My thoughts on and your responses to interesting topics in the Physical Sciences
The Bakhshali manuscript is an artifact discovered in 1881, near the town of Peshawar (in then British India, but now in present-day Pakistan). It is beautifully described in an article in the online magazine of the American Mathematical Society and I spent a few hours fascinated by the description in the article (written excellently by … Read More “Bucking down to the Bakhshali manuscript” »
I have been enjoying reading Richard Muller’s “Now: The Physics of Time” – Muller is an extremely imaginative experimental physicist and his writings on the “arrow of time” are quite a nice compendium of the various proposed solutions. Even though none of those solutions is to my liking, they are certainly worth a read. Meanwhile, … Read More “Schrodinger’s Zoo” »
Here’s something I saw while lazily surfing the net this morning. Someone throws a candy wrapper towards the floor and it sticks to the curtain or a book cover. How long will it stick? First, the reason this happens is because of static electricity – and this is why this rarely happens in humid climates … Read More “Why do chocolate wrappers stick to things” »
I woke up to a snowy day on the 30th of December, here in New Jersey and immediately realized two things! It was colder and darker than at the same time on the shortest day of the year, the 21st of December. I suppose you could blame the colder weather on the polar vortex swinging … Read More “Is the longest day the warmest day?” »
If you watch science fiction movies, the most dramatic effects are obtained through some form of time travel. Pick some time in the future, or the past and a fabulous machine or spell swoops you away to that time. I have always had a problem with this simple approach to time travel. One obvious objection … Read More “Can you travel faster through time?” »
Based on the stats I receive from WordPress.com, most readers of this blog live in the US, India and the UK. In addition, there are several readers in Canada, Saudi Arabia, China, Romania, Turkey, Nigeria and France. Suppose you live in the first three of these countries. In addition, let’s say you go to your … Read More “Coffee, anyon?” »
1.74 seconds. If you know what I am talking about, you can discontinue reading this – its old news. If you don’t, its interesting what physicists can learn from 1.74 seconds. Its all buried in the story about GW170817. A few days ago, the people who constructed the LIGO telescope observed gravitational waves from what … Read More “The unreasonable importance of 1.74 seconds” »
Its been difficult to find time to write articles on this blog – what with running a section teaching undergraduates (after 27 years of ), as well as learning about topological quantum field theory – a topic I always fancied but knew little about. However, a trip with my daughter brought up something that sparked … Read More “New kinds of Cash & the connection to the Conservation of Energy And Momentum” »
I gave a talk on this topic exactly two years ago at my undergraduate institution, the Indian Institute of Technology, in Chennai (India). The speech is here, with the powerpoint presentation accompanying it The Normal Distribution is Abnormal And Other Oddities. The general import of the speech was that the Normal Distribution, which is a … Read More “The Normal Distribution is AbNormal” »
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” »
