Galileo Unbound Blog
983 FOLLOWERS
The Science of Life, the Universe and (Almost) Everything.
Galileo Unbound Blog
3w ago
chaos theory tames the chaos, and we no longer need to blame the gods or the fates for our lot ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
1M ago
Albert Michelson was the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1907 for the invention of his eponymous interferometer and for its development as a precision tool for metrology. On board ship traveling to Sweden from London to receive his medal, he was insulted ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
2M ago
One hundred years ago this month, in Feb. 1924, a hereditary member of the French nobility, Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, the 7th Duc de Broglie, published a landmark paper in the Philosophical Magazine of London [1] that revolutionized the nascent quantum theory of the day. Prior to de Broglie’s theory of quantum matter waves, quantum ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
4M ago
There is more ado about nothing than one can imagine. The physics of the vacuum has a long and fascinating history ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
5M ago
Fractals, those telescoping self-similar filigree meshes that marry mathematics and art, have become so mainstream, that they are even mentioned in the theme song of Disney’s 2013 mega-hit, Frozen. My power flurries through the air into the groundMy soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all aroundAnd one thought crystallizes like an icy blastI’m never going ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
5M ago
Light is one of the most powerful manifestations of the forces of physics because it tells us about our reality. The interference of light, in particular, has led to the detection of exoplanets orbiting distant stars, discovery of the first gravitational waves, capture of images of black holes and much more. The stories behind the ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
6M ago
The first step on the road to Einstein’s relativity was taken a hundred years earlier by an ironic rebel of physics—Augustin Fresnel. His radical (at the time) wave theory of light was so successful, especially the proof that it must be composed of transverse waves, that he was single-handedly responsible for creating the irksome luminiferous ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
7M ago
The Earth races around the sun with remarkable speed—at over one hundred thousand kilometers per hour on its yearly track. This is about 0.01% of the speed of light—a small but non-negligible amount for which careful measurement might show the very first evidence of relativistic effects. How big is this effect and how do you ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
8M ago
The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, has been a testbed for new ideas in astronomy and astrophysics for millennia ..read more
Galileo Unbound Blog
8M ago
Interference: The History of Optical Interferometry and the Scientists who Tamed Light, is published, available now from Oxford, Amazon and Barnes&Noble ..read more