atoms

There’s a joke that asks, “Where do astronauts go for a drink?” The answer is, “The space bar!” But in the distant future, you might ask that question literally. There really is alcohol in space, even if we can’t access it yet.

You're in a line at a cafeteria. You take a plate off the top of a stack of plates. The other plates in the stack rise from below just far enough to present the next plate at the same height as the one you just took. This system reflects a general principle of springs: if you put twice as much force on a spring, it compresses, or stretches, twice as far.