Quantum… jokes?
Many jokes, particularly puns and one-liners, rely on on setting up expectations, just to subvert them, on double meanings and ambiguity. Take this one:
I would tell you a chemistry joke, but I wouldn’t get any reaction.
What the heck is a boson?
Particles are strange. In more than one way: for example they behave as if they were spinning, like a top. But they aren’t moving at all. Even if they were, trying to imagine how some of them “spin” would probably melt your brain. The property that measures this “spinning” (though nothing is moving at all here!) is, creatively, called spin.
Circles, social circles and Pi Day
Tuesday was Pi Day. The choice of which constant to celebrate probably had to do with its notoriety, but to celebrate a constant at all has much deeper roots. Continue reading Circles, social circles and Pi Day
How to make something clean itself
The secret of perpetually stainless stuff hid for centuries in plain sight—at least for those of us living around lotus leaves. Now physics can help you never to clean again, no matter what you spill.
It all comes down to how water sticks to stuff, in other words, how stuff gets wet. Continue reading “How to make something clean itself”
Jazz and the atmosphere of exoplanets
The atmosphere of a planet holds the keys to make it habitable, so we need to look at them to figure if exoplanets are habitable. They are too far to send probes to measure them directly like we do with Mars or Jupiter’s moons, but scientists can study them from right here, looking at how they block light.
What makes a planet habitable
It’s not all about location: planets need a lot of things to go right to harbor life. Continue reading What makes a planet habitable
The thirsty dragon and other capillarity magic
Capillarity is a staple of school physics. But are you sure you know how it works? And what do dragons have to do with it? Continue reading The thirsty dragon and other capillarity magic
2 deep questions on gravitational waves (with puppies!)
Almost exactly a year ago, LIGO announced the detection of gravitational waves. Let’s celebrate answering two deep questions about them. They are hard, but puppies will keep our spirits up! Continue reading 2 deep questions on gravitational waves (with puppies!)
Why o why are rockets painted that way?
… or at all? To paint the lily might well be excess, but there’s very good reasons to paint rockets (or not) Continue reading Why o why are rockets painted that way?
Wormholes: digging tunnels through space
From Doctor Who to Interstellar (but dating back for decades) sci-fi has used wormholes to take heroes across space and time. Do they exist? And what could they really do? Continue reading Wormholes: digging tunnels through space
PhysicalLove 