Tag: physics

The science of pitching

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
October 11, 1993
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I’m lousy at baseball. Fly balls fly right over me, line drives make me duck, and I can’t run the bases worth a darn–but that’s all right, since I seldom hit the ball. So to write this column about the science of pitching, I turned to an expert: Robert K. Adair, Sterling Professor of Physics …

Boats

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
October 6, 1993
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Boats fascinate me. I think it’s because some of my favorite books as a kid were the Swallows and Amazons novels by Arthur Ransome, which are full of boats. So, “Jibbooms and bobstays!”, I said to myself, “Why not write about them?” The one characteristic you really, really want in a boat is the ability …

Tops and gyros

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
January 13, 1993
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Frequently I begin my column by delving into my childhood for pleasant memories about some activity or other that just happens to relate to my topic. Not this time. This week, my topic is tops and gyroscopes, and the fact is that as a kid I never saw the point of them at all. Remember …

Climate control

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 18, 1992
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Humans (at least, this human) are creatures of comfort; and the story of civilization is, to a certain extent, the quest to keep from being either too hot or too cold. The earliest form of climate control was the fire. Room temperature was controlled by adding (or having the servants add) more wood or coal …

Superconductivity

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
June 3, 1992
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You’ve probably heard of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” Well, now there’s something else that’s coming in from the cold: superconductivity. Superconductivity is not something that orchestra directors aspire to; it refers to a discovery made 80 years ago at the University of Leiden (Holland) by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who was …

The mystery of the missing mass

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 5, 1992
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The Mystery of the Missing Mass is not, as you might first suppose, the title of an Agatha Christie novel about a church service that failed to occur on schedule. It is, rather, one of the hottest (or coldest, depending on which theory you subscribe to– never mind, I’ll explain later) issues in the study …

Fission

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 13, 1991
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We sometimes talk about living in the Nuclear Age, because it has only been in the last 50 years that we have managed to harness the power expressed by Einstein as E=mc2. But strictly speaking, uranium fission, which is what we think of when we think of nuclear power, isn’t new. About 1.78 billion years …

Colour

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
August 7, 1991
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Those who are old enough to remember Paul McCartney as a Beatle probably also remember longing for a colour television. (Nowadays, of course, you hardly ever see a black and white one.) There was something about watching television in colour that made even programs like My Mother the Car sparkle. And as for Star Trek–wow! Human beings have …

The physics of fizz, the chemistry of cool

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
July 21, 1991
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Ah, summertime! Time to get away from it all; to sit in the shade with a cold soft drink or a bowl of delicious homemade ice cream (such as the batch I made Saturday). Doesn’t seem very conducive to thinking about science, does it? Think again. Consider that soft drink (or any other bubbling brew) …

Relativity, Part 2

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
May 15, 1991
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Welcome back (those who came back) for the promised look at Einstein’s general theory of relativity. I hope you remembered the billiard balls and rubber sheet… Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which we looked at last week, states that nothing can travel faster than light. Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity, however, assumed that somehow gravitational …

Relativity, Part 1

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
May 8, 1991
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If you were asked, on the spur of the moment, to state a famous scientific equation–any old equation–the odds are you’d say “E=mc2.” Almost everyone has heard of it, and most people have also heard of Einstein and the theory of relativity. Sooner or later, then, a science columnist like myself pretty well has to …

Quarks

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
April 10, 1991
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“Quark” is a word that people automatically associate with science. It’s memorable because it’s unusual–not to mention fun. (Q. What sound does a physicist’s duck make? A. Quark, quark.) But how many people really know what a quark is? Not many, and since I was one who didn’t, I decided to write a column on …