Popular Physics
In the science fiction film $Interstellar$, a band of intrepid astronauts sets out to explore a system of planets orbiting a supermassive black hole, searching for a world that may be conducive to hosting human life. While the film…
Probability theory as a physical theory is, in a sense, the most general physics theory available, more encompassing than relativity theory and quantum mechanics, which comply with probability theory. Taking this simple fact seriously, I…
Here I argue that the much-discussed Doomsday Argument (DA) has two flaws. Its mathematical flaw stems from applying frequentist probability or faulty Bayesian inference. Its conceptual flaw is assuming that Copernican uniformity applies to…
Until 1974, the study of black holes was under the hegemony of Einstein's general relativity. However, that same year, Stephen Hawking incorporated quantum theory and discovered that black holes have temperature, entropy, and evaporate.…
A popular physics legend holds that scissors can cut paper with a speed faster than light. Here this counter-intuitive myth is investigated theoretically using four simple examples of scissors. For simplicity, all cases will involve a…
In the framework of the approach of Dyson megastructures, by assuming that a super-advanced civilization exists and is capable of constructing a ring-like megastructure around their host star, we have considered the observational signatures…
A popular classroom demonstration is to draw a cycloid on a blackboard with a piece of chalk inserted through a hole at a point P with radius r = R from the center of a wood disk of radius R that is rolling without slipping along the chalk…
Stars form from large clouds of gas and dust that contract under their own gravity. The birth of a star occurred when a fusion reaction of hydrogen into helium has ignited in its core. The key variable that determines the formation of a…
A set of basic notes, or `scale', forms the basis of music. Scales are specific to specific genre of music. In this second article of the series we explore the development of various scales associated with western classical music, arguably…
Given the great interest that black holes arouse among non-specialists, it is important to analyse misconceptions related to them. According to the author, the most common misconceptions are that: (1) black holes are formed from stellar…
Specific energy (i.e. energy per unit mass) is one of the most fundamental and consequential properties of a fuel source. In this work, a systematic study of measured fusion cross-sections is performed to determine which reactions are…
Many papers and monographs were written about the modeling the Earth climate and its variability. However there is still an obvious need for a module that presents the fundamentals of climate modeling to students at the undergraduate level.…
We present the result of a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Prof. Donald Fortescue of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and the Dr. Gwenhael de Wasseige of the IceCube Collaboration. The work presented was…
Both, human appreciation of music and musical genres, transcend time and space. The universality of musical genres and associated musical scales is intimately linked to the physics of sound and the special characteristics of human acoustic…
This article presents an automated method to quantify and detect symmetry elements in 2D patterns by means of image processing. Escher's woodcuts, a widely recognized didactic tool for crystallographic education of students, were used to…
Many rocky exoplanets are heavier and larger than the Earth, and have higher surface gravity. This makes space-flight on these worlds very challenging, because the required fuel mass for a given payload is an exponential function of…
The number of people able to end Earth's technical civilization has heretofore been small. Emerging dual-use technologies, such as biotechnology, may give similar power to thousands or millions of individuals. To quantitatively investigate…
Consider a free-space settlement with a closed ecosystem. Controlling the habitat's carbon dioxide level is a nontrivial problem because the atmospheric carbon buffer per biosphere area is smaller than on Earth. Here we show that the…
Cylindrical kilometre-scale artificial gravity space settlements were proposed by Gerard O'Neill in the 1970s. The early concept had two oppositely rotating cylinders and moving mirrors to simulate the diurnal cycle. Later, the Kalpana One…
The meeting of two spacecraft in orbit around a planet or moon involves a delicate dance that must carefully the balance the gravitational, Coriolis, and centrifugal forces acting on the spacecraft. The intricacy of the relative motion…