Last night, while looking for ways to revive Rookie Physics, I stumbled upon an article in The Guardian. It said, "If you’re stuck in a rut, try posting something small: a cool picture or video, with a few words of explanation." The picture on top is something I picked at random (please believe me). It's… Continue reading Ants and Waves
I was walking on the terrace the other day when it started drizzling. As I was making haste, I noticed something nobody would pay attention to. The wet spots left by the raindrops on the floor came in all sizes. And I wondered what is the size distribution of the raindrops? For example, something like… Continue reading Splitter Splatter Raindrops
As a kid I loved multiplication. Dividing was hard—because I didn’t know what to do if the remainder wasn’t zero—but I managed to do okay in my tests. It was only in high school that I met the Cartesian product. Tensor products had to wait till my undergrad. Mathematics is full of products: scalar product,… Continue reading Coins, Dice, and Entanglement
Some physicists believe gravity is weakening. If true, then Earth won’t hold gases in its atmosphere. Lighter gases, like oxygen, will escape, and life on Earth will end. Robert H. Dicke predicted that gravity weakens by about 0.2% every year (I'm skeptical about this estimate). It must weaken by more than 90% for oxygen to… Continue reading Is Gravity Weakening?
Stargazing is a lovely hobby—if you live in a place where you can see the stars, that is—but what you see is the past. Einstein’s relativity theory postulates that nothing can travel faster than light. To understand why you see the star in the past, let me give an analogy. Imagine times where kingdoms had… Continue reading Stargazing: Seeing the Past
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sriram-akella2/episodes/Steven-Weinberg-1933-2021-voice-by-11-ai-e2h5bgq On 23rd July this year, we lost Steven Weinberg. He was the recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam) and a professor of physics and astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. Weinberg was a prolific writer, publishing in periodicals like The New York Review… Continue reading On Steven Weinberg (1933-2021)
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sriram-akella2/episodes/Popper-and-Reverse-Motion-Pictures-voice-by-11-ai-e2gvs0l Imagine watching an action film like The Tomorrow War in reverse. Or imagine a tree shrinking back to a seed. Or a broken cup rearranging itself into an unbroken cup. Magic, isn’t it? But not everything is irreversible. Imagine a car going straight. If we capture this in a film and run it in… Continue reading Popper and Reverse Motion Pictures
Alpha-quartz infiltrated our homes! I repeat, alpha-quartz infiltrated our homes. It made its way into our smartphones, watches, televisions, video cameras, pacemakers, computers, and toys [1]. It’s about time we ask how and why. Silicon dioxide might not ring a bell, but quartz might. There is a simple reason why quartz is used in almost… Continue reading Quartz: Timekeeper
What chains us to the ground? What stops us from soaring the skies like Superman? What drags us down every time we leap? Since centuries, humanity fought against gravity. Imagine a world where we could fly. But the harsh reality is: we aren’t Gabo's characters [1], plus we’re heavy – gravity is strong on heavier… Continue reading Levitation; Optical Levitation
The history of Science is filled with battles between conflicting ideas. Right from the heliocentric theory of Copernicus to the modern developments of Quantum Mechanics, Science has witnessed remarkable clashes. Usually the matter is resolved with an experiment, but sometimes not. The battle between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein lasted a long time and ended… Continue reading A Clash of Ideas: Least Time Principle
Joy sapped off our faces as the bell rang. Playful noises from seconds ago turned to whispers and then dead silence. A slight breeze from outside knocked chalk dust off the blackboard. The dust pelted the floor as it fell, like raindrops on a tin roof. It was Math class. He walked in with a… Continue reading Math Class Musings
Stepping on a weighing machine, wrapping a tape around your waist, standing next to a stadiometer, what is common in all these tasks? You're being measured by something. A weighing machine that measures your weight. A measuring tape that measures your waist size. A stadiometer that measures your height. In any measurement, there is an… Continue reading What is a Measurement?
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