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Parity conservation is the physicist’s way of saying that nature’s laws are left-right symmetric – that there is no preference for left or right. This statement is usually illustrated by the mirror test. Imagine that you are looking at some process in a mirror. If...

It didn’t take long after Pauli postulated his particle before someone came up with a theory, or at least an equation, to describe the process in which it was emitted. That someone was Enrico Fermi, the same man who gave the neutrino its name, and he...

After obtaining his M.A. and B.Sc. degrees from the University of New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford was digging potatoes on his father’s farm one day when he received news of a scholarship award for Cambridge University. He is reported to have said “That’s the last potato...

In 1905, in the first of his annus mirabilis  (“miracle year”) papers, Albert Einstein carried the quantum revolution a step further – a “quantum leap”, we might say (inside joke). Picking up where Planck left off, Einstein looked at the absorption of EM radiation, especially the...

Many people confuse mass with weight - among them my favorite cynic Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary: Gravitation. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportional to the quantity of matter they contain - the quantity of matter they...

When Einstein began to tackle gravity in 1907, science had come a long way from the days of Newton. Not only had electric­ity and magnetism been discovered, but the concept of an electromagnetic field had replaced action-at-a-distance and was on the verge of replacing the...