the physics of sundays

Of all the branches of mathematics that most directly touch our daily life, statistics is likely the worst understood by laymen. We all have heard jokes like “you can twist numbers to prove pretty much anything”, or the infamous  “according to statistics, if you eat

During the quarter-finals match Argentina vs. England of the 1986 FIFA World Cup, Diego Armando Maradona scored a famous goal that opened the way to the victory of the match, and to Argentina’s final winning of the football championship. Famously

In one of my recent posts, I hinted at the practical paradox presented by the “electric” Aharonov-Bohm effect, in that such a phenomenon should affect charges traversing a region where an electric field existed previously. This singular and counter-intuitive effect of dissociation of

Among the many fields of physics that I enjoyed touching in my scientific life, some with more depth, some others just for a little bit of fun, there is also fusion research, albeit from some distance. I was still with

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