Or if you prefer math to mountains:
There's a math puzzle whose answer is a really huge number. How huge? According to Harvey Friedman, it's incomprehensibly huge. Now Friedman is an expert on enormous infinite numbers and how their existence affects ordinary math. So when he says a finite number is incomprehensibly huge, that's scary. It's like seeing a seasoned tiger hunter running through the jungle with his shotgun, yelling "Help! It's a giant ant!" For more, read this.
In week319 of This Week's Finds, learn about catastrophe theory in climate physics! This is the first issue that features a program you can play with on your browser. It's a simple climate model that illustrates how a small increase in the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth could have a big effects on the climate, by melting snow and revealing darker soil. It was made by Allan Erskine.
Also on my blog, learn about ice, its many forms and crystal structures, how it resembles diamonds, and what scientists do with a machine that uses 80 times the world's electrical power for the few nanoseconds it's running.
If you like astronomy, read about the moon called Dysnomia, a planet whose atmosphere liquifies and then freezes every year, the reason so many objects in the outer solar system are red, why the same chemicals you find in the tarry buildup on a barbecue grill are also seen in outer space... and whether life on Earth could have been started by complex compounds from comets!
If you like art, check out some photos from my trip to Chiang Mai in Thailand:
Archimedean tilings are beautiful patterns whose possibility is predicted — but not guaranteed — by solutions to a simple equation. I'll explain what that equation says, where it comes from, and what happens when things don't quite work!
If you plot all the roots of polynomials whose coefficients are 1 and -1, say polynomials of some large degree like 24, you get a picture like this:
How can we understand the amazing patterns here? Read The Beauty of Roots for some answers!
For common questions about physics, you can't beat this:
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© 2011 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu