In 2008, French physicist Serge Galam wrote a review article about “Galam models,” in which he cited 71 papers, all of which were written or cowritten by him. Galam specializes in a topic known as “social physics” (or “sociophysics” for short), an area of complex systems that concerns the use of ideas and tools from physics to study collective social […]
Tag: Physics
Shadows Cast by Spider Legs, Used in Physics Calculations
Anticipating Halloween, the American Chemical Society has published a study about using the shadows cast by (kinda sorta) spider legs, for scientific purposes. The paper is: “Elegant Shadow Making Tiny Force Visible for Water-Walking Arthropods and Updated Archimedes’ Principle,” Yelong Zheng, Hongyu Lu, Wei Yin, Dashuai Tao, Lichun Shi, and Yu Tian, Langmuir, 2016, 32 (41), pp. […]
Six familiar (to many people) paradoxes
Six paradoxes, each presented in one minute, animated by philosophers and their friends at The Open University: (Thanks to investigator Vern Illy for bringing this to our attention.)
Someone figured out how to make money from those physics crank letters
At last, someone figured out how to make money from the physics crank letters she receives! That someone is Sabine Hossenfelder. She tells about how she does it, in an article in Aeon called “What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists“. BONUS (possibly related): “A Fundamentally Eccentric Premise“, by L.X. Finegold. BONUS […]