Built on Facts

In Episode 82 of the best applied science show on TV, the Mythbusters looked at some myths involving snow. The basic idea of science is that if you have a question about nature, you set up an experiment and find out the answer for yourself. The Mythbusters do this with verve and alacrity. [...]

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We now know the physics, which is: this is the quantum mechanics of the sequence of symmetry operations to create mass out of light by compressing charge.
- Dan Winter, Public Speaker on Sacred Geometry
Wait, what?  Beats me, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what he’s talking about. Well actually that’s not quite true. [...]

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Lots of times we might have a complicated function which we wish were less complicated. Take the differential equation describing the simple pendulum, for instance:

I can’t solve that one explicitly. Nobody can - the sin term prevents a closed-form solution and so nearly the only practical way to work with it is to [...]

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How tall are you? You might give an answer in feet and inches if you’re an American, or in meters most other places. And if you give than answer, I’ll have a good understanding of how tall you are - all because we’re using the same units of measurement. In practice your [...]

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Physics is intimately bound up with probability and statistics for two main reasons. First, both thermodynamics and quantum mechanics are intrinsically probabilistic theories. So are some others, but those two in particular really embody the statistical concepts central to modern physics. Second, much of experimental physics is done at the bleeding edge [...]

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For the last few hundred years, one of the most fundamental principles in physics has been that energy is conserved. You simply can’t get it from nowhere. Every experimentally tested physical theory from Newton’s laws to Maxwell’s equations and beyond is completely consistent with energy conservation. Noether’s theorem makes the possibility of [...]

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Snap! The light has gone on in your head, and you have a brilliant and revolutionary new theory of physics. But you’re not a professional physicist, you’re just an amateur who may or may not have any physics training at all. How will you get your ideas recognized?
Here’s the problem. There’s thousands [...]

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In a vacuum, the speed of light is a universal constant: 299,792,458 m/s exactly. For light traveling through a substance like water or glass the speed is lower. The light hasn’t actually slowed down. Instead, the interaction with each successive atom in the material takes a little bit of time and so [...]

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Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
- Isaac Newton
The moon orbits the earth, held precisely by a delicate balance between gravity and inertia. A piece of lint clings to a shirt, held tightly by a delicate balance between electric charges and fields. Laughter [...]

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Apropos of the Indiana Jones post exploring some of the sketchy physics in the new film, we have this new Irregular Webcomic. (And if you haven’t already, read Dr. Pion’s much more thorough and extremely entertaining discussion of even more Indiana Jones 4 physics!) This comic, like the more famous Foxtrot, is written by a [...]

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