Popular Physics
My cat Chester investigates the elusive relationship between the appearance in my hand of a silver laser pointer and that of a red dot on the wall, or on the floor, or on any other object that resides within the vicinity of the laser…
Just a few decades after the discovery of the Charon Relay, and the ensuing First Contact War, relatively little is known about the population of planets linked by the Prothean mass relays. Understanding the nature of these systems and how…
Content: Qualitative and ad-hoc descriptions of observations of the "undergraduate" and "graduate" effects. Comparisons between the classical models of both undergraduate and graduate systems separately lead to the conclusion that a…
While the presence of ghosts has been known for decades, the impact of these apparitions on remote sensing observations has gone unquantified, leaving atmospheric corrections susceptible to ghosting. In this work, we present the first…
The last 25 years have been revolutionary in astronomy, as the field of exoplanets has gone from no known planets outside the Solar System to thousands discovered over the last year few years. This represents a rapid increase not just in…
As a modern musician and cultural icon, Taylor Swift has earned worldwide acclaim via pieces which predominantly draw upon the complex dynamics of personal and interpersonal experiences. Here we show, for the first time, how Swift's lyrical…
A small group of postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates inadvertently formed a longitudinal study contrasting expected productivity levels with actual productivity levels. Over the last nine months, our group self-reported 559…
In the modern search for life elsewhere in the Universe, we are broadly looking for the following: the planets similar to Earth - physical indicators of habitability, and the manifestation of life - the biological signatures. A biosignature…
The great conjunction of 21 December 2020 saw Jupiter and Saturn appear together in the sky, separated by just a tenth of a degree (equivalent to a distance five times smaller than the diameter of the full Moon). This provided a potential…
The mysterious lines in the desert of Nazca in southern Peru received many attempts at an explanation. We discuss the possibility that their origin is based on solar eclipses which could have evoked some kind of "reaction" by the…
Previous critiques of the Drake Equation have highlighted its deterministic nature, implying that the number of civilizations is the same at all times. Here, I build upon earlier work and present a stochastic formulation. The birth of…
The velocit\`a ascensionale media (VAM) is measurement that quantifies a cyclist's climbing ability. It depends on both the ground speed of a bicycle-cyclist system and the slope of an incline. To maximize the ascent speed, the solution to…
I summarize evidence against the hypothesis that `Oumuamua is the artificial creation of an advanced civilization. An appendix discusses the flaws and inconsistencies of the "Breakthrough" proposal for laser acceleration of spacecraft to…
It is shown that under reasonable assumptions a Drake-style equation can be obtained for the probability that our universe is the result of a deliberate simulation. Evaluating loose bounds for certain terms in the equation shows that the…
Newly discovered descriptions about the great aurora observed in March 1582 are presented in this work. These records were made by Portuguese observers from Lisbon. Both records described the aurora like a great fire in the northern part of…
In the past ten years this author published some 15 highly mathematical papers about his new Evo-SETI (Evolution and SETI) Theory. He proved that key features of Evo-SETI are: 1) The Statistical Drake Equation is the extension of the…
We combine power-meter measurements with GPS measurements to study the model that accounts for the use of power by a cyclist. The model takes into account the change in elevation and speed along with adverse effects of air, rolling and…
We model the instantaneous power on a velodrome--as applied to individual pursuits and other individual time trials--taking into account its straights, circular arcs, and connecting transition curves. The forces opposing the motion are air…
Numerous missions planned for the next decade are likely to target a handful of smal sites of interest on the Moon's surface, creating risks of crowding and interference at these locations. The Moon presents finite and scarce areas with…
A collection of short expository essays by the author on various topics in quantum mechanics, quantum cosmology, and physics in general.