[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/02/Atomic-Oxygen-Art-Restoration.mp3[/podcast] Whenever you visit an art museum that houses really old paintings, you may find yourself underwhelmed by their appearance. Case in point: the Mona Lisa. Although I haven’t seen it recently, when I did see it, back in the 1980s…well. It was small, dark, and hard to see inside its climate-controlled compartment. That darkness …
Tag: physics
Redefining the kilogram
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/Redefining-the-Kilogram.mp3[/podcast] This year marks the 220th anniversary of something that grew out of the French revolution and yet sparked a revolution in my own life, and the lives of many other Canadians of a certain age, two centuries later. I’m not talking about the guillotine, although it’s true I seem to vaguely remember a K-Tel …
A better way to keep cool
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/06/A-Better-Way-to-Keep-Cool.mp3[/podcast] We all have our preferred temperature. Me, I like it cool. My poor college roommate can attest to that, since I just about froze him out of our room, aided by the fact I was tall enough to easily reach the air conditioning controls and he wasn’t. But hey, that was in Arkansas, and …
Ball lightning
Now that we’re finally starting to see some hot weather, it won’t be long before we begin to see something else: thunderstorms and lightning (very, very frightening me! Galileo, Galileo…sorry, just a little Queen flashback). It’s the lightning, of course, that makes thunderstorms thunder. If I may quote myself from a previous column, lightning “is …
The laser at 50
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/05/Lasers-at-50.mp3[/podcast] You know you’ve been writing a column a long time when the 50th anniversary of a major scientific discovery comes along and you realize you wrote a column celebrating its 30th anniversary. But that’s exactly what’s happening this month. Next week (Saturday, May 15, to be precise) marks the 50th anniversary of the invention …
The Mpemba Effect
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/04/The-Mpemba-Effect.mp3[/podcast] For all that we know about the physical world, there are a few phenomena that, though seemingly simple, continue to baffle us. And one of the most baffling is the Mpemba Effect. You may not know it by that name—I didn’t until I read an article on New Scientist’s website last week—but you’ve probably …
Fred Morrison’s wonderful invention, the Frisbee
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/02/Frisbee.mp3[/podcast] Fred Morrison died on Tuesday at the age of 90, one of those people you may never have heard of, but really should have. Morrison invented the Frisbee. Since millions of these and other flying discs have been sold since the 1950s, it’s perhaps a bit humbling to discover, though, that even though throwing …
The Large Hadron Collider
You would have had to work very hard last week not to have heard that the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, has just started operating on the Swiss-Franco border. Superlatives abound in any discussion of the LHC. It’s the largest machine in the world, 27 kilometres in circumference, 100 metres underground. …
The science of fairy tales
I have a six-year-old daughter, which means in the past few years I’ve been reintroduced to the wonderful world of fairy tales. I’m as willing to suspend disbelief as the next guy–more so, probably, since I’m a reader and writer of fantasy–but I also have a scientific bent, and every once in a while I …
Take me out of the ballgame
I have a confession to make: although born in the United States, I’m lousy at that country’s national pastime. I hit not, neither do I catch. If I had a dollar for every fly ball I dropped as kid, I could buy…well, a baseball glove, probably, but what would be the point? So this week …
What lies beneath
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. The house in which I live was built in 1926. Over the years, as we discovered recently when we had the walls of a couple of rooms repainted, several layers of wallpaper and paint have accumulated. Peeling back those layers is a bit like …