Physics - Topics

Perpetual motion proposals keep arriving at physics departments even though thermodynamics rules them out Quantum error correction: why is one logical qubit so expensive to build? Laws that turned out to be approximations: Newtonian gravity vs general relativity What is a qubit and how is it different from a classical bit? Why do quantum computers need temperatures colder than deep space? Quantum entanglement cannot send messages faster than light — here is why Second law of thermodynamics: why entropy increases and why that is not pessimism Can a quantum computer solve problems a normal computer never could? Gravitational waves were confirmed a century after general relativity predicted them Conservation of energy still holds when mass turns into energy Why a theorist keeps working when the test is thirty years away Why Ohm's law is called a law when it is really a material property What is quantum teleportation actually teleporting? Newton's third law and the action-reaction pairs people misidentify Newton's Principia unified terrestrial and celestial motion in a way nobody expected Newton's Principia hid a mathematical physics that contemporaries found almost unreadable Do scientific laws describe reality or only predict observations? Deterministic chaos: unpredictability with no randomness at all Why there is something rather than nothing may be a question physics cannot even ask How physicists keep dark matter candidate talk from drifting into fantasy Why calibration standards trace back to a national metrology lab Faraday's law of induction underlies generators and explains why a changing magnetic field drives a current The fine-tuning argument is a mystery only if the constants could have been otherwise The pitch drop experiment has been running since 1927 and has produced nine visible drops Does quantum indeterminacy make the world more contingent or merely less predictable? Why is decoherence the hardest problem in building a quantum computer? What counts as quantum advantage and why do the benchmarks keep getting disputed? Relativity is often called a revolution though it grew out of problems already on the table What the LIGO detection owed to forty years of unfunded instrument work The ideal gas law and the conditions where it falls apart How gravitational waves revealed black holes merging across the universe Energy conservation holds exactly in classical mechanics but bends in general relativity when the universe expands