While the concept of black holes has become a cultural phenomenon thanks to movies such as Interstellar, it still seems like the general public knows very little about them. In order to help clarify any misunderstandings, welcome to a brief introduction on black holes. In essence, a black hole consists of a massive amount of mass […]
Read more "Black Holes"The Fermi paradox is based entirely upon a lunch conversation between Enrico Fermi, an iconic physicist, and his friends and co-workers. When discussing their belief that there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, Fermi asked a simple, but profound question: “Where is everybody?” While, on its surface, this question seems somewhat ridiculous, it […]
Read more "The Fermi Paradox"For the astronaut shown above, he/she will be fine for now. As long as their space suit is intact, they should not be in any immediate danger of death. However, if their suit were to malfunction for some reason, what would happen next? This has been “explained” before in movies or television shows; but as we […]
Read more "Can you survive in space?"April fools! I know I am a day late with this, but I was surprised to find that this was a common thread appearing on my Facebook feed over the weekend. As is common when “news” appears on social media, an “article” was being passed around that seemingly few people even bothered to read. Instead, the headline […]
Read more "Pluto is a Planet Again!"Climate change is a known natural phenomena – for example, the Earth has gone through periods of extreme cold (the Ice Ages) and has always bounced back to the temperatures we know and love today. What isn’t a natural phenomenon is the rapid acceleration of climate change that has been taking place in recent history. […]
Read more "Climate Change"While the Big Bang has become the quintessential theory for the beginning of the universe, the possible future of the universe is still an open question. While the universe we currently observe is expanding in all directions, who is to say that this expansion will continue indefinitely. And if the expansion of the universe ends, […]
Read more "The Big Crunch"Up until about two years ago, gravitational waves were rarely discussed outside of the scientists who based their careers on its discovery. To the public, the entire phenomena was unknown. However, that quickly changed on September 14, 2015 when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave observatory directly detected gravitational waves. As this news spread across the globe, […]
Read more "Gravitational Waves"Before Einstein’s revolutionary ideas changed the landscape of physics, very little was known about the speed of light. The fact is that, at the time, light was an anomaly; it had characteristics unique to anything else we experienced in the world. For example, was light a particle or a wave? And more importantly, if light […]
Read more "Ether and the Michelson-Morley Experiment"Hello everybody! My name is Brandon and I am a Physics/Math double major and a Philosophy minor here at Vanderbilt University.
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Brandon and the Solar System 