Want to name an element on the periodic table? Piece of cake! Just follow this simple, step-by-step guide. The first thing you have to do is to discover an element. At the moment, the periodic table has no blank spots to be filled: all elements with 118 or fewer protons have been found already. Though luck. Moreover, since very crowded nuclei don’t stick together for … Continue reading How to discover an element
I grew up in a famously foggy place. Usually, it’s just a nuisance, but if you know how it works, at least you can add a little poetry to it. The first thing you need to know is that warm air keeps moisture better than colder one. Which is to say, water remains a vapor more easily in warm air. When a mass of warm … Continue reading A very foggy title
No Christmas landscape is complete without snow. Lots of snow. And every little snowflake is unique, everyone knows that! How come, tho? Snow is nothing else than teeny tiny ice crystals that form in the clouds and stay solid all the way down to the ground. Water crystallizes around microscopic imperfections, like dust particles floating in the clouds. Once the initial nucleus is formed, the … Continue reading Every snowflake is unique
90th minute. Beckham sets the ball down. If he scores, England goes to the world cup. He takes a look at the wall and shoots. The ball bends in mid-air, tricks the keeper and goes in the top corner. Ok, you don’t need to be Beckham to bend it like he does. But how did he do it? As you probably heard, physicists like leave … Continue reading The screwball post
There’s a beautiful country, with forests and deserts, vast salt lakes and tall mountains. A country where driving can be mortally dangerous. A country where your new plasma TV won’t last very long. ¡Bienvenidos a Bolivia! A plasma screen is basically a bunch of small neon lamps. They work by passing an electric current through a container full of gas (like, you guessed it, neon!): … Continue reading No country for plasma TVs
In the cold of Canada, a man blows a soap bubble, which immediately freezes. Since that’s awesome, the guy makes a nice video about it. Who knows, maybe he even knew about all the physics that was going on in front of his camera. Let’s start from the easiest thing: why does the bottom of the bubble freeze last? The answer is gravity: the outermost … Continue reading Frozen bubbles
The Sun, the planets and the whole universe revolve around the Earth while hanging on crystal spheres. The velocity of a body is proportional to the force that pushed it. A rock falls to the ground because that’s its natural element. Those are only a few of the teachings of Aristotle that, forced on posterity for centuries, held back scientific progress. Whatever your branch of … Continue reading Aristotle is always wrong, but that’s alright
AnThere’s a sealed box, inside the box is a cute cat and a device that can kill it as soon as a radioactive atom decays. Were we to open the box, would the cat be alive? And how is it doing while the box is still closed? In extreme synthesis, this is the idea of the famous “Schrödinger’s cat” experiment (thought experiment! no actual … Continue reading Cats and not
Nothing’s more naturally predictable than the progression of a day, right? The Sun comes up in the East, rises through the sky, then sets in the West. That’s part of the fascination of places where it isn’t quite so. However, one of the places with the craziest days is rather unaccessible: Mercury. It’s the closest planet to the Sun, so it feels the star’s gravitational … Continue reading Mercurial sunset
Light travels at about 299792458 meters per second. Why not more? or less? Why can’t it have more than one speed? To tell the truth, light does have more than one speed: the one we know, the one that nothing can surpass, is the speed of light in a vacuum. But if it goes through a material, light travels slower. More than that, light of … Continue reading Speed limits
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