Category: Special Relativity
To provide some background to the momentous event of seeing the first collisions in the LHC, here's a video from CERN: ALSO: Happy sesquicentennial to the Origin of Species! Have a site done in Flash to celebrate....
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:34 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Astronomy
Two questions come up every time the discovery of an extrasolar planet hits the headlines: "Is there life on it?" and "How long would it take to get there?" To the first, we respond, "Dunno", and to the second, "That depends upon how fast you can go."
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 8:07 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Electromagnetism
It makes you behave like the village clergyman in an early English physics textbook. It is interesting to note that Earnshaw himself was concerned with quite a different problem: the nature of the "aether", which we have talked about quite...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 8:52 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bad Math
Dave Bacon points to a retrospective piece by the American Physical Society, "The Top Ten Physics News Stories of 2008", and he indulges in a little nitpicking. Well, N can play at that game! Look at this summary, under the...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:36 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My mother was looking through the photo albums in the closet, and she found this, which apparently I drew in kindergarten: This must have been after I watched Timothy Ferris's The Creation of the Universe for the Nth time. Looking...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:24 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's computer-graphics guru Jim Blinn narrating a demonstration reel of the animation used in the esteemed television series The Mechanical Universe (1985). This Caltech production turned a freshman physics course into a video experience covering Newtonian mechanics, introductory calculus, electromagnetism,...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:20 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
To a scientist, having an open mind is a virtue. However, scientists still get upset when they find a story in a "science" magazine which crowbars open the reader's mind so far that you can hear the brains sloosh out...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:44 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cosmology
Max Tegmark sings "The Relativity Song".
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 12:55 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks