I Can't Believe They're Not Forces!

If you’ve ever taken a Physics course, you may have learned about Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion. In case it’s been a while:

1. An object in motion stays in motion
2. The force of an object is equal to the mass multiplied by the acceleration (F=ma)
3. For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.

These are the rules upon which Classical Physics was founded. They are taught in grade school like they are the end-all and be-all of motion in our Universe, and one can certainly do amazing things with them. However, think about this interesting mind experiment: you slide a puck on a frictional rotating table.

That’s it. That’s the mind experiment. You can picture that, right? Because Newton’s Laws can’t.

...pause for dramatic effect...

'The Tides', or 'Things that are so much more complicated than they seem'

So, it's the middle of the summer. That time of year when TV stations play Christmas in July specials and the Earth decides it wants to try and set fire to anyone who walks outside by bombarding them with UV radiation. And what better way to celebrate this fact than going to the beach? 


The beach, as it turns out, is full of physics. In fact, the beach wouldn’t even be there without physics. It’s the motion of the tides that eroded the rocks that originally created the border between sea and land, turning everything into sand. And of course, what makes the tides come in and out? The gravitational pull of the moon. 

As romantic as it sounds, the pull of the moon on the sea is actually fascinating. At high tide, water is pulled towards the moon ever-so-slightly. This subsequently creates a low tide on the sides of the Earth, the places that the water is being drawn from. Yet, the opposite side of the Earth also has high tide, since the effect of the moon goes straight through the Earth! 

This MS Paint drawing just blew my mind. 

The Universe ain't what it used to be.

Do you remember that post I wrote on antimatter about a week ago? Near the conclusion, I speculated that there could be whole antimatter galaxies that science has yet to discover, and thus blew your mind with physics. Well, someone decided to take it a step further. The physicist Dragan Hajdukovic recently published a paper describing an alternate Big Bang theory, one that I found fascinating. In his theory, the universe eventually stops expanding, shrinks down, and then switches all of its matter into antimatter. 

....what.

That’s right: we would live in an antimatter universe. Let’s Tarantino this theory and see how Dragan came to this shocking conclusion.