Emma
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Refracting & Reflecting Telescopes
Right next to light, the telescope is an astronomer’s most valuable tool. There are so many different varieties of telescopes, it can be hard to keep them all straight. But they can all be sorted into a few basic types,…
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The Spectrum of Light
Does this look familiar? People think of rainbows as a symbol of happiness and fortune. There are even myths that leprechauns hide gold at the end of a rainbow. That’s more of a tease than good fortune, if you ask…
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Einstein: Space-Time Curvature
When you hear about “space-time,” it’s just a way to say that space is related to time. And the curvature of space-time, as Albert Einstein predicted, is the way space and time alike literally bend around a mass such as the…
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Einstein: General Relativity
Albert Einstein may have been the genius among physicists, but like all others before his time, he stood on the shoulders of giants. Einstein did not propose that the sun was the center of the solar system; that idea was…
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Einstein: Special Relativity
Albert Einstein’s name literally sends shivers down my spine. This is the man who discovered physics as we know it. This is the man who filled in the gaps where even Newton’s laws of motion went wrong and expanded our…
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Moving with the Tides
Have you ever been to the beach? If you’re from California like me, then I’m betting you have. If you’re from a place that’s not near an ocean and you’ve never been near the water all your life, then I’ll…
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How Orbits Work
Since Aristotle’s time over 2000 years ago, we have accepted that the moon orbits the Earth. We didn’t always know why, and we didn’t always accept this for the right reasons. We used to assume that it happened just because…
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Newton and Gravity
So, the moon stays in orbit around the Earth, right? Yeah, I thought so. But why? The moon’s orbit is not a straight line, which means it’s accelerated motion (using the physics definition, which is absolutely any change in speed or…
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Newton’s Laws of Motion
It’s said that Sir Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell on his head, and that’s when all his discoveries began. Personally, I doubt that story — just as I doubt that Galileo Galilei ever dropped…
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Galileo and Motion
Before Galileo’s time, Aristotle was the god of gravity. Seriously. Before Galileo came along, the question of how gravity worked was answered with another question: “What would Aristotle say?” Obviously, this method was faulty, since Aristotle was actually wrong about…
