This weeks short one is me pondering why atoms are the size they are. 

This week I'm taking a look, briefly at quarks, the atom, radioactive decay and one of the miracles of physics, positronium.

Cricket, the US election and unification theory

Part 2, were we try to prove the earth is round.

and some other stuff.

Is believing that the earth is flat any different from believing in the Higgs boson or the big bang? 

Your first reply maybe of course, one is madness the others are based on science. But how sure are you? 

Could you prove the earth is round? what "evidence" would you use? 

check out these two pieces of video, it is the same camera, the second image is actually lower in the atmosphere, but it has greater curvature. It's just a trick of the lens

https://youtu.be/4XEy2jh7Z-o?t=940
https://youtu.be/4XEy2jh7Z-o?t=1147

This discovery, this process, has had the most profound impact on the world and yet most people have no idea what it is.

We don't teach it at school and most people have never heard of it. If you have never heard of the Czochralski method  I reckon by the end of this post you will be amazed that it isn't something everybody knows about.

It really is true that Most people have no idea what the Czochralski process or method actually is.

Yet it is the first step in a chain of events and processes that have changed the world in the last century beyond all recognition. 

The reason you can read this now is because of Jan Czochralski. This post is about his fantastic process.

Macbeth, Kurtz, Particle Physics, Ivan Denisovich and Wolfgang Pauli. This weeks ponderings. 

Friedmann's equation. 
This was developed back in 1922 by Alex Friedmann when he was working on a model of the universe in terms of General Relativity,

mind blowing stuff and is often considered excruciatingly difficult mathematically. 

It was developed before the idea of an expanding universe was accepted and yet it is still used today, it had that covered, how cool is that eh?

Most people these days have been sold on the idea that the entire universe started with a big bang.

I love the big bang idea for the very simple reason that it gets people to ask questions. The most common being, what came before the big bang? 

We will get to that shortly. But lets ask the same question, what came before the big bang? from an historical point of view, by this I mean, what did we believe before we were sold the idea of the big bang? 

Let's ask a few more questions .

where did the idea of the big bang come from? 
What is the Big Bang? how did it get its name? 
How do we know it happened? What is the evidence? 
What does it mean for us if this theory is actually correct? 
What does it mean if the theory is wrong? what happened if the Big bang didn’t happen?

This one is on something called Frames of Reference. 

In Physics especially were motion is concerned, which is just about everywhere,  you will often hear the term "Inertial Frame of Reference" or "Inertial Reference Frame", but what is it? Well, technically it can be described as follows (this one is taken from Wikipedia);


In physics, an inertial frame of reference (also inertial reference frame or inertial frame or Galilean reference frame) is a frame of reference that describes time homogeneously and space homogeneously, isotropically, and in a time-independent manner.

All inertial frames are in a state of constant, rectilinear motion with respect to one another; they are not accelerating in the sense that an accelerometer at rest in one would detect zero acceleration.

It goes on to say

Measurements in one inertial frame can be converted to measurements in another by a simple transformation (the Galilean transformation in Newtonian physics and the Lorentz transformation in special relativity). In general relativity, in any region small enough for the curvature of spacetime to be negligible one can find a set of inertial frames that approximately describe that region.


Glad we cleared that one up!