Physics - Topics

How a synchrotron is built around a ring the size of a stadium Why are animated physics explainers so much more popular than filmed lectures? How is the boundary between the crust and the mantle detected? The fine-tuning argument is a mystery only if the constants could have been otherwise Mathematics describes the universe unreasonably well and nobody knows why Optical laws like Snell's law in reflection and refraction are the short-wavelength limit of wave behavior The eleven-year solar cycle and what it does to satellites Autumn light looks different because the sun sits lower all day Why noon light is white and sunset light is orange How do geologists date a rock layer to millions of years? Why does the Moon always show the same face to Earth? Why does Venus rotate backwards compared with every other planet? Why do solar eclipses only line up during a new moon? What is a neutron star and why do some spin hundreds of times per second? Was Marie Curie treated as a token woman in science? If the universe began from nothing what was doing the nothing? Time had a beginning and asking what came before may be a badly formed question Reversible cellular automata and where the arrow of time goes Newton's third law and the action-reaction pairs people misidentify Second law of thermodynamics: why entropy increases and why that is not pessimism Conservation of energy still holds when mass turns into energy Why Ohm's law is called a law when it is really a material property Kepler's laws before and after Newton explained them Do scientific laws describe reality or only predict observations? The ideal gas law and the conditions where it falls apart Laws that turned out to be approximations: Newtonian gravity vs general relativity Fermi estimation: how a rule of thumb gets you within an order of magnitude Laplace's demon and exactly what it would need to know about every particle Whether the physics in The Three-Body Problem holds up to scrutiny Why are most launch pads built near the equator or on a coast? Newton's inverse square law of gravity breaks down near Mercury and inside strong fields where general relativity takes over What makes a cycle a cycle: period amplitude and phase