Category Archives: Energy

Strings + A Capella = “Bohemian Gravity”?

Bohemian Gravity: "Any way you quantize, you encounter infinity."
Describing The World Dynamics So Far

According to the current understanding of Physics, there is as yet no uniform field theory.  No all-encompassing well-rounded theory that would enable all the known fundamental forces and elementary particles to fit neatly into one simple model, and to be expressed in terms of a single field.

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IPCC 2013 Stockholm – Latest Findings on Climate Change

A photograph showing the bright Sun shining over the Chukchi Sea. The planet's far northern and southern latitudes are projected to experience the greatest change under increasing global temperatures - and in many cases they already are. Image: Chris Linder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The IPCC 2013 Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released its latest summary of the science behind human-caused climate change or, to use its catchy official title, the IPCC Working Group 1 Fifth Assessment Report Summary for Policy Makers – Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis.

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Heat Race Across a Maze with the Leidenfrost Effect

A photograph showing the Leidenfrost effect of liquid nitrogen in action. The experimenter's warm hand is seen plunged into a vat of liquid nitrogen, which spills over. Don't Try This At Home!

A Familiar Sight in The Kitchen

The Leidenfrost effect is a phenomenon in which a liquid, brought in near contact with a mass significantly hotter than the liquid’s own boiling point, produces a thin vapour layer.  This insulating vapour layer keeps liquid from boiling rapidly. 

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Colour Perception and Retinal Neurons – Attempting to Map the Human Brain

A close-up photograph showing a brown eye. Image: NaturPhilosophie
Colour Perception – Eye of the Beholder

Seeing the World in glorious colours is central to our lives.  Colours shape the way we behave.  They affect our mood and our perception.  They can influence the way we interact and respond to social and environmental stimuli, whether we are directly aware of it, or through subliminal awareness of our external world.  Again, it is one of those things that most people take for granted in everyday life.

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The Art and Science of Music Acoustics – From the Humble Flute to the Mighty Didgeridoo (Featuring Tarzan…)

A photograph featuring an aboriginal didgeridoo player sitting on the beach with his instrument.
Fundamentals of Music Acoustics

Any signal that may be represented as an amplitude varying over time has a corresponding frequency spectrum.  This applies to concepts (and natural phenomena) that most human beings encounter daily, without giving them a second thought.  Such as visible light (and colour perception), radio/TV channels, wireless communications…  Even the regular rotation of the Earth.  Even the sound of music…

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“Pow”! “Bang”! The Physics of Superheroes

A photograph showing a few frames of a Marvel superheroes comic book. Two masked superheroes - one wearing a red outfit and the other one with a green outfit - are flying through space. The captions read: Red Man "You can open your eyes now. There they are." Green man "Wait. I'm confused. If we're smaller than light particles now. How are we even seeing?" Red Man "You're not... Not in any human way. The five senses become something else entirely at this quantum level. Your mind's doing you a favour. It's processing all this into familiar visuals so you won't go insane. By the way, you're not breathing oxygen either. It's best not to think about it." Green Man "No kidding." Superheroes smaller than photon-life.
Physics meets Comic-Book Superheroes

The Physics of Superheroes is a popular science book by  James Kakalios, a Physics professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Minnesota, and a long-time comic-book fan.  First published in 2005, the book explores the elementary laws of physics.

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What do Physicists do anyway?

Air Apparent

Over 50,000 deaths each year in the UK are attributed to air pollution.  Physicist, entrepreneur and father Mark Richards is concerned about the environment and in particular the air pollution that we expose our children to.  He has developed a handy machine which can monitor air quality.  He wants people to see how bad air pollution is, so that we all think more carefully about our lifestyles and travel methods.

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The Moser Bottle Lamp: ‘Divine Light’

A close-up photograph of Alfredo Moser in the light of the bottle lamp - his makeshift invention.
Sun Light in a Bottle

“God gave the Sun to everyone”, Alfredo Moser states modestly.  And Moser gave his light to everyone.  Over the last couple of years, Moser’s ingenious innovation has spread throughout the World, bringing the bottle lamps to locations from Brazil to the Philippines and Bangladesh.  By early next year, it is estimated that one million homes will have benefited from his simple idea… 

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Why the Universe may be Inherently Unstable

"The Cosmic Soup": An impressionist artist's view of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation at the edge of our Local Universe. Artwork:: NaturPhilosophie

Exploring Vacuum Instability

Scientists are currently exploring the concept of vacuum instability.  What does this mean?  Well, they believe there is a chance that…  Billions of years from now, a new universe could open up into the present one and replace it.  It all depends on some very precise numbers related to the Higgs boson particle that researchers are currently trying to pin down.

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The Field Equations of General Relativity

An artist's impression of the Earth's gravity field as described in Einstein's General Relativity.

Keeping It Relatively Simple

The Einstein Field Equations of General Relativity are vast and complex, but they can be written with deceptive simplicity. 

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