The Rest Is Science This Glass Was Made By Lightning
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Jan 29, 2026 They trace glass forged by lightning and explain how fulgurites trap ancient air. They compare natural lightning glass to human-made radioactive glass. They play with scale, asking how dense a hamster would need to be to become a black hole. They test sensations at planetary scales and challenge our intuition about smoothness and texture.
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Why Mirrors Seem To Flip Us
- Mirrors don't swap left and right; they return whatever orientation you present to them.
- Hannah Fry explains that you perceive a horizontal flip because you mentally rotate to face your reflection.
Hamster Black Hole Requires Extreme Density
- Shrinking an object to its Schwarzschild radius, not just compressing it, makes it a black hole.
- A 150 g hamster needs a radius ~2.2×10⁻²⁸ m and density ~3.3×10⁸¹ kg/m³ to become a black hole.
Tiny Black Holes Evaporate Catastrophically
- Tiny black holes evaporate almost instantly via Hawking radiation and convert mass to energy.
- A 150 g hamster black hole would release ~3.2 megatons TNT, far larger than Hiroshima's bomb.