Smashing Pumpkins

Happy day-after-Halloween, everyone!

Halloween: The one day where giving candy to other people’s kids is
not only acceptable, but the preferred method of communication.

I guess I don't have to tell you that, as a physicist, I love shooting things into the air. For this reason, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays; it gives me a chance to watch pumpkin chucking. For any of you who are unfamiliar with the process, this is the breakdown:

1. Get a pumpkin.

2. Make a device that throws the pumpkin.

3. Throw the pumpkin using the device.

Music makes me...

I’m not sure how many people realize how much physics there actually is in music. In fact, the art of music is a branch of physics all on its own, called musical acoustics. The mathematics applied to this artistic field actually present beautiful and intriguing sounds that one would never think of directly, but at the same time has already intuitively known.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you play an instrument, you’re already familiar with the major scale: a series of whole notes that make a pleasing sound. In reality, every note in that scale is repeating sound wave, buffeting the medium around it at a certain frequency. This translates into a musical tone when it hits your eardrum. Yet did you ever consider that, by measuring these frequencies, all of these tones can be connected through the wonderful world of numbers?

YES! MATH!