First, as usual, watch this video:
(easter egg: look for the Doctor Who reference at 5:30)
Yes, that is the entire history and future of everything in seven minutes. Yes, that is kind of scary. But the inevitable heat death of the universe is, well, exactly that. Inevitable. Luckily, we will all be loooooooong dead before then, if that makes you feel any better. Actually I think I just made that worse. Oops.
Anyways, this brings up the interesting nature of time, and our lack of abil
The Standard Model theorizes that the Higgs Field switched on about 100 picoseconds after the big bang. Recently, though, physicists have theorized that it happened a little more gradually than "switching on" in a process more like water boiling. When these bubbles of Higgs Field met, they created massive shockwaves that would have come with sonic booms. In one of the most cool theories in the early universe, the noise would have sounded a lot like thunder.
or this
(let's see if this co
As per usual, this will make more sense if you start out by watching a lovely
It's fairly simplistic, but introduces the topic.
So. Our universe is one with three dimensions of space and one of time. But why? Why doesn't it only have one dimension, or twenty? This is, of course, ignoring string theory/m theory (though I will likely make a post about that later). For a young 3D universe, our temperature is much more uniform than would be expected. There's also that whole pesky question of in
I think that the way this was originally sent to me conveys the meaning better than any rewording I could do:
Equation of orbit of a small mass around a much greater mass
Equation of human awe of earth orbit
So now that you've watched it, you should have a greater appreciation of gravitational forces and centripetal ones, the whole Fc=mv2/r and Fg=GM1M2/r2 and such.
Or maybe you just affirmed that space is really freaking awesome, and a lot prettier than anyone gives it credit
We all know the standard shape of a mushroom cloud
It looks something like this:
The question is why do they look like this?
Well, as can be seen in this post, the less in-depth answer is a simple difference in density between the rapidly expanding gases and the rest of the air.
However, this is a physics blog after all, and so I'm going to get into the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. In the most understandable terms (though to be quite honest after reading up on it I still don't really
Though we may not think of plants as moving things, we are sorely mistaken. The force of an opening flower may be very low - in the micro if not nano newtons - but as they exist and move, they are physics. Enjoy some beauty of nature, all dictated by the ever-present laws of physics.
photo credit to Yutaka Kitamura
Source
Not quite a physics post, but something really cool that came out recently
Now you know what it's like to see through the eyes of five different animals!
I'm still waiting to see a mantis shrimp though... 8 color receptors compared to our three? How does that even work? Where do they fit in the electromagnetic spectrum? Extra colors that is. Maybe within our lifetimes we'll be able to find out.
Despite my last entry clearly dictating that I have no idea what's going on when it comes to fluid dynamics, here I go again.
This time, it's droplets of water and propylene glycol and how they interact when on a glass surface.
First, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Wx2PHIYGI. Now. Okay, watched it? No? Then the rest of this won't make much sense and will be pretty boring. I promise it's cool, and the music's pretty sweet too.
Now that you've all either watched it or closed out
