Temperature
Thermal equilibrium We use the term temperature casually, but what is it exactly? Roughly speaking, temperature is a measure of how concentrated the heat energy…
Thermal equilibrium We use the term temperature casually, but what is it exactly? Roughly speaking, temperature is a measure of how concentrated the heat energy…
One of the trickiest things to define is “nothing.” Why is it difficult to define? Once you try to define “nothing,” it becomes something. Even…
“Saint Anger”: the name of Metallica’s album released in 2003, and a rather controversial expression if used outside the context of heavy music. Indeed, when…
Force can be interpreted as the rate of transfer of momentum. The equivalent in the case of angular momentum is called torque. Where force tells…
What is heat? Is it an invisible fluid your bare feet soak up from a hot sidewalk? Can one ever remove all the heat from…
A conserved quantity of motion Your first encounter with the conservation of momentum may have come as a small child unjustly confined to a shopping…
The technical term for the energy associated with motion is kinetic energy, from the Greek word for motion (the root is the same as the…
Kepler’s laws were a beautifully simple explanation of what the planets did, but they did not address why they moved as they did. Did the…
What about cases where the total force on an object is not zero, so that Newton’s first law does not apply? The object will have…
Newton created the modern concept of force starting from his insight that all the effects that govern motion are interactions between two objects: unlike the…
Newton would not have been able to figure out why the planets move the way they do if it had not been for the astronomer…
Newton’s first law: If the total force acting on an object is zero, its center of mass continues in the same state of motion. In…
It is not a secret that the ecological situation on our planet is rather complicated. Apart from the common worries about global warming, industrial pollution,…
Center-of-mass motion in one dimension is particularly easy to deal with because all the information about it can be encapsulated in two variables: xx, the…
The debates around renewable sources of energy have been going on at least a decade. After more than a century of relying on fossil fuels…
If you had to think consciously in order to move your body, you would be severely disabled. Even walking, which we consider to be no…
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the things which…
It is commonplace that technologies are changing the world we live in. Roughly every two decades, Earth becomes almost a brand new place in terms…
If you drop your shoe and a coin side by side, they hit the ground at the same time. Why does not the shoe get…
This article [Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution] was originally published in The Public Domain Review [http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/05/18/copying-pictures-evidencing-evolution/] under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to…