If you’ve ever watched the launch of a rocket, perhaps a Space Shuttle or one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9s, you’ll have heard the phrase “Max Q.” About a minute after launch — one minute 22 seconds, in the case of Falcon 9 — the announcer will say something like, “The spacecraft is now experiencing its […]
Physics
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Don’t Shoot the Physicist!
Today, hundreds, if not thousands, of theoretical physicists the world over are trying to find the holy grail of physics, a “theory of everything” (or TOE for short) that explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. More concretely, a successful TOE would connect the two theories on which all physics depends: general […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Dark Energy:Blunder or Boondoggle?
Albert Einstein told physicist George Gamow that the greatest blunder of his life was his introduction of a “cosmological constant” designated by Λ, the Greek letter lambda. In his 1915 theory of general relativity, Λ, a sort of ubiquitous “anti-gravity,” keeps the universal static, neither expanding nor contracting. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Mirror Universes
For nearly 100 years, the idea of a “Big Bang” birthing our universe has been the leading cosmological model. In the 1920s, Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and later Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître derived the notion of an expanding universe based on Einstein’s 1915 General Theory of Relativity. Extrapolating backwards in time, expansion implies an infinitely […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Physics’ Beautiful Crisis
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” — John Keats, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” What works for old pots doesn’t necessarily work for physics. In fact, the search for “beauty” has stymied progress in physics for the past 40 years, according to […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Nobel Sexism
Cover up the next paragraph and take a guess at how many women have won the Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded to 206 people since its inception in 1901. And the answer is … Two. Less than 1 percent of the total. Marie Curie received one-quarter of the prize in 1903 for her work on […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Einstein, Newton and the Eclipse of 1919
This is the tale of the high-stakes test of scientific theories that made headlines around the world nearly 100 years ago in the aftermath of World War I, linking the lives of two pacifists on opposing sides of the conflict: German-born theoretician Albert Einstein and English astronomer Arthur Eddington. Einstein, already famous for his groundbreaking […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Welcome to the Real World (Maybe)
T he City Council in Monza, the northern Italian city known for its Formula 1 Grand Prix, is barring pet owners from keeping their goldfish in bowls. … The measure’s sponsor said, “A fish kept in a bowl has a distorted view of reality and suffers because of this.” — New York Times, 2004. Commenting […]