Category: Physics

Few people acknowledge the chemistry that is involved in baking—we tend to rely on recipes and simply take them for granted. After all, they work! Most recipes tell you to put a certain amount of butter, flour, eggs, and sugar, stir them, then bake. What makes a cake different than a brownie or a cookie…

If you have a curve, the gradient across the curve is constantly changing. The gradient at any point on that curve is called the derivative. The derivative tells you, essentially, the rate at which y is changing with respect to x. (There will be another post on infinitesimal calculus which will explain this further) This…

How we discovered the structure of the atom. The history of the atom is a long one which underwent several theories, changes and controversies. You might have heard of the Greek philosopher Democritus who, while sitting by the beach and observing the sand, posed the theory that everything was made of indestructible building blocks he…

In the early 1900s, a young woman named Amalia Emmy Noether made the—highly unconventional decision at the time—to study academics in the University of Erlangen. I say this was highly unconventional because it was a time when educating women in traditionally male-pursuits was seen as a recipe for “overthrowing all academic order.” In fact, Noether…

It seems intuitive that a solid of a particular substance would sink when placed inside the liquid form of that substance (a solid ball of argon will sink in a bowl of liquid argon.) And yet, we have icebergs, ice sheets to skate on, and ice cubes floating at the top of our lemonades. Despite…

There’s a poem by Alexander Pope, which goes: Nature and nature’s laws hid in night God said ‘Let Newton be!’ And all was light That poem seems to illustrate the significance of Newton’s laws quite accurately. Let’s take a look at what these laws were: Newton’s First Law: if a body is at rest or…

A question we’ve all asked as children, but sadly, as we grow we tend to stop wondering and start taking things for granted. Of course the sky is blue, what else would it be? Purple? The truth is, the physics behind our blue sky is quite fascinating. It ultimately comes down to a concept called…

It’s funny how we all have a tendency to picture the orbits of planets as being circular. That’s how we see it in diagrams and how we usually draw it in pictures. After all, circles seem perfect… they seem natural. This bias in favour of circular motion was held even more strongly in the 17th…

Have you ever noticed how the sound of an ambulance seems to have a high pitch when it’s moving towards you, but then the pitch gets lower and lower as it moves away? Well, that’s because of phenomenon called the Doppler Effect… and it’s also how we figured out the universe is expanding (but more…

Dark matter is one of the big mysteries we all hear about. What makes it a mystery is how little we seem to know about it… but what do we know? Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter which appears not to interact with light—hence the name. So you might be wondering, if we…