We don’t usually think about the thickness of things, but it intrudes on us nonetheless. especially when our region gets clobbered by a passing hurricane every decade or two, and we experience destructive gales or floods. The damage we suffer is almost always worse from the water than from the winds. The reason is simply that water is 816 times denser than air. So the force of a few feet of flooding pushing against a house, even if it’s only flowing at five m.p.h., results in much greater damage than that of 100 m.p.h. hurricane gusts.

More commonly our encounters with density variations may range from the thinness of mountain air to the high density of a steel chain. Rarely do we encounter Earth’s highest-density elements, since we’ve probably never been asked to lift a bucket of lead pe

See Full Page