Isaac Newton
milhayser | December 3, 2014On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel counts up toward the birthday of that most holy of men: Sir Isaac Newton. Each day Orzel will (hopefully) unveil a new gem that didn't make it into his exciting new book. On Day 1, Chad wrote about the apocryphal moment of inspiration—in a bathtub—that led the Greek polymath Archimedes to first exclaim "Eureka!" And for Day 2, Orzel considers the scientific origin of art among prehistoric peoples in southern Africa. He writes, "The pigment-grinding process wasn’t a simple thing that might happen by accident, but a multi-step process, involving grinding then…
milhayser | December 23, 2011
On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel counts down to—what else?—Isaac Newton's birthday. Opening a link on this advent calendar yields not a chocolate, but an equation and an important piece of the physics puzzle. For December 19th, we come to "one of the most revolutionary moment in the history of physics," Max Planck's "formula for the spectrum of the 'black-body' radiation emitted by a hot object at temperature T." Chad writes that Planck's initial mathematical trick became "the opening shot of the quantum mechanical revolution that completely changed physics." For the 18th, Chad delves…