The Science Asylum

Near the end of the Sun's life, it will expand into a red giant, but will it destroy Earth? To find out, we need to delve into stellar evolution, fusion, and hydrostatic equilibrium.

Whenever I play tabletop game Farkle, I'm surprise by how often the high-point rolls occur. The probabilities don't seem to correlate with score. Let's try and fix it.

Mars and Venus are both in the habitable zone, but their climates are not human-friendly. What if they formed in opposite locations? Would either one be habitable then? To find out, we'll need atmospheric science and a little help from NASA.

Nothing can escape black holes, yet somehow they can lose mass by emitting Hawking radiation?! To understand why, we'll need to combine quantum field theory with general relativity.

They say you can fit 1.3 million Earths in the Sun... but according to sphere packing math, my own Python code, a scale model; that can't be true. Let's find out how many Earth's actually fit in the Sun.

In cosmology, we can use general relativity to map out several possible futures and pasts. Most have an infinite future, but a finite past. How can that be possible? Maybe it isn't.

Black holes seem like the ultimate absorbers, which would make you think they're absolute zero. Hawking radiation tells a different story though. It's a thermal spectrum!

Contrary to popular belief, bathroom scales do not measure weight. Weight isn't a (Newtonian) force we can measure directly. What do scales actually measure? Let's find out with an experiment.

Electric current has to obey certain rules, like taking the path of least resistance. But when rules are that simple, they tend to be a little wrong. Let's see if we can write a better one.

Dark matter is 84% of the matter in the universe and it single-handedly explains a lot of stuff: cluster motion, galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, and the CMB. We have piles of irrefutable evidence. Let's go through it, shall we.

Alternating current is kind of wild. Electric charge drifting back and forth, governed by wave mechanics. But what if I told you there's a better way using imaginary numbers and the complex plane? It's called a phasor diagram.

We like the think the Earth has a lot of texture: mountains, valleys, trenches, rock, grass, water. But is human touch sensitive enough to detect these features? Let's find out with some scale models.

We know for sure that dark matter exists. The question remains: What is it made of? Is it rogue planets? Black holes? Neutron stars? A bunch of tiny particles like neutrinos? Let's look at the likelihood of each.

How we understand time with clocks is fundamentally different than the passage of cosmic time and this is mainly due to our time zones. Let's take a look at the history of timekeeping to see how these two concepts of time coexist in our lives.

A common phrase in quantum mechanics is: "The electron is in multiple states at the same time." But it's actually a lie. Quantum particles like electrons are never in multiple states at the same time. It's just that most quantum states don’t make sense to us.

Capacitors are tiny physical gaps in a circuit. How does that even work? Well, if we analyze capacitors on a deep level, we see they're almost breathing energy.