Popular Physics
Deliberate and unintentional radio transmissions from Earth propagate into space. These transmissions could be detected by extraterrestrial watchers over interstellar distances. Here, we analyze the harms and benefits of deliberate and…
M.C. Eschers tessellations have captured the imaginations of both artists and mathematicians. Circle Limit III is the most intricate of his tessellations, featuring patterns that repeat at increasingly fine scales. Although his patterns…
Assuming a constant mass-decrease per unit-surface and -time we provide a very simplistic model for the dissolution process of spherical candies. The aim is to investigate the quantitative behavior of the dissolution process throughout the…
In response to a challenge in a recent paper to measure the propagation speed of the wave of collapse of an array of dominoes (the Domino Effect), a novel method of measuring the speed of such waves has been developed using sound recordings…
In this article, inspired by Lawrence Krauss' plenary talk at the 2007 CAP congress, the relation between faith and science is examined.
Earth's analemma is the lopsided figure eight marked out over a year by the position of the Sun in the sky observed at the same clock time each day. It shows how solar time deviates from clock time. The analemma's shape results from the…
The possibility that extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) could be hostile to humanity has been raised as a reason to avoid even trying to contact ETIs. However, there is a distinct shortage of analytical discussion about the risks of an…
The conditions are investigated under which a row of increasing dominoes is able to keep tumbling over. The analysis is restricted to the simplest case of frictionless dominoes that only can topple not slide. The model is scale invariant,…
The Ping Pong gun or Ping Pong bazooka has been a popular and compelling tool for physics education. However, the design necessarily means the ball emerges at subsonic speed. The design has been modified to include a pressure chamber and a…
This is a light-hearted take at the the second law of thermodynamics.
We analyze Einstein's views on God and religion, and his views on Quantum Mechanics.
A way to fight your traffic tickets. The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California. In view of enormous, extremely surprising and completely unexpected public interest to this…
We comment a debate on quantum physics in Slovak TV in which several physicists advocated a point of view that "an electron does not move around the nucleus".
The travel time required for one civilisation to explore the Milky Way using probes is a crucial component of Fermi's Paradox. Previous attempts to estimate this travel time have assumed that the probe's motion is simple, moving at a…
Comments on the results presented at the Conference "Frontiers Beyond the Standard Model," FTPI, Oct. 2012. This summary traces a historical perspective. v2: A reference corrected and a footnote added; v3: a few grammar mistakes and typos…
The double slit interference experiment has been famously described by Richard Feynman as containing the "only mystery of quantum mechanics". The history of quantum mechanics is intimately linked with the discovery of the dual nature of…
In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by…
When the laws of Physics are taken seriously, the sports can benefit in getting better results, as was the case of the high jump in Flop style, so that the athlete sprints diagonally towards the bar,then curve and leap backwards over it.…
A coupling onset of the cyclone upward and rotation flows is experimentally demonstrated in a little bottle. The rotating flow provides a pressure increase in the outer part of the rotating flow by its centrifugal force. When a gradient of…
The classical view of mass is that it quantifies the amount of substance and is a kinematical parameter. All matter has an attribute of mass and is a conserved quantity in any interaction. With the advent of special relativity, mass became…