Popular Physics
The lack of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, even the simplest forms of animal life, makes it is difficult to decide whether the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is more a high-risk, high-payoff endeavor…
Gravitation, the universal attractive force, acts upon all matter (and radiation) relentlessly. Stable extended structures can exist only when gravity is held off by other forces of nature. This series of articles explores this interplay,…
The Bayreuth Festspielhaus is well known for its architecture because its design is heavily influenced by composer Richard Wagner. Due to the special acoustic design, the reverberation time (i.e., time scale for the sound pressure level to…
Perception, sensation and re-action are central questions both in Psychology, Arts, Neurology and Physics. Some hundred years ago, believed to start with Wertheimer, researchers and artists tried to classify our human being "understanding"…
This essay discusses the relationship between science and religion, specifically the controversy elicited by an article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, criticizing the scientific establishment for ruling out intelligent design as beyond…
Phys and Math are two colleagues at the University of Sa{\c c}enbon (Crefan Kingdom), dialoguing about the remarkable efficiency of mathematics for physics. They talk about the notches on the Ishango bone, the various uses of psi in maths…
The 2016 Physics Nobel Prize honors a variety of discoveries related to topological phases and phase transitions. Here we sketch two exciting facets: the groundbreaking works by John Kosterlitz and David Thouless on phase transitions of…
The recent discovery of seven potentially habitable Earth-size planets around the ultra-cool star TRAPPIST-1 has further fueled the hunt for extraterrestrial life. Current methods focus on closely monitoring the host star to look for…
I will report below on a few examples of raving and insane (or maybe utterly genial) sentences that can be found in famous and otherwise admirable books of physics, because I genuinely believe it is amusing.
I propose that much recent history can be explained by hypothesizing that sometime during the last quarter of 2016, the history of the world underwent a macroscopic quantum tunneling event, creating, according to the Many Worlds…
We use a feed-forward artificial neural network with back-propagation through a single hidden layer to predict Barry Cottonfield's likely reply to this author's invitation to the "Once Upon a Daydream" junior prom at the Conard High School…
Large time-domain surveys, when of sufficient scale, provide a greatly increased probability of detecting rare and, in many cases, unexpected events. Indeed, it is these unpredicted and previously unobserved objects that can lead to some of…
Gravitation, the universal attractive force, acts upon all matter (and radiation) relentlessly. Left to itself, gravity would pull everything together and the Universe would be nothing but a gigantic black hole. Nature throws almost every…
The LIGO results are among the greatest experimental achievements of all times. Time and again scientists have compared this feat to Galileo pointing his telescope to the sky, offering instead an 'ear' to the cosmos. After the remarkable…
The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…
The event GW150914 was the first historical detection of gravitational waves (GWs). The emergence of this ground-breaking discovery came not only from incredibly innovative experimental work, but also from a centennial of theoretical…
According to a well-known principle of thermodynamics, the transfer of heat between two bodies is reversible when their temperatures are infinitesimally close. As we demonstrate, a little-known alternative exists: two bodies with…
Quarks can be represented on the faces of the 3x3 Rubik's cube with the help of a symbolic representation of quarks and anti-quarks, that was delevoped originally for a deck of elementary particle cards, called Quark Matter Card Game.…
Quark Wars is an all-new, adventure style game. We recommended playing it outdoors. Quark Wars is modeled upon the outdoor game called Hungarian Number War, with notable influence from Star Wars, the American epic space saga. The players…
A physical model is developed, which suggests a pathway to determining the optimal release conditions for a basketball free throw. Theoretical framework is supported by Monte Carlo simulations and a series of free throws performed and…