I found the following site:
http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/unanswered.html
Anyone have any ideas for those questions?
I have an idea. Why don’t you pick one or two questions from that list of over 40, and ask them here? You might get more of a response than just providing a link to a web site that lists dozens of questions to scroll thru.
the one about the waves and the shoreline is simple. Huygen’s Principal combined with diffraction around a barrier. The energy carried by the waves moves to fill in all spaces, even on the “back” of the island. Here, however, the waves are smaller.
I just read down until I found one I could philosophize on:
I’m reasonably sure that those raised dots are there to act as bumpers while the bottles are on the “assembly” line, in transit, etc. By creating a small patch of thicker glass, the manufacturer lowers the number of bottles which are broken in the normal course of being processed.
Now, to the unasked question of why bottles sometimes have a little dimple in them (a distinct, meant-to-be-there depression in the glass), that I think has to do with keeping the bottle aligned a certain way during the aforementioned “assembly” line process, possibly to keep the bumpers facing the right way, possibly just to ensure that the top and bottom labels go on oriented the same way.
WAG quotient of this answer: 68%