the physics of sundays

As far as we know, Birkbeck College in London was the first public university in the world to open its doors to women, in 1830. Its physics Department rose to fame in the 1930s with the brief passage of Patrick

We are in the great city of Prague, November 23, 1911. The young Albert Einstein has just accepted his first assignment as full professor of theoretical physics at the Karl-Ferdinand German university of the Bohemian capital. The hard days are over, and this period of

Watching movies with my wife Olga can be a challenging experience. After many years in the radio and TV business, she works as free-lance writer of serials and short movies, so that her professional attitude provides the chance for long

An interesting aquarelle on display in the Napoleon’s Last Headquarters Museum, near Waterloo, depicts the Belle Alliance inn. The roof and walls are seen shot by cannonballs; an officer of the Chasseurs Imperiales, with the uniform represented in full details, walks on his horse; some remains

When teaching basic notions of science in schools we often make recourse to examples, analogies, similarity, even absurd schematizations. A typical example is the harmonic oscillator as a proxy for a pendulum: the former is an idealization of the latter,

By looking around the natural environment, it is evident that both plants and animals of similar species vary in their size quite a lot more than us humans, notably as a function of certain genetic characters. A chihuahua is much a smaller dog

Quantum computing is expected to bring about a revolutionary impulse to high-performance computing. Just like a few other notable advances of modern physics, the idea of using quantum computers to simulate quantum systems that are too hard to calculate using conventional digital computers was proposed in 1981

Fracture mechanics is basically about scaling. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was the first to record some understanding of scaling in fracture, by designing strength tests on iron wires of different length. While we don’t know whether Leonardo actually ever realized such tests, which would have required a high

The “Guglielmo Marconi” building of the Institute of Physics (“Istituto Fisico”) in the University of Rome “Sapienza” (meaning Knowledge in Italian) may be quite intimidating, both for a young aspiring physicist and for a newcomer professor. The amount of outstanding

Unlike animals, which generally have to contend with a body plan which is fixed at birth, plants can continue to develop new organs and elaborate their body plan throughout their life. A beautiful example of a nearly regular and periodic