by crissly | Oct 23, 2022 | Uncategorized
A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and crumpled it into a seemingly disordered ball of chaos. He held it up for the audience to see, squeezed it for good measure, then spread it out again.“I get a... 
by crissly | May 13, 2022 | Uncategorized
Our planet also changes positions. In six months, the Earth will go from one side of the sun to the other. This is a change in distance of almost 300 million kilometers, and it’s enough to cause a noticeable apparent position change for some of the nearest... 
by crissly | Feb 16, 2022 | Uncategorized
The inside of a tokamak—the doughnut-shaped vessel designed to contain a nuclear fusion reaction—presents a special kind of chaos. Hydrogen atoms are smashed together at unfathomably high temperatures, creating a whirling, roiling plasma that’s hotter than the surface... 
by crissly | Jan 26, 2022 | Uncategorized
Blowing soap bubbles never fails to delight one’s inner child, perhaps because bubbles are intrinsically ephemeral, bursting after just a few minutes. Now, French physicists have succeeded in creating “everlasting bubbles” out of plastic particles,... 
by crissly | Jan 23, 2022 | Uncategorized
Quantum Latin squares were quickly adopted by a community of theoretical physicists and mathematicians interested in their unusual properties. Last year, the French mathematical physicists Ion Nechita and Jordi Pillet created a quantum version of Sudoku—SudoQ. Instead... 