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!

The History of the Meter

In science, precise measurements are everything. In order to prove even the simplest theorems, you need systems of measurement that can be both accurate for your purposes, and translatable to other scientists to facilitate collaboration. This is what the SI units are for; they’re a universal system of measuring things. The meter, as stubborn as America might be to use it, is actually the perfect ruler for science (we’ll see why later). But I wondered today: what did the world do before the French intervened with their fancy “Système International d'unités”? How did we measure football fields? 

Yeah, I went there.

The Fundamentals, Part 4: The Weak (but still really strong) Force

Our final interaction, and it’s a tough one. The weak force is probably the most subtle of the fundamental interactions; it’s responsible for beta decay, or the breaking down of particles like the neutron and proton through radiation. This kind of decay is the main force that powers our Sun, as well as making heavier elements possible. However, there’s a lot more to the weak interaction than meets the eye...