The useful distinction is between materials that store energy in their shape and materials that store it in their disorder. A spring does the first and rubber does the second,…
The useful question about any symmetrical thing is not why somebody made it that way but what process would produce that arrangement without anybody deciding. Here are sixteen answers.
1.…
Almost every physical process runs the way intuition expects. Hot things cool. Cold things warm. Something that starts closer to a target reaches it first.
Which is why this particular…
The single fact behind most of this is that the sun is not a point of light. It is a disc, roughly half a degree across, and almost everything strange…
Sound behaves very differently in water than in air, and most of the differences are counterintuitive.
It travels roughly four to five times faster. It carries very much further. And,…
Here is a question that has been asked for centuries and is still argued about on television panel shows: why does a mirror swap left and right but leave up…