Tag: physics

Bad movie science

It will probably come as no surprise to you that when Hollywood tackles scientific topics, it almost always gets them wrong. But as Sid Perkins describes in a recent article in Science News Online, some scientists and teachers are using movie science to teach science and promote an interest in science. There are innumerable examples of bad movie …

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Pentaquarks

Every branch of science has its pinnacle of achievement, the thing that every scientist in that field dreams of achieving. For an astronomer, it’s the discovery of a new heavenly body; for a paleontologist, a new species of dinosaur. And for a physicist, it’s the discovery of a new subatomic particle. University of Saskatchewan particle …

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High-temperature superconductors

You’ve probably heard of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” More than a decade ago, there was a lot of hoopla about something else coming in out of the cold: superconductivity. Newsmagazines did cover stories on the new high-temperature superconductors, and promised they would soon change our lives. After that…nothing. A new technological …

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Ice

Ice is an inescapable fact of life in Canada every winter.  It makes roads and sidewalks slippery, bursts pipes, cracks pavements, heaves ground. It can bring down trees and power lines and even airplanes. And yet, if ice didn’t have the special properties that make it sometimes destructive and almost always a nuisance, two vitally …

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Sandcastle science

One of the great joys of childhood is making sandcastles on the beach; and oddly enough, part of the fun is also watching a wave wash them away. It’s a little startling to find out, then, that something instinctively understood by children–that damp sand sticks together–was only recently explained scientifically in 1997. Dr. Peter Schaffer, …

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Rainbows

Saskatchewan has elected to call itself “Land of Living Skies.”  One good reason appeared in the sky on Canada Day following an afternoon thunderstorm:  a rainbow. In space, the sky is black and the sun appears white, and that’s all there is to it. But before the light of the sun reaches us down here …

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Soccer

Watch me explain the science of soccer on CBC Newsworld, July 22, 2007: Hundreds of millions of soccer fans are now tuning in to the World Cup, where they’ll see, not just exciting games, but a fascinating display of scientific principles. Let’s start with the ball. The basic physics haven’t changed: when a ball is …

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Stupid movie physics

  The season of the movie blockbuster is upon us, and that means it’s time once again to ask the question: what planet do the people in movies live on? Judging by the physics displayed, it’s not this one. In our world, for example, you cannot outrun the fireball of an exploding bomb down the …

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The physics of fiddling

Isaac Stern, master of the complex physics of waveform generation, vibrating wood, and acoustical analysis, died last month. Stern, of course, didn’t think of himself in those terms: he thought of himself as a violinist. But violins are remarkably complex devices. On the surface, they look pretty simple: the bow vibrates the strings, which vibrate …

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Nanopropellors

One of the first science-fiction movies I can remember seeing was Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into an injured man. Their mission: to vaporize a life-threatening blood clot in his brain. Among other things, the movie featured Racquel Welch in a wetsuit. In a …

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Of bats and balls

The Subway Series is not, as a non-sports-fan might be forgiven for thinking, an exciting new lineup of sandwiches from a popular restaurant chain. It is, instead, this year’s World Series of baseball between the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, and even if you’re not interested in watching New Yorkers battle each …

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Barbecuing II

There are still a few good weeks of summer left, and that means there’s still plenty of time for the ultimate summer activity, barbecuing. Technically, what we call barbecuing around here is not true barbecuing, which involves the long, slow cooking of meat, often over hours, at relatively low temperatures in the presence of lots …

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