I've always noticed how moths are drawn to light but never cared enough to investigate why. Even now, I'm sure the answer is a Google away. I'd rather keep it a mystery. I've encountered two instances of humans displaying similar behavior. One of those two makes sense to me, the other I do not understand at all. I barely grasp the physics of the second, honestly.
The first of these examples I've witnessed (and fell prey to) on more occasions than I'd like to admit: oxygen-enriched air. I used to work in the sort of big heavy dirty industrial plant that looks, to lay people, like that screen-saver of the random pipes. One of the major pipelines involved in the process where I worked (it was a 60" diameter pipe) was a line that carried air that was enriched with about 20% additional oxygen. Long story short, it had a leaky valve stem and it never got fixed. Whenever we would go up to check it out, we would just sit there on the catwalk above the valve and drift into conversation, our bodies and minds finding ways to keep us from leaving the oxygen enriched air around the leak. In hindsight, I can't believe it never got fixed and it was creepy to think how quickly we forgot why we went up there in the first place. There was no hazard to health there, it was honestly safer than any other part of the plant since the constant flow of gas out of the valve stem made this one of the only places where a pocket of carbon monoxide couldn't develop. The experience was intoxicating.
The second one, Cherenkov radiation, I have never seen with my own eyes. That's the typically blue glow around the core of a nuclear reactor. Supposedly you see it and you want to dive in the water. Visible photons are ejected from a shock front of charged particles traveling faster than light. A classical example would be to imagine really fast electrons pushing photons out of the way as they haul ass through an insulator. Again, I've never seen this, only heard accounts of it.
The first of these examples I've witnessed (and fell prey to) on more occasions than I'd like to admit: oxygen-enriched air. I used to work in the sort of big heavy dirty industrial plant that looks, to lay people, like that screen-saver of the random pipes. One of the major pipelines involved in the process where I worked (it was a 60" diameter pipe) was a line that carried air that was enriched with about 20% additional oxygen. Long story short, it had a leaky valve stem and it never got fixed. Whenever we would go up to check it out, we would just sit there on the catwalk above the valve and drift into conversation, our bodies and minds finding ways to keep us from leaving the oxygen enriched air around the leak. In hindsight, I can't believe it never got fixed and it was creepy to think how quickly we forgot why we went up there in the first place. There was no hazard to health there, it was honestly safer than any other part of the plant since the constant flow of gas out of the valve stem made this one of the only places where a pocket of carbon monoxide couldn't develop. The experience was intoxicating.
The second one, Cherenkov radiation, I have never seen with my own eyes. That's the typically blue glow around the core of a nuclear reactor. Supposedly you see it and you want to dive in the water. Visible photons are ejected from a shock front of charged particles traveling faster than light. A classical example would be to imagine really fast electrons pushing photons out of the way as they haul ass through an insulator. Again, I've never seen this, only heard accounts of it.
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