situation.

And this has happened a lot. People being careless with jerry cans at petrol stations has led to fires — there’ve been lots of reports in Australia, for example. So yes, sparks can cause flames. But mobile phones don’t cause sparks.

So there’s a disconnect between those two parts of the myth. That said, I kind of understand where it comes from. And there are arguments for not using your phone at a petrol station simply because you might be distracted. Like, what if someone drives in? So it’s not bad advice, just not necessarily for the reasons people think.

Brianne
Yeah. I always wondered if it was something to do because obviously you used to have a separate phone, God, 412 years ago, you used to have a separate battery from a phone, right? Oh yeah. I don’t know if I ever had one of those or not. I don’t recall. But I think some of the concern was dropping it and it sparking on the ground. But you could say that about almost anything with a metallic element, I would have thought.

Laurie
Yeah, quite. You can generate sparks quite easily. So I feel like we’ve kind of blamed the mobile phone for something that we are perfectly capable of doing incompetently without it.

Brianne
Mobile phones on planes. I am of the firm belief, if it was a real concern, they would take your phone off you. Or, as I’ve recently learned existed, they’d put them in Faraday bags, which are a thing. I don’t know if you know enough to comment on the aeroplane.

Laurie
I remember vaguely reading about it a long time ago, and I kind of, I’m of the same frame of mind. I suspect that if you’re like really up close to the cockpit, maybe it might have… there’s a possibility of some interference. But usually with this stuff, we’ve got very narrow, well-defined wavelength ranges that our technology operates at. And like you said, unless it was an extreme risk, I think they would take our phones off us if it was an extreme risk. I think they would. But I mean, I generally just don’t use it and I’m never near the front of the plane. So I think it’s just a habit.

I’m not convinced that it’s going to cause a plane to fall out of the air, but could it interfere? Maybe, you know, if the wavelengths overlap, if the wavelengths in our broadcast spectrum of our phone and whatever, all of the electronics in the cockpit, if they overlap, then yeah, there’s a possibility they will interfere. Yeah, I just keep it off.

Absolutely, look at the end of the day if you don’t know enough, don’t bugger around with the rules because it’s a plane. Err on the side of caution. Yeah, I think that’s a good rule in a plane in general really. Definitely.

Continuing on with the plane thing, can a plane toilet suck your innards out? I don’t know what the myth is here, but apparently this is a thing people are concerned about. It’s being sucked into the toilet or being like disembowelled. That’s a horrible scene in, what are those, Final Destination?

Brianne
Horrible, horrible scene where a man is disembowelled by a swimming pool pump.

Laurie
Oh God.

You know, is there something else I have to fret about? I would say no, you don’t need to worry about this. And I think the reason that you don’t have to worry about it is that the only way there’s any sort of risk, and it’s a very minor risk even at this, would be if you manage to create a perfect seal with your buttocks on the toilet seat. You can’t do that. The toilet seats have a gap in them on a plane, probably for that reason.

Oh yeah yeah. No disembowelling. Yeah. So I think that’s not going to happen. I’ve never, again, there’s no reports of it ever happening, ever.

Brianne
They’ve covered it up, you see, the same 5G.

Laurie
And yeah, I’m sorry. I should stop mocking—

Brianne
People. That’s terrible.

Laurie
It’s all part of this conspiracy. But no, I think basically that’s never going to happen. So you have to get a perfect seal with your buttocks and then when the vacuum is turned on, it might suck some of your skin a bit further in maybe, but it’s not going to be powerful enough to disembowel you.

And also, by the way, an aeroplane toilet, the stuff that goes down the toilet is stored. It is not ejected out of the plane, which is another myth that you see sometimes that people think.

Brianne
Yeah.

Laurie
Yeah. No, that doesn’t happen. So I think you’re safe.

Brianne
I didn’t know people thought that was a thing, the whole just dropping it. I just don’t see countries allowing that to just be dropped willy-nilly. But okay.

Laurie
So it’s not. And so if you were sucked into the toilet slightly, it would be maybe by a couple of millimetres, but it’s only if you can get this perfect seal in place, which you can’t.

Brianne
Yeah.

No. Okay. Thankfully, I can tick that off the don’t-have-to-be-worried-about list. Being in a car in a storm, you always assume, because I have driven through the most spectacular lightning storm and it’s slightly unnerving because electricity is—actually my great uncle was hit by lightning twice.

Oh my God. He survived. I know honestly I thought this was a BS family myth but it is actually true. Oh my goodness. Yeah but in a big electrical storm, other than being beautiful, it’s unnerving. We all feel a little bit safer because of the tyres I think. Is that a reality or are we less safe?

Laurie
You are safe in a car in a storm but not because of the tyres. It’s because your car acts as a Faraday cage. So assuming your car is a metal cage, is a metal chassis, then what will happen is if lightning does strike your vehicle, which the risk of that is already pretty small, but if it does strike your vehicle, the lightning will take the easiest path and that’s through metal. So all of the charges will stay on the outside of the car and make their way to the ground. So it’s not to do with the tyres at all.

Where things get a bit complicated is if you have like a convertible car, which doesn’t have a metal roof, for example, arguably that definitely will not be acting as a Faraday cage because it needs to have a clear path, like it needs to have a continuous path of the metal. So, you know, maybe you’re less safe in a convertible car, even with the roof up in a lightning storm. But yeah, it’s all about the metal, really. It’s all about the chassis and not really about the tyres at all.

I know that makes sense that you’re thinking about it. Yeah. Electricity is a weird thing, you know, we have this relationship with this and it’s also kind of a bit terrifying and mysterious. So I understand the thing about thinking that because rubber is an insulator on some level that maybe that protects you, but actually what you want is for the electricity to flow just not through you. You want the electricity to flow somewhere else and thankfully in a metal car that is exactly what it will do.

So you’re pretty safe in it.

Brianne
Yeah, okay. So even though you’ve got that rubber and say, well, what’s yay thick, the actual rubber itself and the charge leaps to ground.

Laurie
Yeah.

Brianne
Usually. ’Cause you’re really, it’s such a short distance, you know, so. Yeah. Right. Okay. And lightning is negatively charged clouds, positively charged earth.

Laurie
I believe so. Yeah.

Brianne
And there is somewhere, and I’ve forgotten where it is in the world, that gets almost all year round, it has something like 200 lightning strikes an hour for something about 250 days a year. And I can’t remember where it is, but…

Laurie
It must be like rainforesty, I would think.

Brianne
It’s certainly a tropical environment. I probably should have found out where that was. Yeah, that’s very cool.

If I dropped a coin from the Sky Tower in Auckland, would I slice through somebody? This is another Final Destination thing, actually.

Laurie
I think the answer to this is no. Now, I’ve kind of gone around the houses on this, partly because aerodynamics is quite complicated. You know, I was like, oh, I’ll just do like a quick calculation just to see.

Brianne
Oh, you did, okay, oh, nuts.

Laurie
Oh yeah, well, you know, if I have numbers, I will try and do a calculation. But I think the answer is no. But I think once you start getting bigger, heavier objects than say a coin, then the risk becomes much greater.

So when you drop something from a building, it’s moving through the air as it’s moving at a constant acceleration. So it’s moving at the speed of gravity, which means that its speed is increasing at a constant rate, which is a weird thing sometimes for people to get their head around.

It is moving through the air, so it’s bashing through air molecules. It’s not moving through a vacuum. So you end up reaching what’s called a terminal velocity, which is where the air resistance, so the drag that’s caused by moving through the air, trying to push the air molecules out of the way, that kind of balances with the gravitational force on the coin, right? So the speed of the coin moving through the air.

Now where it gets complicated is like, you’ve got these things called drag coefficients. So this tells you how easily or how difficult it is for a shape of an object to move through air or water. So there’s a reason that like planes are the shape they are because that minimises what we call the drag coefficient. A big ball, for example, will experience a lot more drag than a sleek aeroplane. And a coin is funny because a coin kind of is thin, small, it will flip over, I would expect, as it’s falling. So it’s actually quite difficult to calculate what its drag coefficient is.

So this is why I’m kind of going around the houses a bit. But basically, from what I can figure out, you’ve got like a one cent coin in New Zealand weighs about two grams. One dollar coin weighs about eight grams. They’re very small, you know, they’re like tens of millimetres in diameter. They’re thin. So I think that even when they’re moving fast, I don’t think they’re going to… they’re definitely not going to slice through you. It might hurt a bit if it hits you, but I don’t think it’s going to injure you.

But yeah, when stuff gets bigger and heavier, then the speed that it reaches, the energy it has when it hits the ground is much higher. So then it gets quite risky. But I did look up because I wanted to see, I’m sure I knew that someone would have done this calculation about hailstones, right? Because hailstones are a thing that we’re obsessed with. And a hailstone with a radius of about five centimetres, so 10 centimetre diameter, so a big hailstone would have like a terminal velocity of close to 50 kilometres an hour.

So that, it would hurt you, but it’s not going to slice through you.

And that’s a relatively easy thing to calculate because it’s a ball, it’s a sphere.

But even so, things like humidity will make a difference to how objects move through air. So it’s really difficult to calculate, but I think it’s definitely not going to slice through. It might hurt you a bit if it hits you.

Brianne
Unfortunately, you have just now ruined the latest Final Destination movie really, because the precursor is a bit of a coin. I always assumed there’d be a path of least resistance, that it would fall through because obviously flipping over at one point you’d have more force. I do not like talking about this when I have no idea what I’m talking about. This is quite stressful but I just—

Laurie
I assumed it would be easier for it to fall that way, and therefore it would gain a bit more speed. It tends to flip, yeah. It tends to move around a bit. And you have objects like a dart, for example — a dart will tend to fall in one direction. It will point straight down at the ground. But that’s again because of what we call a drag coefficient. It’s got this narrow, long body, so it will fall on that least-resistance kind of path. But we just don’t have any preference to the way that things tumble, especially if we accelerate something. If we launch something, it will usually stay in its position because we’ve given it energy and it will hold that position. But when you’re dropping something, you’re just kind of hands-off, and it will tumble and it will move and it will be buffeted by the air if there’s any breeze or wind. All of those things can interfere with how an object falls. Would it be different in a vacuum? Yeah, it definitely would be. If it fell through a vacuum, it would probably kill you.

Brianne
Oh, okay. Okay. The last question is really weird and I think it actually comes from a Simpsons joke. You know how toast always lands buttered side down? And cats always land standing up? So what happens, the age-old joke, if you glue a piece of buttered toast to a cat — does it infinitely rotate?

Laurie
Exactly. That’s exactly what it does in terms of physics. I can confirm. If only. Why do cats always land on their feet? I think just because they think quicker than us. I don’t really know. I think they have a sense of where their body is. There’s a thing called proprioception, which was not something I’d ever heard about until quite recently, which is a sense of where your body is in space. Really good athletes, for example, have incredibly good proprioception.

Brianne
It’s very important and we don’t train it, but we should.

Laurie
No, not at all. Very good athletes know where their limbs are and where everything is. You’ll see this — I’m a big rugby fan — in a match where you’ve got someone at the bottom of a maul and they’ve managed to somehow know where the try line is, even though their body has been flipped over and stumbled to the ground. But they know where the line is. And I think with cats, they have incredibly good proprioception. They can see where the floor is or know where the floor is, and they can rotate their body to meet it. Toast, of course, does not have any proprioception because it’s not conscious. The butter-side-down thing, I think it’s just because of the height of most tables.

Brianne
Yes. It’s all about what, 1.3, 1.5 metres? It’s just the number of rotations, I think. Maybe we should do some experiments with dropping it from higher heights. Please make sure you film those because I think it would be quite funny — particularly the cleanup afterwards, super annoying.

Laurie
If you stick it onto the back of a cat, then obviously what will happen is that the buttered toast will want to hit the ground, the cat will want to hit the ground also, so they infinitely just cycle and become a perpetual motion machine. Well, we’ve solved the energy crisis. Done. Congratulations.

Brianne
You’d probably get your doctorate written very easily from 9pm the night before, I think.

Laurie
Super.

Brianne
So just jot this down. Look, I have heard of all sorts of absolutely insane things online that people vehemently believe. Perpetual motion cat-toast machine is not the weirdest. It could be worse. The other day I was trying to explain to someone why a water-powered engine or a water-powered car won’t work. And I understand that if you run electricity, you split water and then you can burn the hydrogen and the oxygen is there. You try and tell people, but splitting water actually uses more energy than is released.

Brianne
Yes, and people are like, “Oh, but you just use electricity to split the water.” Okay. So the electricity comes from…? No, I haven’t convinced anybody of my argument at all.

Laurie
No, but it’s hard. Anything to do with energy is hard, because I think we don’t teach it well. And I think also people want simple answers. The reality is that few things are simple. Most things are complicated. And that’s why you need experts who are working on these challenges rather than randoms reckoning they have an idea. And it’s not to discourage people having ideas — ideas are great — but science is about testing ideas. The ones that work stick around, the others don’t.

Brianne
Exactly. Do you have a cat?

Laurie
I don’t. I have a dog though.

Brianne
Okay, dogs unfortunately don’t land on their feet. So if you’re going to test that one, I’m going to need you to get a cat.

Laurie
I’ll go in next door. They have a cat.

Brianne
Perfect. Make sure you film that experiment because that will be really interesting to watch you stick some toast to a cat.

Laurie
I think we’ll just wrap it around its waist maybe, like a saddle. So the toast is like a saddle — it would be lovely. Oh God, you can tell it’s Friday.

Brianne
We’ve gone completely crazy. Well, do you have any other random myths you want to bust?

Laurie
No, I don’t think so. I mean, the world is full of interesting myths. I’ll tell you a random cool thing that I came across when I was writing Sticky. This is about plants — maybe a bit physics-adjacent. There’s a plant called the salvinia fern, which is actually a horribly invasive weed. It grows like crazy on waterways. It chokes them up, it’s awful stuff. But from a physics point of view, it’s really interesting because the leaves of these ferns are covered in these structures. They look a bit like a baking whisk — a long stem with four strips joining at the top.

These plants float on the water and they don’t get wet. You could submerge this fern in water for literal years, pull it out, and it would be bone dry. A few years ago, scientists finally figured out how this plant is so water-repellent. These whisk structures are covered in a waxy material that stops water from sticking to the leaf. But the genius bit is at the very tip of the whisk — there’s a tiny section that is actually water-attracting, hydrophilic. So water gets pinned at the tips, while the rest of the leaf repels water. That traps a layer of air inside the fern. So when you lift it out, only that tiny tip has touched water.

Scientists are trying to use this to develop coatings for boats, so you could potentially have a boat that doesn’t get wet. It moves on a pocket of air.

Brianne
Would it help with speed?

Laurie
Yes, it would definitely help with speed because you’re moving through air rather than water. That’s the goal — to make a coating that repels water but pins it at points, so boats can glide faster, not foul, and use less fuel.

Brianne
I’d love to see something come out of that. And as soon as you said it, I thought that would solve a lot of problems with packaging. The reason we use plastic is because so much of our food or cosmetics contain water, so cardboard and stuff doesn’t work. If you could use something like that as a coating on the inside of a box or tube… Can we hurry this along to commercial?

Laurie
Yes, let’s have a chat. We’ve got the whole weekend. Two whole days.

Brianne
So that water — is it at all related to surface tension?

Laurie
Yes. Water has quite a high surface tension. It’s not a skin, but it behaves like one. The molecules want to stick together strongly, so surface tension makes a difference. I’d love to see if anyone’s done the experiment with another liquid like alcohol, which has lower surface tension. It would be interesting to see if alcohol wets the leaf instead.

Brianne
Yeah. I think spiders are great. I do really like them, but I really don’t want them on me. They freak me out a little bit.

Brianne
I was cleaning out the pool — well, I wasn’t. I was standing in the corner going “oh my God,” because there was a massive spider walking along the bottom of it. And I did a bit of research — even if they don’t seem hairy, they often trap air around themselves with surface tension and can survive for quite a while. Really cool… and horrifying.

Laurie
Yeah, it’s true. I kind of feel like that sometimes about the natural world. Anything that’s alive — the squishy, alive things — they’re like magic or something.

Brianne
Ultimately though, I remember having a very vociferous debate with an engineering flatmate. He said, “Ultimately, everything is physics.” It was physics versus biology.

Laurie
I had an argument with a friend at university. She’s a biologist and would say, “I just don’t know how you could walk around in the world not understanding how your body works.” And my arrogant response was always, “Well, I don’t know how you move through the universe without understanding how it works.” Which, can I say, I would never say now. I do not believe that.

Brianne
It’s almost like the less you know, the more arrogant you are about the little bit you know, right? And then you realize, oh shit.

They saw the formation of a planet?

Brianne
Yeah, I only read the heading and then I lost it and can’t find it again. But they’ve got vision of the beginnings of a planet.

Laurie
Man.

Brianne
Yeah, I don’t know how they know, because I imagine it takes eons to form a planet.

Laurie
I would think so. But how cool that we have the ability to see things that far away and that long ago.

Brianne
Oh, we’re getting into relativity. No, too confusing. My brain will melt.

Laurie
Not for a Friday.

Brianne
Well, there you go. There’s your weekly physics myth-busting. You can feel better about 5G and airplane toilets. Although, to be honest, it wasn’t the sucking thing that worried me about plane toilets — it’s the level of ick. And I don’t understand why there is always water on the floor. I’m convinced it’s not water. Please don’t explain.

Laurie
I will tell you that the toilets don’t use water on a plane. So it’s not from the toilet.

Brianne
Also, it’s definitely not water.

Laurie
That could be from the sink.

Brianne
Sure it is. Yeah, okay.

Brianne
We’ll go with that. Thank you again. Always fascinating, always a pleasure. That has been your weekly physics moment.