Tag: physics

Curling

I’ve written about the science of skating, and before that about the science of tobogganing. Now let’s look at a third winter sport, the one that’s hardest to explain to your relatives in Texas: curling. Curling apparently originated in Scotland, probably starting with people tossing small rocks at targets on frozen lakes and rivers, like …

Continue reading

Electrical shocks

I distinctly recall, as a kid in junior high, being required in shop class to stand in a circle holding hands with my classmates, two of whom were attached to opposite sides of a small hand-cranked electrical generator. Somebody (probably the teacher) cranked the generator, and the rest of us were expected to “ooh” and …

Continue reading

Barbecuing

Summer may officially begin tomorrow, on the summer solstice, but for many people, summer really begins the first time they’re able to barbecue in their backyard. I am not one of them. I enjoy eating the fruits of someone else’s barbecuing efforts as much as the next guy, but to actually stand at the grill? …

Continue reading

Tennis, anyone?

It’s summer, and love is in the air…also, love-15, love-30, game, set, and match. Yes, it’s tennis time, and the air is filled with the distinctive “thwock” of balls hitting racquets and balls hitting courts, plus the occasionally equally distinctive sound made by a player who just missed an easy return. Of course, being the …

Continue reading

Glue

Since I only wear glasses late at night when I take out my contacts, for the past couple of years I’ve been making do with an old pair of frames broken in two places: the nose piece and the right earpiece. I must have glued them back together a dozen times, but the repairs never …

Continue reading

Dr. Tom Wenaus and the Superconducting Super Collider

A couple of years ago I wrote a column about one of the biggest scientific projects of our time, the Superconducting Super Collider, currently under construction in Texas.  I didn’t know at the time that a Regina man is one of the scientists working on it.   Dr. Torre Wenaus is a staff physicist at …

Continue reading

The Superconducting Super Collider

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Human Genome Initiative, “biologists’ equivalent of the Apollo program.”  But there’s an even bigger and more expensive initiative happening down in Texas that you might call physicists’ equivalent of Apollo.   This gigantic (in every sense of the word) project is called the Superconducting Super Collider, or …

Continue reading

Glass

There’s a window above my desk through I’m watching a cold wind blowing leaves down the street. It’s not blowing in my face, however, thanks to a very special material: glass. Glass is an “amorphous solid”– its molecules don’t form a strict pattern, like the molecules of steel or granite, but are jumbled together like …

Continue reading

Static electricity

  I’m a little nervous as I word-process this column about static electricity, because every computer owner knows (and usually learned the hard way), that static electricity is a Bad Thing. Static electricity, however, has been around longer than computers:  like, forever.  The first time anybody noticed, though, was around 600 B.C., when the Greeks …

Continue reading

Radio

Go on any long trip with several other people, as I did over the weekend, and a major source of conflict is sure to arise: what to listen to on the radio. But amid the debate on the relative merits of country, jazz, Top-40 and oldies (not to mention loud and soft), it struck me …

Continue reading

Baseball

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 …

Continue reading

Kites

When Bob Dylan wrote about answers blowin’ in the wind, he must have had Saskatchewan in mind: here on the prairies, just about everything is blowin’ in the wind. (Whether that includes answers depends on how well the kids up the street held on to their homework, I suppose.) You can’t change this fact of …

Continue reading

Easy AdSense Pro by Unreal