My thoughts on and your responses to interesting topics in the Physical Sciences
Why is the night sky dark? Wilhelm Olbers asked this question, certainly not for the first time in history, in the 1800s. That’s a silly question with an obvious answer. Isn’t that so? Let’s see. There certainly is no sun visible, which is the definition of night, after all. The moon might be, but on … Read More “Mr. Olbers and his paradox” »
I really had to see this eclipse – met up with my nephew at KSU, then eclipse chasing (versus the clouds) all the way from Kansas to central and south-east Missouri. The pictures I got were interesting, but I think the videos (and audio) reflect the experience of totality much better. The initial crescent shaped … Read More “The Great American Eclipse of 2017” »
I promised to continue one of my previous posts and explain how Einstein’s theories of 1905 and 1915 together affect our GPS systems. If we hadn’t discovered relativity (special and general) by now, we’d have certainly discovered it by the odd behaviour of our clocks on the surface of the earth and on an orbiting … Read More “Mr. Einstein and my GPS” »
Imagine you were walking around in Manhattan and you chanced upon an interesting game going on at the side of the road. By the way, when you see these games going on, a safe strategy is to walk on, since they usually reduce to methods of separating a lot of money from you in various … Read More “Master Traders and Bayes’ theorem” »
The most refined Standard Candle there is today is a particular kind of Stellar Collapse, called a Type 1a Supernova. To understand this, you will need to read the previous posts (#1-#5), in particular, the Fermi-Dirac statistics argument in Post #5 in the sequence. While this is the most mathematical of the posts, it might … Read More “Fermi Gases and Stellar Collapse – Cosmology Post #6” »
You know this story (or something similar) from your own life. I was walking from my parked car to the convenience store to purchase a couple of bottles of sparkling water. As I walked there, I noticed a car with the number 1966 – that’s the year I was born! This must be a coincidence … Read More “Coincidences and the stealthiness of the Calculus of Probabilities” »
Arbitrage refers to a somewhat peculiar and rare situation in the financial world. It is succinctly described as follows. Suppose you start with an initial situation – let’s say you have some money in an ultra-safe bank that earns interest at a certain basic rate . Assume, also, that there is a infinitely liquid market … Read More “Arbitrage arguments in Finance and Physics” »
I stopped following basketball after Michael Jordan stopped playing for the Bulls – believe it or not, the sport appears to have become the place to believe and practice outlandish theories that might be described (in comparison to the Bulls) as bull****. There’s a basketball star, that plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers. His name … Read More “The earth is flat – in Cleveland” »
