Click here to go back to all FAQ’s.
Maybe 🙂 .
This is page is really just a collection of ideas to help inspire YOU.
It was conceived as a combination of physics (aerosols), biology (lungs), and math (large number conversions). All parts are meant to be used separately or together.
For now, just going to lay out the experiments, if you write out introductions and want to contribute a write-up such as “What are aerosols”, please contact @lazaruslong13 on Twitter.
Aerosols Introduction
After discussing, show this video of 50 micron aerosols. Afterwards, you can have them visualize dust motes caught in a sunbeam in their living room – those are approximately 50 micron aerososl as well.
Much discussion lately in aerosol/disease transmission communities about the “5 micron cutoff” where droplets supposedly fall to ground w/in 1-2 m. @jljcolorado and @linseymarr has suggested ~50 microns.
Here’s some video evidence for that. 50 micron droplets wafting in lab


Fun Aerosol Demonstration Option 1
Smoke machine plus garbage can vortex…demonstrating aerosols, and Bernoulli’s Principle
OR
Fun Aerosol Demonstration Option 2 – this one HAS to be outside.
Cheap Aerosol Demonstration – Get a little flour and blow into the air – those are aerosols.
Lungs (Biology)
From here. Materials required are here – the lung demonstration is very well laid out on their web page.


And while doing the above experiment, or before, you can talk about about fun lung facts from the below two articles. What you see is just a sample of the fascinating knowledge in them.
- “Central to the human respiratory system, they breathe in between 2,100 and 2,400 gallons (8,000 and 9,000 liters) of air each day—the amount needed to oxygenate the 2,400 gallons (9,000 liters) or so of blood that is pumped through the heart daily.”
- “Your lungs are one of the largest organs in your body. The surface area of both lungs is roughly the same size as a tennis court and the total length of the airways running through them is 1,500 miles. That’s about the distance from Chicago to Las Vegas.”
After talking about the gallons breathed, you could segue into…
Math
Your lungs process over 2,000 gallons of air. Per day. Very rough math follows (please feel free to contact me to get it corrected!)
If a respiratory aerosol is 5 microns, that would be 1.51416e+18 aerosols processed. 1,514,160,000,000,000,000. Potentially, 1.5 quintillion 5 micron aerosols.
So, we don’t want a bunch of aerosols in our lungs, so what do we do? Clean the air.
Corsi/ Rosenthal Box Science
Click here to go back to all FAQ’s.