Monday, September 19, 2011

Where We're Going...


A lot of you have probably been thinking, “OK, world, this is the future. Where is my flying car?”

"I need something more... stylish."

Well, before you get your proverbial panties in a bunch, think about how that would work. Without involving jets (which are dangerous for a commercial vehicle) and propellers (which would make your car a plane) the only thing left to make your car fly would be the power of magnetism. Everyone’s pushed a magnet across a table before; in theory, a strong enough magnet would be able to push off a metal surface and, with, a motor in it, possibly drive itself around. However, that magnet you pushed does flips, skids, and is just entirely unstable if pushed from the bottom. How could one implement your fantastic new magnet technology in a stable car, one that wouldn’t flip over when you turned it on? The answer: superconducting levitation. Believe it or not, that is a real phrase, and the technology is being implemented as we speak.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The God Particle


The Higgs boson.
...I don't even know.


You may have heard of the “Higgs boson particle” in the news lately. It’s the thing that CERN is working so hard on this year, sending out news reports daily, it seems. In reality, the Higgs boson is one of the only theoretical fundamental particles that hasn’t been observed yet, and even more important, it’s the key to a grand unification of Physics theory.

But... what is it?

Sunday, September 11, 2011

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!