On Episode 150 of their podcast Dear Hank and John, Hank and John Green were pondering this, haunting questions:
How many visitors to the Eiffel Tower would have to poop there when they arrive before the tower is covered in poop? How long would that take?
Well, let’s have at it!
Electricity, fuels, heating: energy is all around us. Physicists talk about it all the time to decode the mechanisms behind basically every process. Yet a good definition of energy is hard to come by: what is this “energy”?
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
Polls are wrong! Stats mean nothing! Numbers can’t describe people! Maybe. Or maybe we’re doing something wrong in handling them. Continue reading Things numbers do, things numbers don’t
So it wasn’t gravitational waves after all: the Nobel prize for physics went to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz. That’s the easy part. The motivation needs a little unpacking: For theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. We all know and love a few phases of matter: solid, liquid and gas (maybe plasma if you want to get kinky). … Continue reading Theoretical donuts and quantum computers: the Nobel prize 2016
We’ve all been through it: we want to listen to some music, take our earbuds out of our bag only to find—THE HORROR!—an impossibly tangled mess. Can’t anyone assuage this terrible scourge? According to physics… nope, not really. As it turns out, earbuds tangle up because of a simple but deep reason. Namely, there are precious few ways for a chord to register as “tidy”, … Continue reading Earbuds must tangle!
Some time ago I came across a fun article. I got curious, and embarked on a journey that took me to the source of a famous internet myth and even to explore what it means to be a physicist. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The article was about the myth that it’s impossible to fold a piece of paper more than 7 times, … Continue reading How many times can you fold a piece of paper?
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