After Copernicus released his famous work On the Revolutions of The Heavenly Spheres in the first half of the 16th century, more and more people started believing in the heliocentric theory. Almost a century later the great Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei started observing the endless night skies with his newly built telescope. Galileo was a great fan of Copernicus’ ideas, and his telescope was a great tool to check them practically. Interestingly, after many long nights...
So recently the list of free science books was posted on I Fucking Love Science Facebook page (thanks for that guys), which unfortunately caused a huge traffic “spike” and crashed our servers. But no worries — the tech. support guys are sorting this out and the website should be fully working in about 24 hours. Meanwhile, for those, who can access this post, but not the list of free books, try using this cached...
It’s strange to think that one of the most famous experiments in physics — the double slit experiment — can be easily performed at home. With just a cheap laser and some imagination one can do this experiment without much hassle. So the famous experiment that gave evidence for the wave-like behavior of light was demonstrated by Thomas Young back in 1801. The interesting fact is that, in his famous speech in front of the audience at the...
For those interested in physics quizzes and trivia I have assembled a short list of some great resources online: 1. Triviala is a fun website with user generated quizzes and trivia. The physics quizzes range from very basic ones to more complicated ones testing your knowledge in equations and biographical facts of famous scientists. 2. This document from American Physics Society offers 50 trivia questions. 3. These classical physics quizzes. Not that fun but...
Last time we had a look at a rather exotic problem of extra spatial dimensions, so how about we switch to cosmology this time. In this edition of “The Great Unsolved Problems in Physics” we take a look at a problem, which happens to have a really cool name — the Space Roar. So what is the Space Roar? According to the best university in the world called Wikipedia, it is a signal discovered by NASA’s ARCADE...
So, as you might have noticed, a poll on who is the greatest physicist has been running on our website for about a month. So I decided to present the results and to compare them to some of the more popular similar polls. As always, such polls are highly subjective, and everyone seems to have totally different opinions, so I decided to compare a couple of these polls to create the most objective list...
So one of the major news at the last weeks edition of “Physics News of the Week” was a survey by Maximilian Schlosshauer Johannes Kofler and Anton Zeilinger. It was survey on the views on the foundations of quantum mechanics by the leading scientists in the field. More specifically, Max Tegmark polled 48 participants of the conference Fundamental Problems in Quantum Theory held at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County back in 1997. The polls from the survey form a...
In this series of articles I would like to take a look at the fascinating unsolved problems in physics. An overview of such outstanding problems as the theory of quantum gravity, the mystery of dark energy or the origin of time can be both fun and beneficial, so let’s take a look at some of these problems and how physicists are attempting to tackle them. One of the most popular unsolved problems, at least judging by a...
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to the RSS Feed