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Q: Can resonance destroy anything? Is the “brown note” possible? 24 Aug 2013 | 12:56 am
Physicist: Nope! “Resonance” is a “driven harmonic oscillation“, where the driving force pushes and pulls at, or near, the “resonant frequency” of whatever it is that doing the resonating. There are...
Q: Are there examples of quantum mechanics that can be seen in every-day life, or do they only show up in the lab? 14 Aug 2013 | 07:30 pm
Physicist: The weird effects that show up in quantum mechanics (a lot of them anyway) are due to the wave-nature of the world making itself more apparent. What we normally think of as “particle behav...
Q: Why does it take thousands of years for light to escape the Sun? 7 Aug 2013 | 03:35 am
Physicist: The original statement is often something like, “It takes tens of thousands of years for a photon to get from the core to the surface of the Sun, but only eight minutes to get from the Sun ...
Q: What does it mean for light to be stopped or stored? 29 Jul 2013 | 11:40 pm
Physicist: We’ve gotten a handful of questions since this was published and led to articles like this, this, and, this. In a nutshell, some dudes in Germany (Georg Heinze, Christian Hubrich, and Thom...
Q: What are quasi-particles? Why do phonons and photons have such similar names? 23 Jul 2013 | 03:30 am
Physicist: Prefixes like “quasi-”, “psuedo-”, and sometimes “meta-” are basically used to mean “sorta like… but different… you know?”. Quasiparticles behave like particles in a few fairly important w...
The nuptial effect 10 Jul 2013 | 10:01 pm
Every day, on average, 2-3 physicists get married. On Saturday I’ll be attempting to push that average to as high as 3-4. It’ll be more like this than not. So (for our regular readers), there’ll be...
Q: How do you prove that the spacetime interval is always the same? 3 Jul 2013 | 10:09 am
The original question was: Here’s my current dilemma: how does one rigorously prove the invariance of the space-time interval? In Taylor & Wheeler’s Spacetime Physics, they basically show one very go...
Q: Are numbers real? 27 Jun 2013 | 03:53 am
Physicist: This question usually comes in the form of “are complex numbers real?” or “are negative numbers real?” or something along those lines. Turns out you can answer all of these questions at on...
Q: If time were reversed would things fall up? 19 Jun 2013 | 02:44 am
Physicist: Reversing time seems to reverse how things work. Instead of growing, plants shrink. Instead of going forward, airplanes fly backward. And, “intuitively”, instead of falling down, things ...
Q: Why don’t “cheats” ever work on the uncertainty principle? What’s uncertain in the uncertainty principle? 13 Jun 2013 | 03:39 am
Physicist: The Uncertainty Principle is often stated as “the position and momentum of a particle cannot be simultaneously and perfectly measured”. Mathematically, it’s written as , which means that t...
