Newton, Isaac (1642–1727) was the English physicist and mathematician who laid the foundations of physics as a modern discipline. He discovered that white light is composed of many colours. He developed the three standard laws of motion. Unless acted upon by an unbalanced force, an object at rest stays at rest, and a moving object …
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Category:Physics
Rubens Tube…
Some years ago I built a Rubens Tube out of a length of plastic guttering, and a speaker. The tube has holes drilled in it at regular intervals and a speaker fitted at one end. It is then flooded with methane from the lab supply and ignited. When music is played through the speaker the …
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Circuit Symbols…
Most of these should look familiar to you although relays & reed switches might be new. We will discuss them on another occasion. Make sure you can draw all of these symbols from memory. You are unlikely to need to draw a reed relay but you do need to be able to recognise one, and …
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EM Drive…
. NASA has recently announced that their research team has confirmed that the EM drive described above, when tested in a near vacuum, produced thrust. . The graph shows their raw data with error bars and the dotted line is their best fit line to show how the thrust in micro-newton (μN) is plotted against …
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Pluto…
I still think of Pluto as our ninth planet even though it was downgraded to dwarf planet status in 2006. It was only discovered in 1930 and since a year on Pluto is 248 years on Earth, it has not even completed one orbit of the Sun since its discovery. I include Pluto because I learned …
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Dark Matter and Dark Energy…
by Steve Z. Dark matter and dark energy are hypotheses to explain why the Universe is not behaving in the way we think it should be, suggesting that some other force is at work. In the 1990s we were quite certain of one thing about the Universe; it might have enough energy density to stop …
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Synlight…
I don’t suppose very many of my usual readers take The Guardian at home, but in general I have found its science reporting to be better than the other newspapers. They still fall prey to press releases from Universities and industry, publishing reports of scientific findings uncritically and without checking their sources, but usually I feel …
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Vera Rubin…
If you have read A Bloke In A Hat from 2014 then you will know the names of a few female scientists. Science has been dominated by men but I think that things have now improved such that nearly as many women as men apply to take science courses at University. One very great female scientist …
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Elbaite…
Elbaite is a mineral belonging to the tourmaline group. It has a complicated molecular structure but is made up of repeating groups of sodium lithium aluminium borosilicate. It can include a number of other metal elements as impurities which change its colour. It was first found on the island of Elba, from where it gets its …
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Einstein’s Mind…
GIJP mentioned enjoying a documentary over the holidays about the genius of Albert Einstein. It is an hour long so you may not want to view it all but here it is for those who are interested – I have become absolutely hooked on it putting this together! . This post is part four of …
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