In the very early days of TED there was a fascinating talk by mathematician Steven Strogatz. In the talk, Strogatz discusses the ways nature often evolves to be “in sync,” that is to embody motion…
Author: Mobolaji Williams
Lollipop on an Inclined Plane
When I first started learning mechanics, I began with Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker. It was one of the canonical texts for introductory university physics, and it was pitched at students who…
The 2020 Election and The Probability of Electoral Mis-Alignment
In American politics, it is not common for a presidential candidate to win the Electoral College vote while losing the popular vote, but if it happens, one can be sure that there will be a…
Toy Model of Drag Forces
Can we compute the velocity-scaling behavior of drag forces using the simple model of an object moving through a gas cloud? When physicists discuss the “drag force” experienced by an object due to its interaction…
Superluminal Waves on a Train
Is faster than speed-of-light travel possible given the laws of relativity? One of the postulates of special relativity is that photons (and actually all massless particles) travel at the speed of light, and a corollary…
Renormalization Group of the Classical Pendulum
Does the simple mechanical system of the pendulum exhibit the properties inherent in the renormalization group? The renormalization group is a result from 20th-century physics, but its conceptual underpinnings are quite old. In certain manifestations,…
NYT Digits Puzzle – Generating Functions, Catalan Numbers, Complexity
(NOTE: As of August 18, 2023 the NYT Digits puzzle has been removed the the NYT website. A copy of the game has been reproduced on a new private site: https://engaging-data.com/digitsgame/) In the previous post,…
NYT Digits Puzzle – Incremental Programming and Recursion
(NOTE: As of August 18, 2023 the NYT Digits puzzle has been removed the the NYT website. A copy of the game has been reproduced on a new private site: https://engaging-data.com/digitsgame/) About a month ago,…
Uniformity of Saturn’s Rings
Before he studied the kinetic theory of gases, and before he gave a unified treatment of electricity and magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell investigated the composition of Saturn’s Rings. In an essay contest, in which he…
The Subjective Experience of Time
In Episode 7 of the Netflix series BEEF, Danny and George, eight months after first meeting each other, sit in an outdoor patio of a restaurant. Danny met George under not entirely honest circumstances, but they…