Popular Physics
An analysis of marathon pacing and elevation change is presented. It is based on an empirical observation of how the pace of elite and non-elite marathon runners change over the course of the marathon and a simple approximation of the…
You and I are highly unlikely to exist in a civilization that has produced only 70 billion people, yet we find ourselves in just such a civilization. Our circumstance, which seems difficult to explain, is easily accounted for if (1) many…
"The Center is Everywhere" is a sculpture by Josiah McElheny, currently (through October 14, 2012) on exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The sculpture is based on data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), using…
Here I determined the Sun's position as an expert witness for crown counsel. From my calculations I found the Sun's location in the sky was such that it could not impede the driver's vision, as a result it could not have been the reason for…
To many people, music is a mystery. It is uniquely human, because no other species produces elaborate, well organized sound for no particular reason. It has been part of every known civilization on earth. It has become a very part of man's…
We have built a Sinai cube to illustrate and investigate the scaling properties that result by iterating chaotic trajectories into a well ordered system. We allow red, green and blue light to reflect off a mirrored sphere, which is…
Graphene-metal compound structure has been reported as a novel and outstanding component used in electrical and optical devices. We report on a first-principles study of graphene-cu compound structure, showing its capacity of converting…
An equation, fundamental for solar energy applications, can be used to determine the sunrise amplitude at given latitude. It is therefore suitable for being applied to archaeoastronomical calculations concerning the orientation of towns,…
It seems that the ancient Roman towns were oriented with the sunrise. Here I propose a discussion on the orientation of Torino, the Julia Augusta Taurinorum, which has the ancient Roman structure perfectly preserved. According to this…
In this paper we give the outline of a lecture given to undergraduate students aiming at understanding why physicists are so much interested in the Higgs boson. The lecture has been conceived for students not yet familiar with advanced…
A short history of prisms from Lucius Anneus Seneca to George Ravenscroft.
Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens…
In classical mechanics matter and fields are completely separated. Matter interacts with fields. For particle physicists this is not the case. Both matter and fields are represented by particles. Fundamental interactions are mediated by…
The idea that the electron is an extended charged object the spinning of which is responsible for its magnetic moment is shown to require a sizable portion of the electron to spin at speeds very close to the speed of light, and in fact to…
Recently I have proposed the Roman Dodecahedra as ancient coincidence rangefinders. Here I discuss several data and references freely available on the Web. After analysis, the common features of these artifacts allow to tell that a Roman…
In this paper we provide an appraisal of the scientific foundations of the Olympic sport "judo" from a Western perspective, i.e. a biomechanical reassessment of the basic teaching tools of the foundations of Jigoro Kano's Kodokan judo. The…
A basketball bounced on a stiff surface produces a characteristic loud thump, followed by high-pitched ringing. Describing the ball as an inextensible but flexible membrane containing compressed air, I formulate an approximate theory of the…
We systematically study the evolution of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universe coupled with a cosmological constant $\Lambda$ and a perfect fluid that has the equation of state $p=w\rho$, where $p$ and $\rho$ denote, respectively,…
In this paper I propose a possible use of Roman Dodecahedra, which are bronze artifacts of gallo-roman origin dating from the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD, for playing a bowling game. The presence of holes and knobs can be quite important during…
We present the relatively less known thermodynamic concept of exergy in the context of ecology and sustainability. To this end, we first very briefly outline thermodynamics as it arose historically via engineering studies. This enables us…