My thoughts on and your responses to interesting topics in the Physical Sciences
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” »
The Special Theory of Relativity, which is the name for the set of ideas that Einstein proposed in 1905 in a paper titled “On the Electrodynamics of moving bodies”, starts with the premise that the Laws of Physics are the same for all observers that are traveling at uniform speeds relative to each other. One … Read More “Special Relativity; Or how I learned to relax and love the Anti-Particle” »
I have always been fascinated by the weirdness of the Universe. One aspect of the weirdness is the quantum nature of things – others relate to the mysteries of Lorentz invariance, Special Relativity, the General Theory of Relativity, the extreme size and age of the Universe, the vast amount of stuff we don't seem to … Read More “Can a quantum particle come to a fork in the road and take it?” »
To explain the next standard candle, I need to digress a little into the math of statistics of lots of particles. The most basic kind is the statistics of distinguishable particles. Consider the following scenario. You’ve organized a birthday party for a lot of different looking kids (no twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets …). Each kid … Read More “A digression on statistics and a party with Ms. Fermi-Dirac and Mr. Bose (Post #5)” »
Having exhausted the measurement capabilities for small angles, to proceed further, scientists really needed to use the one thing galaxies and stars put out in plenty – light. The trouble is, to do so, we either need detailed, correct theories of galaxy and star life-cycles (so we know when they are dim or bright) or … Read More “Cosmology: Cepheid Variables – or why Henrietta couldn’t Leavitt alone …(Post #4)” »
This post describes the cool methods people use to figure out how far away stars and galaxies are. Figuring out how far away your friend lives is easy – you walk or drive at a constant speed in a straight line from your home to their house – then once you know how much time … Read More “Cosmology: Distance Measurements – Parallax (Post #3)” »
Continuing the saga about the cosmological red-shift.
This calculation was inspired, a few years ago, by trying to find a simple way to explain the sum of the first natural numbers to my (then) twelve-year-old daughter, without the use of calculus. As many people know, the sum of the first natural numbers is found very easily, using the method that Gauss (apparently) … Read More “A simple sum” »
I have received some feedback from people that felt the posts were too technical. I am going to address this by constructing a simpler thread of posts on one topic that will start simpler and stay conceptual rather than become technical. I want to discuss the current state of Cosmology, given that it is possibly … Read More “A course correction – and let’s get started!” »
This article follows a simple example laid out by Jaynes (1996). Jaynes’ example is one that shows how one’s computation of the change in entropy in a physical / chemical process depends on the precise variables that one uses to label the macro state. If you use different variables (say you are insensitive to properties … Read More “A simple connection between Entropy and Information” »
Quantum Mechanics was the result of analysis of experiments that explored the emission and absorption spectra of various atoms and molecules. Once the electron and proton were discovered, very soon after the discovery of radioactivity, it was theorized that the atom was an electrically neutral combination of protons and electrons. Since it isn’t possible for … Read More “Here’s an alternative history of how quantum mechanics came about…” »
I graduated in 1993 with a physics Ph.D and after a short post-doc, went off to work as an options trader and “quant”. After 22 years in that area, I realized that physics is actually back to being interesting again – 22 years ago, people were saying that fundamental physics was all done, with the … Read More “Another physics blog? Why?” »
