As Chubby Checker sang and showed a 1960s generation, “Let’s do the twist.” Twist is not only an important thing. It is the only thing. Look around; all that you can see is made of twist. How so? The explanation starts with atoms and takes us through topology and Solitaire to the final fate of […]
Tag Archives: atoms
The DNA of the Universe
The universe burst into existence some 13,799,000,000 years ago. Why did it become this universe? Why does it have quarks and electrons; and elements including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen; and gravity to grow galaxies; and planets orbiting vast numbers of stars; and all of the ingredients that lead to life? Doing this required many […]
The Origins of Einstein’s Ideas
Albert Einstein is mostly known for physics theories. Or for E=mc2 (though he didn’t write it in that way). But his biggest contribution was the boldness, number, depth, diversity, originality and sometimes sheer courage of his ideas. Every one of these ideas was controversial at the time; now they underpin the world economy. What’s the […]
Avogadro and the Eaters of the Dead
We can find fundamental physics while meditating in unlikely places. My wife’s father had a fishing camp on a small island in a lake. He died when she was young. His remains lie in a village cemetery by a sandy track amid boreal forest. It is a lovely place. We visit it from time to […]
First Stars
Here’s more news from big telescopes. The galaxy depicted in the illustration is called CR7. It has a football flavor: Google tells me CR7 is Cristiano Ronaldo, star player for famed Spanish soccer team, Real Madrid. The galaxy named after him shows up way down on page three of my search results! That bright patch […]
Do Stars Make Buckyballs?
No doubt you never thought about this question. But suddenly it is hot science news. The answer that we get is: Yes. And it has interesting implications. The story starts with the odd properties of carbon. (It’s our story too because they are the basis for life, not to mention much of our industry.) Carbon […]
Be Careful What You Wish For
Here is a story that can save you money. It might even save your life. If we could see all of the organisms that surround us, we would see microbes, billions of them, many kinds of viruses, bacteria, fungi and archaea. Most of them do nothing to us. Some could help us. Others, if they […]
A Particular Success
— For Bill Rachinger, sine quo nihil . . . CERN’s Large Hadron Collider or LHC is back in the news. And behind the scenes there is fine physics that is little-known. It is the world’s biggest machine. Liquid-helium-cooled magnets bend twin beams of hydrogen nuclei (aka protons) in a circle. They collide at up […]
Smashing Science
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. So says J.R.R. Tolkien’s hero-wizard, Gandalf, to Saruman (an anti-hero wizard). More than a century of successful atom smashing seems to say that Gandalf got this wrong. But let’s take a closer look at what we have—and what we […]