Now on ScienceBlogs: The Australian's War on Science 41
An exploration of physics and the quest to understand our world.
Matt Springer is a graduate student of physics at Texas A&M university. He is also an occasional writer and tinkerer, and he is probably too curious for his own good.
Help Matt not starve! Use this link to amazon.com
March 31, 2009
I have a Fermi problem for you. By the very nature of a Fermi problem, a precise answer is impossible, we're merely looking for a justified order-of-magnitude estimate. Here goes: During last week's Earth Hour event, what amount of CO2...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 30, 2009
Before we figured out that the universe was a very large open space with lots of stuff scattered about, the ancients had some interesting ideas on how the sky worked. Roughly speaking, celestial phenomena came in three kinds. There are...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:41 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 29, 2009
Category: Sunday Function
The quadratic formula. With the exception of the Pythagorean Theorem, it's probably the single most common mathematical formula people carry from high school. It's not a function as such, it's something that solves a function. Let me give an example:...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 28, 2009
March 27, 2009
There's a story of Feynman and several other physics lecturers who liked to attach a bowling ball to the high roof of their lecture halls and pull the ball out to an angle right by their faces and let it swing.
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 25, 2009
Kal-El, native of the planet Krypton, came to Earth and was adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent. Being a Kryptonian, he found that he had superhuman powers and used them for good as Superman[1]. We all know the story. But...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 24, 2009
Cormac McCarthy is with good reason widely considered to be among the finest living American writers. The literary scene has appreciated his work for some time; the general public (including myself, though I do a lot of reading) was first...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2009
Missiles are a problem if you're fighting a modern war. You can get out of the way or you can hide behind something, but that's about it. Now anti-missile technology has had some success dealing with mid-range missiles. The Patriot...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 19, 2009
March 18, 2009
It's not all that often I agree with Mike Dunford politically, but in writing about the AIG bonuses he's right. The bonuses ought to stay with the executives who were paid them. Neither congress nor the president ought to try...
Posted by Matt Springer at 3:18 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
