1
Why can’t I go faster than the speed of light?
I should state from the very beginning that the title of this post is a bit of a tease. I don’t know why nothing can go faster than the speed of light. No one does. It is a fundamental pos…
Gravity and Levity
A blog about the big ideas in physics, plus a few other things
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Visit gravityandlevity.wordpress.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2012 – Sep 2021
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2
Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This s…
3
What if I were 1% charged? (2013)
In case you hadn’t heard, the universe is governed by four fundamental forces. But when it comes to understanding nature at almost any level larger than a nucleus and smaller than a planet, …
4
How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
5
How thick is the atmosphere? A derivation of the Boltzmann distribution
Let’s talk about a small question as a way of introducing a big question. How thick is the atmosphere? How far does Earth’s atmosphere extend into space? In other words, how high can y…