Physical Science

Neptune is the eighth planet from the sun and has some of the most violent weather in the Solar System. Neptune’s atmosphere has a lot in common with the atmospheres of all of the large gas planets in the Solar…
Read more

Polonium Symbol: Po Atomic Number: 84 Atomic Mass: 209.0 amu (atomic mass units) Melting Point: 254.0 C (527.15 K, 489.2 F) Boiling Point: 962.0 C (1235.15 K, 1763.6 F) Number of Protons: 84 Number of Electrons: 84 Number of Neutrons:…
Read more

In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who had been granted asylum in the United Kingdom, took 3 weeks to die of radiation poisoning from polonium.  Polonium’s discoverers, the Curies, would have been horrified.  As Marie Curie once said,…
Read more

Scientific research at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN won’t stop with the confirmation of evidence, recently announced, of the existence of the Higgs boson – a tiny but crucial subatomic particle sometimes referred to as the “God particle.” Instead,…
Read more

Ever since Galileo confirmed the earth was not the center of the universe, man has been pushing the limits of knowledge to discover more about the universe and in particular the solar system. With the technological advancements of the past century,…
Read more

Introduction Living in the Southern Hemisphere around Christmas (2011), a viewer interested in the heavens could have seen a comet (a large mass of icy rock) streak through the night sky. This was no ordinary comet. Many astronomers feared the…
Read more

The comet Lovejoy (C2011W3) was reported as recently discovered this year on December 2, 2011 by the amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy of Australia. But a similar comet with the same name by the same astronomer was discovered in 2007 (C2007E2)….
Read more

Time is a measure of movement. If there is no movement, there can be no time. Furthermore, movement is subject to an observer fixed to a motionless point. How can we measure movement without a reference point that is not…
Read more

“Time is an illusion – lunchtime, doubly so” – Ford Prefect, “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” Now, this is something that ironically has taken a lot of my time thinking about. I think that this more of a philosophical…
Read more

We are a young and arrogant species. Throughout our short span of antiquity we have observed our world and tried to comprehend its meaning. Some of us observe and say, “This is so!” these are the philosophers, the governors, and…
Read more