Here’s some of what I’ve written and coded for New Scientist: Black holes, space brains, hunting for planets around distant suns, why honey is stringy, and more…
Read more "Black Holes, Lifeloggers, and Space Brains"The fundamental theorem of arithmetic is, as the name suggests, pretty fundamental. I built an interactive infographic which does a better job explaining it than I could do using words….
Read more "Primes!"Energy isn’t conserved. It can be — and is — created and destroyed. Your high school physics teacher lied to you. Or, more likely, your high school physics teacher was mistaken. And your college physics professor was probably mistaken too….
Read more "Getting Nothing for Something (and Vice Versa)"Astronomy and cosmology involve some big numbers: a hundred million miles to the sun; six trillion miles in a light-year; two million light-years — ten billion billion miles, a one with 19 zeros after it — to the nearest galaxy. These are huge numbers, and it’s hard to get your head around them directly. But with a little bit of work, it’s not too bad. For example, a million isn’t actually that big of a number: get a cube of something small (marbles? BBs?) with a hundred objects on each side, and there are a million of those objects in that cube. Get a thousand of those cubes — a bigger cube, with ten of the smaller cubes on each side — and you’ve got a billion. A million seconds is only 11 and a half days; a billion seconds is 31 and a half years….
Read more "Big Numbers and Really Big Numbers"