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Improved Astable Multivibrator

The conventional two transistor astable multivibrator has been modified to produce better waveform which are more steeply rising and falling than those from the conventional astable. The improvement in the waveform is achieved by using a diode pair in each collector branch of the transistors. This restricts the direction of current flow for the charging and discharging of the timing capacitors. This article also derives the time period of oscillations for the modified circuit and discusses the limits on source and sink currents at the transistor collectors.

physics.pop-ph↗

Cooking the volumes

Cooking possesses a system of units of measurement, that includes measures of volumes based on pre-metric units. This paper discusses the cooking measures and compares their features with those of the ancient Roman measures of capacity.

physics.pop-ph↗

Free Fall Frame to Demonstrate Weightlessness

A simple apparatus to demonstrate free fall weightlessness is given. This can be easily constructed from readily available materials and can be used for the demonstration purpose to an audidence with all the details of the apparatus visible.

physics.ed-ph↗

The Creation of the World - According to Science

How was the world created? People have asked this ever since they could ask anything, and answers have come from all sides: from religion, tradition, philosophy, mysticism... and science. While this does not seem like a problem amenable to scientific measurement, it has led scientists to come up with fascinating ideas and observations: the Big Bang, the concept of inflation, the fact that most of the world is made up of dark matter and dark energy which we can not perceive, and more. Of course scientists cannot claim to know the definitive truth. But we can approach the question from a scientific viewpoint and see what we find out. How do we do that? First, we look to the data. Thanks to modern technology, we have much more information than did people of previous ages who asked the same question. Then we can use scientific methods and techniques to analyze the data, organize them in a coherent way and try and extract an answer. This process and its main findings will be described in the article.

physics.pop-ph↗

On the Mirage of the Classical Electron of Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit

The idea that the electron is an extended charged object the spinning of which is responsible for its magnetic moment is shown to require a sizable portion of the electron to spin at speeds very close to the speed of light, and in fact to explode within an unacceptably short time, ~1E-31 s. The experimentally well-established magnetic moment of elementary particles such as the electron therefore must be accepted as an intrinsic property, with no need for classical models based on spatially extended objects. Emphasizing these facts in education, as early as possible, is important to the framing of the proper mind-set.

physics.pop-ph↗

Bipolar Transistor Tester / Digital IC Tester for Physics Lab

A very simple low cost bipolar transistor tester for physics lab is given. The proposed circuit not only indicates the type of transistor(NPN/PNP) but also indicates the terminals(emitter, base and collector) using simple dual color (red/green) LEDs. Color diagrams of testing procedure have been given for easy following. This article describes the construction of this apparatus in all detail with schematic circuit diagram, circuit layout and constructional illustration. The second part describes a simple circuit to test digital ICs in a physics lab. Small scale integration digital ICs like logic gates, flip-flops, registers, counters, decoders, multiplexers etc are used in physics lab for various purposes either in a commercially obtained equipment or lab made circuits. The non-functionality of a circuit may call for a test of the digital chip. Commercially available test equipment is expensive, bulky and some times useless with regard to the concerned test. This article describes an inexpensive, portable and useful digital IC test circuit that could be helpful in detecting the actual fault with the chip provided the data sheet for the chip is available. In a very convenient and easy way. The article contains neat diagrams and illustrations to help the reader build a proper functional digital IC tester.

physics.pop-ph↗

Entropy-based Tuning of Musical Instruments

The human sense of hearing perceives a combination of sounds 'in tune' if the corresponding harmonic spectra are correlated, meaning that the neuronal excitation pattern in the inner ear exhibits some kind of order. Based on this observation it is suggested that musical instruments such as pianos can be tuned by minimizing the Shannon entropy of suitably preprocessed Fourier spectra. This method reproduces not only the correct stretch curve but also similar pitch fluctuations as in the case of high-quality aural tuning.

physics.class-ph↗

arXiv in the classical Russian literature

The creation of arXiv, a highly democratic open access repository of research papers in high-energy physics more than twenty years ago was undoubtedly the most spectacular and landmark event for the high-energy physics community. However, we report a curious observation which indicates that the general cultural significance of this event extends far beyond the boundaries assumed at the beginning.

physics.pop-ph↗

Aliens on Earth. Are reports of close encounters correct?

Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens are not missions of diplomats, scientists nor even invasion fleets; typical encounters are with lone ETs (or small groups), and involve curious behavior: abductions and experiments (often of sexual nature), cattle mutilations, localized killing and mixing in human society using various methods. Standard scientific explanations of these social memes point to influence of cultural artifacts (movies, literature) on social imagination, projection of our fears and observations of human society, and, in severe cases, psychic disorder of the involved individuals. In this work we propose an alternate explanation, claiming that the memes might be the result of observations of actual behavior of true Aliens, who, visiting Earth behave in a way that is then reproduced by such memes. The proposal would solve, in natural way, the Fermi paradox.

physics.pop-ph↗

The Proof of Innocence

A way to fight your traffic tickets. The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California. In view of enormous, extremely surprising and completely unexpected public interest to this work, we have added an appendix answering the two most common questions.

physics.pop-ph↗

Dodecahedral bowling

In this paper I propose a possible use of Roman Dodecahedra, which are bronze artifacts of gallo-roman origin dating from the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD, for playing a bowling game. The presence of holes and knobs can be quite important during collisions. Moreover, in several of these objects, the holes have different sizes providing a biased rigid body.

physics.pop-ph↗

The twin paradox in relativity revisited

The accepted resolution of the twin paradox in relativity states that the age of the inertial twin `jumps' when the traveling twin undergoes his turn-around acceleration. This resolution is based on the use of the equivalent gravitational shift in the frame of the accelerating twin. We use the same analysis to propose a symmetric variant of the problem with the twins experiencing identical acceleration and deceleration phases, but which predicts conflicting results for the age of the other twin. We also propose an unambiguous test of the standard resolution based on the Pound-Rebka experiment.

physics.class-ph↗

The Cosmic Spacetime

Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject, suggests that we may be missing the point. The observations actually reveal a simpler and more elegant Universe than anyone could have imagined.

physics.pop-ph↗

Roman Dodecahedron as dioptron: analysis of freely available data

Recently I have proposed the Roman Dodecahedra as ancient coincidence rangefinders. Here I discuss several data and references freely available on the Web. After analysis, the common features of these artifacts allow to tell that a Roman Dodecahedron was probably a dioptron. The equation of this optical instrument is given. The paper ends with a discussion on the role of the Web and free information for further studies of these objects.

physics.pop-ph↗

A traveler-centered intro to kinematics

Treating time as a local variable permits robust approaches to kinematics that forego questions of extended-simultaneity, which because of their abstract nature might not be addressed explicitly until a first relativity course and even then without considering the dependence of clock-rates on position in a gravitational field. For example we here use synchrony-free ``traveler kinematic" relations to construct a brief story for beginning students about: (a) time as a local quantity like position that depends on ``which clock", (b) coordinate-acceleration as an approximation to the acceleration felt by a moving traveler, and (c) the geometric origin (hence mass-independence) of gravitational acceleration. The goal is to explicitly rule out global-time for all from the start, so that it can be returned as a local approximation, while tantalizing students interested in the subject with more widely-applicable equations in range of their math background.

physics.pop-ph↗

Torques without Rotation: the Right-Angle Lever

An extended body subject to external forces which exert zero net force and zero total torque in the rest frame, may experience a nonzero torque in another inertial frame, and nonetheless does not rotate. Long known as the Trouton-Noble or right-angle lever paradox, there has been extensive discussion and indeed controversy, but a clear understanding comes from a suitable treatment of angular momentum and simultaneity.

physics.class-ph↗

The orientation of Julia Augusta Taurinorum (Torino)

It seems that the ancient Roman towns were oriented with the sunrise. Here I propose a discussion on the orientation of Torino, the Julia Augusta Taurinorum, which has the ancient Roman structure perfectly preserved. According to this ancient ritual, we can use the sunrise amplitude to determine the Turin's birthday. The use of the hour angle is also proposed, in this case the day of the foundation of Turin could be the winter solstice.

physics.pop-ph↗