Subject
15 entries
Physics
Bookmarks
Greg Egan's Foundations: Physics for SF Readers
Greg Egan's Foundations is a four-part series explaining Special Relativity, General Relativity, Black Holes, and Quantum Mechanics for science fiction readers — accessible with high school math, focused on deriving concrete predictions rather than history or philosophy.
Bartosz Ciechanowski — Interactive Explainer Archives
Bartosz Ciechanowski's archives of interactive visual explainers — deep, painstaking explanations of physics and engineering concepts through interactive WebGL simulations. Some of the best technical writing and visualization on the internet.
GPS: How the Global Positioning System Works
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive explainer on how GPS works — from trilateration fundamentals through satellite orbital design, pseudorandom codes, and relativistic clock corrections. One of the best pieces of technical writing on the web.
Relativity: A Modern Primer
A modern introductory treatment of relativity — likely covering both special and general relativity with contemporary notation and pedagogical framing. Useful as a mathematically careful primer that bridges high school physics and graduate-level treatments like Misner, Thorne & Wheeler.
Movies Every Physics Student Should Watch
A curated list of films recommended for physics students — mixing sci-fi with documentaries and biopics of physicists. Light reference material rather than a serious pedagogical resource.
Danielle Fong: A Time for Urgency
Danielle Fong's talk at the Nantucket Project on the urgency of clean energy — referencing a dramatic decline in some metric (likely solar costs or storage costs) that had "gone basically to zero." A physicist-founder making the case for aggressive timelines on energy transition.
WIRED: Visualizing Gravity (Rocks in Paint)
WIRED tweet sharing Fabian Oefner's rocks-in-paint photography — saved alongside the article itself. See also the direct article note.
It Takes 275 Water Molecules to Make Ice
Scientific American podcast item: researchers determined that a cluster of exactly 275 water molecules is the minimum required to form an ice-like crystalline structure — a finding that probes the boundary between bulk and nanoscale physics in water.
Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought
Coverage of Harold 'Sonny' White's 2012 NASA research suggesting the Alcubierre warp drive might require far less exotic matter than originally calculated — reducing the energy requirement from Jupiter-mass to roughly 500kg. Speculative but grounded in real general relativity.
How an Atomic Clock Works, and Its Use in GPS
An EngineerGuy video explaining how atomic clocks work and why GPS depends on them. A clean demonstration that the entire global positioning system rests on quantum mechanical precision in timekeeping.
The Higgs Boson Explained
PHD Comics' RSAnimate-style video explaining the Higgs boson, saved just weeks before CERN confirmed its discovery in July 2012. An accessible breakdown of one of the biggest physics finds of the century.
ZeroN: Magnetic Levitation That Remembers
ZeroN is an MIT Media Lab system that levitates a metal ball in mid-air using electromagnetic control, then records and plays back its movements in 3D space. A tangible interface where a physical object becomes a programmable point in space — bridging physical and digital interaction.
Physicists Store a Two-Frame Movie in an Atomic Cloud
NIST researchers stored two sequential image frames — a functional two-frame 'movie' — inside a cloud of ultracold rubidium atoms using quantum optical techniques. A proof-of-concept for quantum memory, storing light itself as atomic spin states.
The Physics of Why Coffee Spills When You Walk
Researchers modeled why coffee spills when you walk with a cup, finding the human gait frequency nearly matches the resonant frequency of liquid sloshing in a standard mug. The fix: walk irregularly, use a lid, or carry a non-cylindrical container.
Ice Polymorphs
John Carlos Baez's Azimuth post on the extraordinary diversity of ice crystal structures — at least 15 distinct phases of solid water exist under different pressure and temperature conditions. The ice-nine trope from Vonnegut has a real crystallographic basis.