There’s an interesting article in New Scientist that purports to describe “seven questions that keep physicists up at night”. The list is very heavy on the “deep questions” that tend to percolate around the more esoteric quarters of the high-energy physics world, and not so much on the vast bulk of physicists who (ad Chad…

Grab a book, or an empty DVD case, or anything else that’s a uniform rectangular solid. If it’s a book, you might want to secure the book closed with tape or a very lightweight clip, because we’ll be throwing it in the air. We want to test a theory. In classical mechanics we know that…

There’s a stereotype that it’s declasse for us intellectual aesthetes to enjoy football, but I don’t care. I enjoy it anyway. Whether you spent any time this weekend watching football or not, I’d like to pose a quick and (maybe!) easy vaguely football-related problem to exercise your brain to make up for all the boob…

The deserts of New Mexico can get blazingly hot and bone-chillingly cold, extremes of temperature familiar to the outdoorsman in that kind of terrain. A few hundred feet below the ground in Carlsbad Caverns, the temperature is essentially stable in the mid-50s no matter how scorching or frigid the air a few feet above happens…

There’s a question that gets posed toward the beginning of intro physics classes to gauge the students’ understanding of acceleration. If you fire a bullet horizontally while at the same instant dropping a bullet from the same height, which hits the ground first? The point is to think clearly about the equation describing accelerated motion.…

Today Texas A&M was a bit of a madhouse. Huge crowds, hundreds of police, unseasonably-suited and grim-faced men with mirrored sunglasses, unmarked helicopters circling overhead, TV cameras circling below, and completely borked traffic. Why? Not just one but two Presidents of the United States are making speeches this afternoon. Obviously most of the fuss is…

I propose a Fermi Problem. Over the lifetime of an average light bulb, what is the total mass of all the electrons that have flowed through? Work on that if you have an idea how to proceed, or just take your best plausible guess. Remember it’s a Fermi problem, so we’re looking for estimates rather…

Supposedly there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and indeed just about every large organization from business to charity spends tremendous amount of time and money trying to get noticed by the public. You’d think therefore that it would be a good thing that particle physics gets the press it does. You’d think, but then…