Books

Physics has long aspired to provide a faithful map of reality: a representation in which events can be placed unambiguously, trajectories traced deterministically, and the past and future related…Read more

Why Relativity Looks Like Spacetime—and Why It Isn’t Relativity is usually presented as a theory about spacetime: its structure, its curvature, and the transformations that relate one observer’s measurements…Read more

I generally avoid religious topics per se on this blog, not out of policy, but for lack of interest.  But there are many topics usually addressed in conversations concerning…Read more

We’re trained to think that causes precede effects, energy flows like water.  With the variational principles in physics, it doesn’t work that way.  The solutions don’t violate causality —…Read more

Analogies are easily stretched beyond viability, but they are the stuff of intuition. Consider a barrel filled with water and a rock on a string dangling over it.  If…Read more

Our familiarity with the concept of dimensions is based on a commonsense notion of specifying the locations of objects in what we otherwise consider to be an empty ‘space’.…Read more

A friend indicated that he and his wife had conceived of their new relationship as the two faces of Janus.  It brought several things to mind:  First was that…Read more

Whoever we quote with however many credentials to clarify our conception of entropy, we get basically the same adage – order into chaos.  And it’s true, but it leaves…Read more

*** The universe is a major swap meet of varieties of energy.  Mechanical energy can be traded for heat and vice versa.  And so it goes for kinetic and…Read more

Let’s face it, there’s no market for what we write.  And even if there were, we wouldn’t know how to reach that market.  So, why do we write?  We’re…Read more