Physics

Entropy. A subject that comes back again and again and again and again and again in this blog. And so does the question in my inbox: "what exactly is entropy?" On the internet you can find a plethora…

At about the 1 minute mark in a youtube Yale Lecture, titled The Taylor Series and Other Mathematical Concepts, the teacher tells his class that he will be presenting the Taylor Series and the class…

[Retracted: In this blog I hope to get to a well known issue in general relativity, namely that gravitational energy needs to be defined for a spacetime volume instead of at a point.]  The [new…

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. The baryon known as Xi_b^* confirms fundamental assumptions…

In a recent PRL article Artemis Spyrou and collaborators have reported on the first observation of an exotic form of nucleons, the long-sought dineutron. Dineutron was predicted theoretically as a…

Many people struggle with, and even rail against, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.  The way it is usually taught or presented often seems to make it appear to be ever so complex, far too…

No, unfortunately not yet the discovery of the century. Still, the new particle found by CMS in its 2011 dataset is a very important piece of the puzzle of low-energy spectroscopy. Here "low" should…

When I started a career in particle physics, joining the CDF experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider about two decades ago, the search for a particle decay signal into hadronic…

I tried to figure out the precession of the perihelion of Mercury calculation out three or four times from my collection technical books on gravity.  There was never enough detail for me to…

As seen in the article on the hydrogen atom the value of a number numerically equivalent to Planck's reduced constant comes from the equations for the energy of the electron as …