Popular Physics
More than 30 years have passed since the Voyager 2 fly-bys of Uranus and Neptune. I discuss a range of lessons learned from Voyager, broadly grouped into process, planning, and people. In terms of process, we must be open to new concepts:…
Mastering semiconductor technology is essential to insert any country into the trends of the future, such as smart cities, internet of things, space exploration, etc. In this paper we present the growing annual revenue of the semiconductor…
In this article we show why flying and rotating beer mats, CDs, or other flat disks will eventually flip in the air and end up flying with backspin, thus, making them unusable as frisbees. The crucial effect responsible for the flipping is…
A highly reflective sail provides a way to propel a spacecraft out of the solar system using solar radiation pressure. The closer the spacecraft is to the Sun when it starts its outward journey, the larger the radiation pressure and so the…
In this work, three heuristic derivations of the Hawking temperature are presented. The main characteristic of these derivations is their extreme simplicity, which makes them easily accessible to a wide and diverse audience.
The plate trick or belt trick is a striking physical demonstration of properties of the double cover of the three-dimensional rotation group by the sphere of unit quaternions or spinors. The two ends of a flexible object are continuously…
Cosmic radiation is a critical factor for astronauts' safety in the context of evaluating the prospect of future space exploration. The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) on board the Curiosity Rover launched by the Mars Scientific…
This perspective article elucidates both the importance and the implications of relativistic spacetime crystals as well as the renormalized blended coordinates transformation. It alludes to possible applications in materials science,…
In the initial stages of its development, atomic theory had to bypass the laws of classical electromagnetism in an ad hoc manner in order to explain the stability of atoms. In quantum mechanics, however, the classical theory may find again…
Using non-excessively-technical language and written in informal style, this article introduces the reader to the concepts of electromagnetic and gravitational waves and recounts the prediction of existence of these waves by Maxwell and…
This article gives an elementary account of the recently proposed theory of spontaneous quantum gravity. It is argued that a viable quantum theory of gravity should be falsifiable, and hence it should dynamically explain the observed…
We intend to promote the concept of mass functions for interdisciplinary science education and communication. A mass function characterizes the frequency distribution of the masses of objects in the universe. We present an experiment to…
In a brief article published in 1931 and expanded in 1935, the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared an important astronomical discovery where he introduced what is now known as Chandrasekhar limit. This limit establishes…
A modified version of panspermia theory, named Nebula-Relay hypothesis or local panspermia, is introduced to explain the origin of life on Earth. Primitive life, acting as the seeds of life on Earth, originated at pre-solar epoch through…
GAIA (originally the acronym for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics) is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) which will make the largest, most precise three dimensional map of our Galaxy by an unparalleled survey of…
This article will briefly review the theory of star formation (SF) and its development using observations. This is very relevant in the present context since planet formation appears to be a byproduct of SF, and the whole question of life…
A brief dialogue about quantum entanglement (in Spanish).
The preponderance of white dwarfs in the Milky Way were formed from the remnants of stars of the same or somewhat higher mass as the Sun, i.e., from G-stars. We know that life can exist around G-stars. Any technologically advanced…
Numerous advantages may accrue to ET from the use of probes for the conveyance of information relative to the alternative of beaming information electromagnetically from its home star system. However, probes would benefit from a…
Land-based beacons, information laden probes sent into our solar system, and more distal communication nodes have each been proposed as the most likely means by which we might be contacted by ET. Each method, considered in isolation from…