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Physics Facts

Does Your Brain Do Flips?

You may not be aware of it, but when you look at the world, the image projected on your retina is upside down. This is due to the optics used by our eyes. Our brain compensates for this upside down ... Continue reading

Normal Sight: Normal ray tracing of light to the retina. Shows image will 'flip'.

With Pinhole: Ray tracing of pin through pinhole; a shadow is cast on the retina.

Bizarre Boiling

The next time you're watching a pot of water boil, perhaps for coffee or a cup of soup, pause for a moment and consider: what would this look like in space? Would the turbulent bubbles rise or fall? ... Continue reading

Without buoyancy, the vapor produced by boiling simply floats as a bubble inside the liquid after the heating has stopped. Surface tension effects cause the many small bubbles produced to coalesce into one large sphere.

The Early Universe Soup

In the first few millionths of the second after the Big Bang, the universe looked very different than today. In fact the universe existed as a different form of matter altogether: the quark-gluon ... Continue reading

Collision of two gold nuclei at the RHIC accelerator. An attempt to produce quark-gluon plasma in the laboratory.

Ultraviolet Light

Ultraviolet light is a form of radiation which is not visible to the human eye. It's in an invisible part of the 'electromagnetic spectrum'. Radiated energy, or radiation, is given off by many ... Continue reading

Our Sun emits light at all the different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, but it is ultraviolet waves that are responsible for causing our sunburns. This is an image of the Sun taken at an Extreme Ultraviolet wavelength.