Physical Science

The Atlantis space shuttle left the Earth on July 8, 2011 at 11:29 am. Those who watched from the viewing areas experienced the joy of witnessing as the shuttle went through a perfect launch, then rose through the atmosphere until…
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Buoyancy is a simple concept. In order to float in water (or any other liquid), an object must displace a mass of the water equal to its own mass. The pressure exerted by the liquid on the hull of the…
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Propulsion in outer space today requires some form of reaction mass to be ejected from the spacecraft to generate accelerating thrust. If there were some mechanical or electrical way to obviate the need to carry this reaction mass, space travel…
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Would you recognize a time machine if you saw one? Would you know what to look for – or to borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams (author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”), would you overlook it as an…
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There is a big difference between generating power and generating electricity.Power is the ability to do work while electricity is the process of Ions attempting to return to a state of balance. This definition of electricity isn’t very useful if…
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The black hole is one of the most interesting ideas in physics because the rules of the universe as we understand them react differently in black holes. Yet the traditional black hole in which gravity is so heavy that not…
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The world of physics can be strange, very strange indeed. And every once in awhile something happens during an experiment that throws a wrench into the neatly constructed model of how everything works and causes all assumptions to be reassessed….
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Rolf Mueller, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, thinks the geometry of bat ears may prove useful for self-contained, robotic flight systems. When many people think of bats the image of blood-sucking vampires comes to mind. But…
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Researchers have come across an odd phenomenon while studying the properties of quantum physics. Again and again experiments have shown that two linked particles seem to be entangled and what happens to one happens to the other. Surprisingly it doesn’t…
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For decades researchers have been searching for a way to achieve superconductivity other than bringing special materials down to a temperature near absolute zero. Now Oxford University researchers report non-superconducting material can be made a superconductor by using laser light….
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