I started writing science articles on April 1 this last year, so maybe it’s good for me to take a sec, turn around, and see what happened. For example, I know that when exploring a new city I often get my best photos when I remember to look backwards and see a new angle on what I’ve just walked through. And my memory being what it is, I’ve probably genuinely forgotten some of the things I’ve written about, so I’m sure I’m writing this article mainly for me. And maybe, just maybe (rationalization!) for someone looking for a sort of one-stop digest of what’s been written about so far.
I thought at first to list articles purely chronologically, but maybe it’s more useful (interesting?) to order them by views — basically popularity. I started out with a subscriber base in the single digits so naturally the later ones (where the subscriber base is in the triple-digits!) are all more popular than the beginning ones. There’s probably no good way to do it, so I’ll just normalize the views so that the most popular article will be last and have
[By the way, Substack now has a built-in equation editor using the typesetting software LaTeX that I love, so I’m super-pumped about this upcoming year. Normally I have to format each equation in a different software package and import the result as an image, which is clunky. I’m sure almost nobody but me cares about this! Thank you anyway, Substack!]
And in the self-discovery department, I do basically all of the illustrations for the articles myself using LaTeX and, for 3D stuff, Blender. It’s time-consuming, but it turns out that I like making illustrations just as much as the actual writing.
Here we go!
Global Warming and the Toy Model Greenhouse Effect
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This was one of the ones I had the most fun writing and working through — I suppose it’s a typical for a fledgling author that the thing they liked the most turned out to be the least seen! Here I developed a simple physical model of the Greenhouse Effect that we can first use to predict the temperature of planets without an atmosphere, and then build in a simple absorber using first-year physics concepts. The amazing thing is that it sort of works, implying that the basic principles of energy balance are really at the root of our problem.
Can You Go Faster than the Speed of Light? (No)
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One of the first articles so I’m not surprised it hasn’t been selling like hotcakes. But so fun to do! (Oh, ok, they’re all fun)
When I teach this stuff (Special Relativity) this is one of the capstone ideas — “faster-than-light” speed is not permitted not because of any particular equation, but because we tend to believe we live in a Universe that preserves the ideas of cause and effect.
How Do We Know the Distances to the Stars?
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When I teach General Astronomy this question is one just about every student has. And it’s particularly cool to dig into since the answer has consequences. If they’re really that far away, then can we make an actual 3D map of the Universe? If they’re really that bright (so we can see them at those distances), how are they generating that much energy? And so on. Pretty much all of modern astrophysics swings around the hinge of this question.
Accelerating a Nickel to 99% of the Speed of Light
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This is a standard exercise we do in Modern Physics class since the standard curriculum is pretty cavalier about postulating objects traveling at some substantial fraction of the speed of light. It turns out to be an exceedingly hard thing to do.
Relativity and Time “Slowing Down”
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Article #1! Introduced here is the most critical concept to understand about relativity — the fundamental idea that light travels at the same speed (300,000,000 m/s) for any observer, no matter their speed relative to the emitter of the light. Everything else, including the famous weirdness of “slowing clocks” and “contracting lengths” is a consequence of this.
The Gravitational Slingshot!
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This one usually excites students in class — an actual application of elastically colliding homework-standard bouncing balls and colliding pucks. That we could actually speed up interplanetary spacecraft by flinging them around giant planets and stealing some of their orbital motion excites me too!
Hot Streaks!
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This was a fun little diversion! Not really physics, but definitely mathematics and some coding. I’ve always been a basketball and baseball fan, growing up obsessed with comparative statistics and Hall of Fame arguments. I remember there being a “feeling” of being in the “zone” when playing basketball years ago, but the really interesting thing is that the stats just don’t back up much of anything more than that. It’s a pet peeve listening to broadcasters building narratives around essentially random events, and certainly highly-paid coaches base decisions on notions of “hot streaks” as well, so I was scratching my own itch a bit here.
Lagrange Points!
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There was a lot of excitement when the JWST telescope was launched and deployed, but some confusion among the public about where it would actually be. Instead of being in orbit close to and around the Earth like the Hubble telescope, JWST would be parked out at L2, known as the second Lagrangian point. So here was a fun little dive into deriving (using some first-year math) where that point actually is and why it’s important.
Fermat’s Principle and Minimizing Time
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There is a “Law of Refraction” and assorted homework problems that students usually work on in a first-year course. What’s rare, though, is a peek into the more subtle and beautiful principle responsible for the (seemingly arbitrary) formula — the idea that there is some quantity (here, the time) that Nature minimizes along the path actually taken. These minimizing principles are very deep and consequential ideas that permeate all of fundamental physics.
White Dwarfs are Weird
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Fundamental to Enlightenment science is the idea that the Universe is made of the same stuff and governed by the same laws as we find here on Earth. The beauty of this is that then, by conducting experiments here, we can infer what’s going on there. But soon we encounter things like white dwarfs, which are made of a kind of stuff that has no parallel here on Earth. This study of compact objects is still a wonderland to me.
To Be Real
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“Imaginary” numbers are too often seen as a bit of a meaningless academic exercise in high-school math classes. It’s only later that the engineers/mathematicians/physicists get to see the incredible beauty and need for these numbers. I think that once you see Euler’s formula and then learn that
you change as a person for the better.
Ok, I only like to imagine that.
Human-Caused Global Warming? Yep.
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This article probably took me the longest time to write. I don’t think there are enough places where people can read a straightforward account of why CO2 levels are rising and the direct tie to observed global temperatures, so this was my contribution.
Using Reason as a Lever for Understanding
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And coming in at #1! I think we should help students to realize that fairly simple physical arguments and experiments have consequences that can be frankly astounding. That you can infer something about the core of the Earth by watching a little pendulum bob swing back and forth absolutely sounds like medieval magic, but is instead evidence of the profound reach of modern science.
On Deck:
The next article I’m working on:
The metric tensor! Fundamental to Einstein’s theory of gravity (General Relativity), I’m going to explore where it comes from, why we need it, what it is, and how we use it. Sa-weet.
If you’re a student/teacher and want to see lots of worked examples that I like to include in my classes when I teach the “standard” University Physics 1 and 2 courses, feel free to browse the (growing) collection of 150+ videos at
And if something is especially cool and you’re inclined to leave a “tip” I’m not above coffee or pizza:
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