the physics of sundays

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

I am not that old, I think. Well, yet. However I am old enough to remember some old days when many groceries were purchased in bulk at the local shop around the corner. That was indeed the case for pasta,

According to some unverified urban legend, in a sunny day of April 1954 the English physicist George Ingram Taylor was distractedly browsing a copy of the Life magazine that his wife had brought back from the beauty parlor, when he

Once all our attempts to obtain living matter from inanimate matter have failed, it seems to me that it should be part of a validly correct scientific procedure, to ask ourselves whether life actually ever had an origin; if it

Rudolf Clausius was both a mathematician and physicist. Sadi Carnot was a mechanical engineer. Lord Kelvin did not spare a crown, and became a specialist of all the three disciplines. These people are usually regarded as the “inventors” of thermodynamics.