Showing results for "What the" in Physics

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times.

Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at ninety percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators.

For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of...

Randall Munroe, der geniale Erfinder von xkcd.com, legt nach. In der Fortsetzung seines internationalen Bestsellers "What if?" beantwortet er viele neue verrückte Fragen wissenschaftlich fundiert und umwerfend kreativ.

Ah, the Cloud. It's such a useful bit of tech jargon, isn't it? The kind that's casually thrown around in work meetings by bosses who (kind of) understand and maybe even at the nerdier type of dinner or drinks parties. People joke about the Cloud while others take it for granted, and some worry about this mysterious entity where all of our data is stored, accessible at the touch of a screen from anywhere on Earth. But what even is the Cloud, and for that matter, where is the Cloud?

Whether it's from dodgy acronym-titled crime shows to news stories designed to terrify you down to your socks, we've all heard about sites like Silk Road and the ways criminals use cryptocurrency online. But did you know that among the various shady corners of the dark web you can also find portals to the BBC and Facebook? So, let's go on a journey from the birth of the Net through the strangest dark services to the surprisingly positive uses of dark technology, including dodging the watchful eye of oppressive censors.

The world loves 4G phones, tablets and other gizmos and we take the tech for granted...but when that 4 grew up into the next-gen 5, it seems everyone perked up and started caring about phone-networking tech. Journalists journaled, politicians, er, politicked and tin-foil hat wearers reached for the extra-thick reinforced foil. Why all this fuss? Believe it or not, 5G could change the way you live.

As we navigate through life we instinctively model time as having a flowing present that divides a fixed past from open future. This model develops in childhood and is deeply saturated within our language, thought, and behavior, affecting our conceptions of the universe, freedom, and the self. Yet as central as it is to our lives, physics seems to have no room for this flowing present. What Makes Time Special? demonstrates this claim in detail and then turns to two novel positive tasks.

Earth, from space, looks like a shimmering gem suspended in an inky, infinite expanse. But this serene image masks the magnificent and volatile interior forces that make life possible for millions of species on the surface. The placid appearances of our neighboring planets similarly belie their powers—and science fiction-worthy features, like diamond rain.

From Beethoven's connection to plumbing to why rotten eggs smell like sulfur, the technical explanations included in this scientific primer tackle 99 chemistry-related questions and provide answers designed to inform and entertain. What jewelry metal is prohibited in some European countries? What does Miss Piggy have to do with the World Cup? How can a cockroach be removed from a human ear? The quirky information offered incorporates scientific savvy, practical advice, and amusing anecdotes.

The essential guide to radiation: the good, the bad, and the utterly fascinating, explained with unprecedented clarity. Earth, born in a nuclear explosion, is a radioactive planet; without radiation, life would not exist. And while radiation can be dangerous, it is also deeply misunderstood and...

Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see. The experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, and so on have created a vivid and vibrant continuum. These ways of representing reality in “living color” echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and creation. It’s everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of anything about it?