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…
Category: physics
Ernst Ising’s Original Solution to His Model
How did Ernst Ising originally solve the “Ising model?” In 1920 Wilhelm Lenz proposed that ferromagnetism could be explained through the local interactions of spins in a material, and in1922 he gave this problem to…
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…
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,…
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…