How to Convince Your Flat-Earth Friends the Earth Is Round
Illustration: Rhett Allain You can see that we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse equal to the distance from the observer’s eyes to the center of the Earth (R …
dot physics
Why the Polar Vortex Is Bad for Balloon Artists
It’s been crazy cold this week, even down where I live in Louisiana, thanks to an outbreak of a polar vortex. This frigid air is bad for all kinds of …
School of Rock: The Physics of Waves on Guitar Strings
The rubber band example does indeed have two nodes—they are at the ends of the rubber band where your fingers hold it. We only have half a wavelength in the …
How to Measure the Impact From a Collision
Not only do I get the “shape” of the acceleration curve for the colliding cart, but I also get a maximum acceleration of –6.67 meters per second squared. With that …
Could a Cockroach Survive a Fall From Space?
There’s some cool stuff going on here. Notice that for the objects with air resistance, they all reach incredibly high velocities as they fall in the upper atmosphere where they …
How to Measure the Calories in a Candy Bar—With Physics!
This Halloween, when you grab a candy bar, pay attention to the wrapper. In the United States, a “nutrition facts” label has been required for all packaged foods since 1994, …
The Physics of Faraday Cages
This also works the other way: Incoming electromagnetic waves will get canceled by the moving charges in the Faraday cage. Your phone won’t know that it’s getting a text message …
Which Spider-Man Is Stronger: Tobey Maguire or Tom Holland?
Next, I need the mass. Each car has an empty mass of 26,000 kilograms and a capacity of 34 seats, or 123 total passengers. From the clip, the train looks …
Radiation Is Everywhere. But It’s Not All Bad
For many of the sources you encounter in everyday life, the amount of radiation is so low that you don’t need to worry about it. But ionizing radiation can also …
How to Cool an Object Without Using Any Energy
There are three ways that objects can have a thermal interaction with other objects. The most common method is through heat conduction. This happens when two objects of different temperatures …