I’m thinking of like when you bottle wine that’s still fermenting, and it explodes. I understand that the fermentation process raises the air pressure inside the bottle. What I *don’t* understand is how? When you pump air into a balloon, the air pressure rises because there are *more* air molecules entering the balloon.
With wine in a bottle, you have a fixed amount of matter at a certain temperature. I don’t understand how fermentation could increase air pressure in a closed system?
In: Physics
The yeast is held together as a solid by chemical bonds. These bonds themselves are a form of energy, constantly countering any forces (such as gravity) that would try to spread out the yeast. You can have a pile of yeast that isn’t a puddle because it’s held together into granules by these bonds.
When a chain reaction occurs in the chemicals that starts destroying bonds, the bond energy is released and the byproducts are liquids and gasses (from what was once solids). This freed bond energy is now overloading and breaking the bonds of other solid yeast, and this goes on and on (this is why I called it a chain reaction).
So the glass breaks because the bond energy is no longer being used for bonding, and is now wild kinetic energy pushing randomly against the glass.
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This is also the simplified explanation for how your phone battery works. When you charge it you’re not adding new mass into the phone. When it depletes, it is no lighter than it was when it was charged. So how does it power your phone to perform computations and emit light?
It’s about the arrangements. Charging your phone is the act of reorganizing the inside of the battery to form lots of neat and tidy bonds between its atoms. Discharging your phone battery (eg into the screen’s light) is using the energy freed by breaking bonds.
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Now if you want an explanation of what bonds are that’s a different ELI5
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