Some science facts & trivia

According to the laws of gravity, the moon technically does not orbit the Earth. The two bodies actually both orbit around their common centre of gravity, which is located 1,000 miles beneath the surface of the Earth and is on a straight line between the centres of the Earth and moon. The centre of the Earth makes a small circle around that centre of gravity every 27 ¹/₃ days.

To the nearest ten-thousandth of a mile, light travels at 186,282.3959 miles per second. At that rate, it takes slightly more than eight minutes to get to Earth from the sun. However, it takes light hundreds of years to travel from the sun's centre to its surface. The light must take a very indirect path to the surface due to the large number of collisions with particles within the sun.

An atomic clock kept at the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A., 1650 metres above sea level, gains about five microseconds each year relative to an identical clock kept at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, 25 metres above sea level. The reason is that gravity gets stronger as one gets closer to the Earth's core, and, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, time is slower in stronger gravitational fields.

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the amount of entropy in the universe always increases, which means that eventually, the universe must run down and life in the universe will cease.

While light has no mass, it has weight. Weight is a measurement of the pull of gravity on something, and light can be bent by gravity.

The largest number in the English language with a word naming it is a googolplex. This number is equal to 10 to the power of a googol, or 10 to the power of 10¹⁰⁰. This number would be written as 1 followed by 10¹⁰⁰ zeroes (except that, as there are far fewer particles in the universe than there are zeroes in a googolplex, the number could never be written out in full). The names "googol" and "googolplex" were both suggested in the 1930s by Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Dr. Edward Kasner.