Sorry everyone. No new post this week. I meant to get it up late Sunday, but I never managed. I’m currently busy moving out of my old apartment. The lease ends this Friday and I’m kind of in a rush because of this. Normal posts resume next week.
jonah
Jonah is the author of The Physics Mill.
Uncategorized
Kiera Wilmot Charges Dropped
A little while back, I posted about Kiera Wilmot, a student who was expelled for performing a science experiment on school grounds. Worse, Ms. Wilmot faced felony charges. I also posted about what you can do to help her. Good news! Our efforts payed off! All charges against Kiera Wilmot have been dropped! Unfortunately, Ms. Wilmot’s future in the school system is still uncertain. However, at least some of the injustice has been remedied. I got my information here.Thanks very much to Dan Satterfield for pointing it out!
cosmology / Physics / Relativity / etc.
Always Walk Away From An Explosion—The Story of the Big Bang
We were fortunate to be there a day or two before ‘the big bang’ and then we got the heck out of town. ~Scotty Moore A few weeks ago, +Matthew Villaneuva asked the following question on Google+: Does anybody else find the Big Bang (the scientific explanation on how the universe got created) weird? Actually, yes! Just a century ago, everyone believed that the universe was static—i.e., that it had always existed and that it would always continue to exist. Even Albert Einstein held this view. I previously explained why we know the universe is expanding, so I’m going
Geometry / Mathematics / Physics / etc.
An Update On Kaluza-Klein Theory
I recently posted an article on Kaluza-Klein theory. This was partly because I was working a paper on it as a final project in my second semester of general relativity. The paper is finished, and I thought I’d upload it for the more mathematically inclined of my readers. If you’re interested, you can find it here.
Physics / Science And Math
Faster than a Speeding Pony: Why We Do Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations
This post will be rather short because I’m in the middle of finals. Of course, if you follow me regularly, you also know that I’ve posted rather a lot this week. When I’m exhausted from studying, it’s much easier to write in short bursts, which might explain all the short posts recently. While reading this article, I recently found the following video, in which a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic demonstrates the physics impossibilities in a few scenes of his favorite show. Let’s watch it, and then I’ll explain why I showed it to you. (A
Science And Math / Uncategorized
An Update on Kiera Wilmot
I recently posted about the plight of a teenager in Florida, Kiera Wilmot, who performed a science experiment which went badly. No one was hurt and no property was damaged, but she’s been expelled and she’s facing felony charges. The case has been getting a lot of media attention, which is a really good thing, I think. Here’s some more reading material if you’re interested. DNLee has posted twice on the issue on her Scientific American blog. Both posts are eloquent, enraged, and worth reading. You can find them here and here. There’s also some discussion about what caused
Uncategorized
Social Activism Time
I usually don’t get preachy on this blog. However, there have been two events in the science world that have made me really angry, and I want to do something about it. The first is this: The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the United States government’s premier science organization. Until the sequester, they provided a huge amount of funding for scientific research in every field. Project proposals are subjected to peer review and either funded or rejected based on their scientific merit. The benefit that the United States, both as a political entity and as a society, has
Computer Related / Discrete Math / Mathematics / etc.
R.I.P. Kenneth Appel
Imagine that you’re a stingy cartographer and that you want to make a colored map of the united states. Because you’re stingy, you want to avoid spending money on ink. You have to color the map so that no two adjacent states are the same color—otherwise you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart! If you want to buy the fewest colored pens possible, how many colors must you use to make your map? Very early on, mathematicians guessed that the answer was four colors. However, no one could prove it. An example map is in the tittle figure,
Geometry / Mathematics / Physics / etc.
Stuff From Shape — Kaluza-Klein Theory
There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres. ~Pythagoras When Albert Einstein and David Hilbert published the theory of general relativity, they weren’t just proposing a new theory of gravity. They were proposing a new way of thinking. In general relativity, gravity isn’t a force. Instead, it’s a natural consequence of the shape of the universe. Force comes from stuff. Matter pushes and pulls on other matter. A proton may need to use its electric field to attract an electron, but the field is a property of the proton.
Physics / Relativity / Science And Math
More on General and Special Relativity
Last time, I answered some questions from readers Ms. C and Mr. A on special and general relativity. Mr. A asked some very deep follow-up questions, so I thought I’d share them. Mr. A asks: I believe you already answered what I had intended to be my follow-up question: spacetime curvature accounts for the acceleration of an object already in motion; but why does a body at rest being to move (e.g. why doesn’t a stationary object hover in the air until someone touches it)? If I understand you’re post correctly, Einstein would say that there is no such thing as being at absolute rest —