Author Archives: Will Sweatman

How the Human Brain Stores Data

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Evolution is one clever fellow. Next time you’re strolling about outdoors, pick up a pine cone and take a look at the layout of the bract scales. You’ll find an unmistakable geometric structure. In fact, this same structure can be seen in the petals of a rose, the seeds of a sunflower and even the cochlea bone in your inner ear. Look closely enough, and you’ll find this spiraling structure everywhere. It’s based on a series of integers called the Fibonacci sequence. Leonardo Bonacci discovered the sequence while trying to figure out how many rabbits he could make starting with …read more

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Hyperuniformity — A Hidden Order Found in the Greatest Set of Eyes

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Of all the things evolution has stumbled across, the eye is one of the most remarkable. Acting as sort of a ‘biological electromagnetic transducer’, the eye converts incoming photons into electrical and chemical spikes, known as action potentials. These spikes then drive the brain of the host life form. Billions of years of natural selection has produced several types of eyes, with some better than others. It would be an honest mistake to think that the human eye is at the top of the food chain, as this is not the case. Mammals underwent a long stint scurrying around in …read more

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Fractals Among Us

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Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see

Benoit Mandelbrot

Randomness is all around you…or so you think. Consider the various shapes of the morning clouds, the jagged points of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the twists and turns of England’s coastline and the forks of a lightning bolt streaking through a dark, stormy sky. Such irregularity is commonplace throughout our natural world. One can also find similar irregular structures in biology. The branch-like structures in your lungs called Bronchi, for instance, fork out in irregular patterns that eerily mirror the way rivers bifurcate into …read more

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Uncertainty – The Key to Quantum Wierdness

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All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, ‘What are light quanta?’ Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.

                       Albert Einstein, 1954

As 1926 was coming to a close, the physics world lauded Erwin Schrodinger and his wave mechanics. Schrodinger’s purely mathematical tool was being used to probe the internal structure of the atom and to provide predictable experimental outcomes. However, some deep questions still remained – primarily with the idea of discontinuous movements of the electron within a hydrogen atom. Niels Bohr, …read more

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How to Measure the Extremely Small: Atomic Mass

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How does one go about measuring the mass of an object? Mass is defined as the amount of matter an object contains. This is very different from weight, of course, as the mass of our object would remain the same despite the presence or size of a gravitational field. It is safe to say, however,  that most laboratory measurement systems are here on Earth, and we can use the Earth’s gravity to aid in our mass measurement. One way is to use a balance and a known amount of mass. Simply place our object on one side of the balance, …read more

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Symmetry for Dummies: Noether’s Theorem

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Einstein referred to her as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. Her theorem has been recognized as “one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics.” Yet many people haven’t the slightest clue of who this woman was, or what she did that was so significant to our understanding of how our world works. If you count yourself as one of those who have never heard of Emmy Noether and wish to enlighten yourself, please read on. I can only hope I do her memory justice. Not just by telling …read more

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Dr Who Returns to Earth

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While searching for signs of Dalek activity in the vast depths of outer space, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico stumbled across a most interesting find. They were receiving modulated radio signals emanating from an invisible object about 25 light years away. The signals were all in the VHF band between 41 and 68 MHz. After a applying a little amplification and some wibbly wobbly timey wimey enhancements, it became clear what the signals were – 50 year old terrestrial television broadcasts. The site takes a minute or so to load due to the traffic its getting.

[Dr. Venn], the …read more

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Coleco Chameleon is a Kickstarter Scam

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Retro gaming consoles exploded with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi and other similar single-board Linux computers. They all work the same way in that they emulate the original game console hardware with software. The game ROM is then dumped to a file and will play like the original. While this works just fine for the vast majority of us who want to get a dose of nostalgia as we chase the magic 1-up mushroom, gaming purists are not satisfied. They can tell the subtle differences between emulation and real hardware. And this is where our story begins.

Meet the …read more

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