Categories
Physics

ProprioSTEPtion

Picture you’re crossing a crosswalk, taking broad confident New York strides. The sidewalk curb up ahead is a full foot above the road, so you fix your eye on it and prepare to take that step up, knowing that failure to plan ahead will cause you to trip and look like a fool in front […]

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Non-fiction Physics

Far-fetched physics #2

It must have been within a couple of years of 2005, but in which direction I cannot remember, because that is the year that I triumphantly completed AP Physics under the illumination of Konstantinos Alexakos, a supergiant of a teacher, around whom lesser life events have dwarfed and realigned. With the sponsorship of an adult […]

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Non-fiction Physics

Centers II: Zizek, Aurelius, Hawking

I recently recalled the introductory monologue from the documentary film Zizek! In it the eponymous philosopher and social critic takes a stab at his theory of the universe, arriving swiftly and entertainingly at “love is evil.” The contrarian path he takes to that end is his trademark, and I wanted to put it up to […]

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Non-fiction Physics

The Center Must Hold

First, Rousseau argued it…. Then Kant laid it out…. Then Nietzsche declared it…. Then Yeats sang it…. Then Picasso painted it…. Then Antonioni shot it…. Then Tschumi built it…. Then Bolano practically drilled it into our heads…. It is the primary motif of modernism. It is the concept of decentralization. Since the Enlightenment, the shift in our mode of thinking has […]

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Physics

A Contorted Universe

The universe may be much more contorted than we think. Denis and I were walking out of AP physics, exchanging, bug-eyed, our newest theories on the makeup of the cosmos. That day, the class had done a review of Newtonian physics– the crux of which, it was concluded, lies not in gravity or the three […]

Categories
Non-fiction Physics

Potential

Be it all in my head or in fact actually widespread, I need to share this mini exposé on the meaning of potential energy, and its implications. I can thank Konstantinos Alexakos for tuning my brain to these frequencies.  As taught in high school, potential energy is maybe misconstrued as ACTUAL energy, something substantive, a FORM of […]