Popular Physics
We discuss an apparent information paradox that arises in a materialist's description of the Universe if we assume that the Universe is 100% quantum. We discuss possible ways out of the paradox, including that Laws of Nature are not purely…
Data released by the Planck Collaboration in 2015 imply new dates for the era of radiation, the era of matter, and the era of dark energy. The era of radiation ended, and the era of matter began, when the density of radiation dropped below…
Whether we are alone in the universe is one of the greatest mysteries facing humankind. Given the >100 billion stars in our galaxy, many have argued that it is statistically unlikely that life, including intelligent life, has not emerged…
In a recent paper in Scientific Reports, Burridge \& Linden misinterpret the Mpemba effect as a statement about the rate of cooling of liquid water, when it is in fact a statement about the rate of freezing of water. Debunking an obviously…
A simple model is presented to explain the Higgs boson physics to the grand public. The model consists of a children ball pool representing a Universe filled with a certain amount of the Higgs field. The model is suitable for usage as a…
The very humble origins of the Cyberspace, and all the related developments that smoothly conspired and converged towards this concept, making its emergence possible, as the personal computer, TEX and LATEX, the Fax, the internet, the…
This paper documents the places in mainland Europe at which the sun sets latest, by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), on any given day (distortion due to differences in local standard times is ignored). In contradiction to the na\"ive…
A recurring topic in interstellar exploration and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is the role of artificial intelligence. More precisely, these are programs or devices that are capable of performing cognitive tasks that…
We consider global catastrophic risks due to cosmic explosions (supernovae, magnetars and gamma-ray bursts) and possible mitigation strategies by humans and other hypothetical intelligent beings. While by their very nature these events are…
Are dreidels fair? In other words, does the average dreidel have an equal chance of turning up any one of its four sides? To explore this hypothesis, three different dreidels were each spun hundreds of times with the number of occurrences…
Advances in robotics and additive manufacturing have become game-changing for the prospects of space industry. It has become feasible to bootstrap a self-sustaining, self-expanding industry at reasonably low cost. Simple modeling was…
We report an emergence of bifurcation in basketball, a single-particle system governed by Newtonian mechanics. When shooting the basketball, the obvious control parameters are the launch speed and the launch angle. We propose to use the…
This article contains a short review of the current status of string theory.
We have been congratulated on the stage by a Nobel laureate (he was our curtain raiser), played our music in planetariums, museums, observatories throughout Spain and at the end of the meeting of the ESO telescopes time allocation…
We introduce a novel, two-mass system that slides up an inclined plane while its center of mass moves down. The system consists of two identical masses connected by an ideal string symmetrically placed over a corner-shaped support. This…
Previous work has presented both a theoretical foundation for designing terrain park jumps that control landing impact and computer software to accomplish this task. US ski resorts have been reluctant to adopt this more engineered approach…
The underlying physics of basketball shooting seems to be a straightforward example of the Newtonian mechanics that can easily be traced by numerical methods. However, a human basketball player does not make use of all the possible…
This is a chapter for an upcoming book, "Space, Time, and the Limits of Human Understanding", edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghirardi. I first present the classical picture of flat space and ever-flowing time, as generally accepted…
This is an elementary review of the history and physics of neutrinos. The story of the discovery of neutrino mass through neutrino oscillations is described in some detail. Experiments on solar neutrinos and atmospheric neutrinos played an…
Sound measurements on a sequence of related, similar constructions with slightly different dimensions confirm a simple picture of the air modes of the internal resonator banjo's body. For the purpose of this study, the air modes are…