Clik here to view.
Why Current Wormhole Research is So Important
Once we clear away the hype (see the previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4), and realize that no one is doing anything as potentially dangerous as making real wormholes (ones you could actually fall into) in a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beyond the Book (and What the Greeks Knew About the Earth)
Since the upcoming book is basically done, it’s time for me to launch the next phase of the project — the supplementary material, which will be placed here, on this website. Any science book has to...
View ArticleHow to Tell that the Earth Spins
Continuing with the supplementary material for the book, from its Chapter 2. This is in reference to Galileo’s principle of relativity, a central pillar of modern science. This principle states that...
View ArticleBeyond the Book: The Ambiguities of Scientific Language
Personally, I think that popular science books ought to devote more pages to the issue of how language is used in science. The words scientists choose are central to communication and miscommunication...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Impossible Commentary: Newton, Gravity, and the Speed of the Moon
Additional supplementary material for the upcoming book; your comments/corrections are welcome. This entry has to do with how Newton realized that weight and mass aren’t the same thing — that the pull...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Impossible Commentary: Is Gravity a Force? Is it an Illusion?
[This is a tricky one… it’s easy to make confusing statements about Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity), and so I am especially hopeful of getting readers’ feedback on this subtle issue,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What [Really] Causes our Twice-Daily Ocean Tides?
More about tidal forces today (see also yesterday’s post) and the conceptual point underlying Earth’s ocean tides. (Quote) Because gravity dwindles at greater distances, the Moon’s pull is stronger on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Truly Elegant?
Quote: . . . the Higgs field exhibits the most inelegant of the known laws governing fields and particles. There’s an amusing tendency for those who tout beauty to ignore this, as though it were an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Heads Up — Northern Lights Possible in Next 24 Hours
[Note added: the predicted storm has begun, as of about 1000 UTC, 5:00 AM NYC time; good for early birds on the west coast and those in Asia.] If you live in Canada, Europe or the northern half of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Ocean Tides Teach Us About the Sun and Moon
The Moon has a four-week cycle; it is full every four weeks (actually every 29.5 days). But ocean tides exhibit a two-week cycle; they are large one week and then smaller the next. Specifically, as in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Value of Check-It-Yourself Science
A couple of years ago I wrote a series of posts (see below) showing how anyone, with a little work, can verify the main facts about the Earth, Moon, Sun and planets. This kind of “Check-It-Yourself”...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why is it So Hard to Measure the Distance to the Sun?
(This is the second post in a series; here’s post #1.) It’s not too hard to measure the distance to the Moon; the Greeks did it over two thousand years ago. First you measure the size of the Moon,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Far Could the Sun Possibly Be?
(This is the third post in a series, though it can be read independently; here are post #1 and post #2; and post #4 blows this one out of the water, so don’t miss it!) Measuring the distance to the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How “Shooting Stars” Measure the Distance to the Sun
(This is the fourth post in a series, though it can be read independently; here are post #1 , post #2 , and post #3.) For many years, I thought that measuring the distance to the Sun was quite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Estimating the Distance to Jupiter in My Backyard
Last night, using the methods I described as part of my check-it-yourself astronomy series, I estimated the distance to the planet Jupiter using nothing more than my eyes, a protractor, and a simple...
View ArticleThe Next Webpage: The Zero-Point Energy of a Cosmic Field
My two new webpages from earlier this week addressed the zero-point energy for the simple case of a ball on a spring and for the much richer case of a guitar string; the latter served as a warmup to...
View ArticleArticle 4 on Zero-Point Energy: Mass, Fermions, and a Good Wrong Idea
I have posted my fourth article discussing zero-point energy. (Here are the first, the second, and the third, which covered respectively the zero-point energy of a ball on a spring, a guitar string,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Moving” Faster than the Speed of Light?
Nothing goes faster than the speed of light in empty space, also known as the cosmic speed limit c. Right? Well, umm… the devil is in the details. Here are some of those details: If you hold two...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is Light’s Speed Really a Constant?
How confident can we be that light’s speed across the universe is really constant, as I assumed in a recent post? Well, aspects of that idea can be verified experimentally. For instance, the...
View ArticleA Relatively Important Question from a Reader
Recently, a reader raised a couple of central questions about speed and relativity. Since the answers are crucial to an understanding of Einstein’s relativity in particular and of the cosmos in...
View Article
