One of our favourite outreach setups is the magnetic pipe experiment: two pellets fall at the same rate in vacuum, but pass them through a pipe and one of the two takes ages to get…
Read More Multiply two matrices for thin lenses, with focal lengths f1 and f2. What do you find? What does this tell you about this compound lens?
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Let us consider the following scenario: on a sunny day, some people decide to go to the beach and have some fun with the waves. A coastal guard is keeping an eye on the swimmers, and she notices that one of them appears to be drowning. To help the person in distress…
Read MoreA hypothetical student decided to investigate on his own (as one should) the magnification of a spherical mirror. He came up with this design…
Read More One of the most important skills we learn as physicists is how to approximate. The best physicists like Fermi or Feynman could turn this into a real art. Fermi for instance would tackle a question such as How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? What’s your guess?
Read More 2018 marks the 400th anniversary of Kepler’s laws (I’m not sure that many know about this birthday). In Harmonices Mundi, the Dutch physicist reported a great discovery (his third law). It states that…
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