Entries with tag "physics"

I've been reading a lot about the Large Hadron Collider lately, since it's so close to finally being turned on after decades of planning and 13 years of construction. Some people worry that it will create a mini-black hole that will swallow the Earth, though there have been repeated, exhaustive studies performed to disprove those fears. Just like it was safe to push that mysterious crystal into the beam of the anti-matter spectrometer at Black Mesa.

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According to the the generally accepted scientific understanding of the 18th century, all combustion was attributable to phlogiston, a colorless, odorless, tasteless, massless substance. At the time, the scientific community believed that all flammable materials contained a certain amount of phlogiston. The act of burning the materials was in fact merely releasing the phlogiston into the air. Once burned, the materials were held to be in their "true" form, the 'calx'. Thus the act of burning was known as 'dephlogisticating' a substance.

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OK, my standards seem to be getting pretty low as far as what I'm willing to post here. Soon you'll start seeing surveys about the number of people I've kissed and "What type of pasta are you?" quizzes. But these make me laugh and, ultimately, that's one of the few goals I strive towards here.

Q. What do you get if you cross a pig and a sheep?

A. A vector with magnitude (length of pig * length of sheep * sin θ) in the direction mutually perpendicular to the pig and the sheep determined by the right hand rule.

Q. What do you get if you cross a mosquito and a mountain climber?

A. You can't; a mountain climber is a scalar!

A policeman pulls a guy over. "Do you know that you just ran through a red light?" he says.
"I didn't run a red light," the guy says. "I saw the light, and it was green."
The policeman says, "Well, then I'll have to write you a speeding ticket!"

Q. What is the physicist's definition of a vector space?

A. A set V satisfying the axiom that for any x in V, x has a little arrow drawn over it.

A few years ago I read Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History Of Time, and found it very interesting. Aside from describing the current theories regarding the formation of the universe, it provided a clear summary of the development of science and astronomy in the time of Kepler, Newton, etc.

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