Built on Facts

There’s a test problem famous by virtue of the fact that one student failed to answer it, but did so in a hilarious way. You’ve probably seen it, and here it is:

Let me quote the problem in case it’s hard to read.
A proton approaches a long line of positive charge so that with its [...]

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I loved the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Sure the plot was ridiculous and there were a lot of “Lucas moments”, but it was a legitimately fun film. The nuke scene alone is worth the price of admission. I’m sure the fine folks at Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics [...]

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For better or for worse, physics has always been involved in warfare. Both the machinery of the human body and the character of the theater of battle exist in the physical world, and therefore an understanding of the rules of the world can prove to be a decisive advantage in battle. This isn’t [...]

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My intro physics text in my undergraduate education was by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker. I personally thought it was a quite good text, but what particularly stood out was its obsession with penguins. Probably a dozen or more problems involved penguins in very improbable situations. It was pretty funny. But there’s [...]

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In honor of the NBA playoffs, how about some quantum mechanics? Ok, maybe it’s a stretch! But let’s say we have a particle bouncing on a hard surface. We can model this by defining a floor at x = 0. For x > 0, the potential V(x) = mgx. For [...]

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If you have a very long electrically neutral current-carrying wire, the moving charges inside it will generate a magnetic field.
But what if you have a charged wire that’s not carrying any current?  Well, obviously you’ll have an electric field but no magnetic field.  But let’s further say you’re in an airplane flying parallel to that [...]

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There’s a joke in physics that asserts that the time until commercial fusion power generation becomes viable is 15 years - and has been since 1940. Maybe that 15 years is a constant of nature, and like a jogger on a treadmill there’s no forward progress despite all the effort in the world.
Maybe, but [...]

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There’s a very interesting column in the New York Times that’s caused a lot of discussion in various corners of the internet. That tends to happen often these days when science and theology intersect. The column is The Neural Buddhists, and its thesis is that since our minds are a result of our [...]

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“Remember Fermilab?” Isn’t it a little premature to be nostalgic? After all, it’s the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Well, at least it will be until the famed LHC starts operations this year. Once that happens, the contribution Fermilab’s machine can make to fundamental physics will be far superseded. [...]

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John Derbyshire, writing in his beautiful book Prime Obsession, talks of a conversation he had with the mathematician Andrew Odlyzko. Derbyshire asked if he though the Riemann Hypothesis was true or not. The truth or falsehood of that hypothesis is the most importnat problem in mathematics, but despite more than a century of [...]

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