QUARK UNIVERSITY

The only non-controversial thing to say about the combination of science and religion is that it’s controversial. But if you look at Georges Lemaître, you can see that the two don’t have to be sworn enemies. Never heard of him? Many people haven’t, but a certain guy named Albert Einstein was a big fan. Georges Lemaître, born in Charleroi, Belgium in 1894, was a busy man in the early 20th century. After he was awarded a Belgian War Cross as an army officer in World War I, he earned degrees in math and philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven. Soon after that, he was ordained as a priest. Ever the scientist, he was given permission to study at prestigious Harvard Observatory while, at the same time, earning his Ph.D in physics from MIT. How’s that for a résumé? In 1927, Lemaître cooked up the revolutionary theory that still impacts how we view our universe today. His article entitled “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius accounting for the Radial Velocity...

Some of the major unsolved problems in physics are theoretical, meaning that existing theories seem incapable of explaining a certain observed phenomenon or experimental result. The others are experimental, meaning that there is a difficulty in creating an experiment to test a proposed theory or investigate a phenomenon in greater detail. There are still some deficiencies in the Standard Model of physics, such as the origin of mass, the strong CP problem, neutrino oscillations, matter–antimatter asymmetry, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.[1] Another problem lies within the mathematical framework of the Standard Model itself—the Standard Model is inconsistent with that of general relativity, to the point that one or both theories break down under certain conditions (for example within known spacetime singularities like the Big Bang and the centers of black holes beyond the event horizon). Unsolved problems by subfield Edit The following is a list of unsolved problems group...

Introduction In digital logic design, circuits fall into two categories: combinational logic and sequential logic . Combinational logic circuits are implementation of Booleanfunctions. They compute their outputs as functions of theirinput . They do not have any memory elements. Sequential logic circuits, implement functions with state .That is, they keep information internally (think of this informationbeing stored in data members of an object). The output of a sequentialcircuit depends not only on the input bits, but also on the internalstate. It turns out, for sequential circuits, it’s easier to designwith a clock. So, what’s a clock? Most people think of a clock as a way to tell time. Why woulda computer need to know how to tell time? A clock, on a computer, isn’t the same kind of clock usedin your home, or on a watch. If you’ve ever bought a computer,one of the more important features it the clock rate. For example,you may buy a machine that’s running at 2 GHz. Do you knoww...

When it comes to particle physics, there’s a sense that every law we know about classical physics just doesn’t apply. In a lot of cases, that’s disturbingly true. But some laws stay the same no matter how big or how small your subject. See how classical thermodynamics works on a quantum scale below, then keep scrolling for examples of quantum weirdness.

No runway, no problem—have helicopter, will travel! Igor Sikorsky (1889–1972), father of the modern chopper, had no doubt at all about the brilliance of this amazing, flying machine, which he said was the closest thing to “fulfillment of mankind’s ancient dreams of the flying horse and the magic carpet.” Jet planes are wonderful for screaming us from one side of the planet to the other. But when it comes to tricky rescue missions—plucking stranded sailors from the sea, hurling tubs of water onto forest fires, plucking engineers off wind turbines, dashing the critically injured to hospital—nothing beats a chopper. According to science historians, inventors had been trying to develop flying machines with spinning rotors for over 2000 years before Sikorsky finally built the world’s first practical helicopter in 1939. Why did it take so long? Because helicopters are incredibly complex machines—miracles of intricate engineering that take real skill to fly. How exactly do they work? Let’s t...

We take for it granted that we can fly from one side of the world to the other in a matter of hours, but a century ago this amazing ability to race through the air had only just been discovered. What would the Wright brothers—the pioneers of powered flight—make of an age in which something like 100,000 planes take to the sky each day in the United States alone? They’d be amazed, of course, and delighted too. Thanks to their successful experiments with powered flight, the airplane is rightfully recognized as one of the greatest inventions of all time. Let’s take a closer look at how it works! Photo: You need big wings to lift a big plane like this US Air Force C-17 Globemaster . The wings are 51.75m (169ft) wide—that’s just slightly less than the plane’s body length of 53m (174ft). The maximum takeoff weight is 265,352kg (585,000lb), about as much as 40 adult elephants! Photo by Jeremy Lock courtesy of US Air Force. How do planes fly? If you’ve ever watched a jet plane taking off o...

Technically speaking, astronomy is the science of measuring the positions and characteristics of heavenly bodies, and astrophysics is the application of physics to understand astronomy. However, nowadays, the two terms are more or less interchangeable since all astronomers use physics to understand their findings.

Elementary particles are particles with no measurable internal structure; that is, they are not composed of other particles. They are the fundamental objects of quantum field theory . Many families and sub-families of elementary particles exist. Elementary particles are classified according to their spin . Fermions have half-integer spin while bosons have integer spin. All the particles of the Standard Model have been experimentally observed, recently including the Higgs boson . [1] [2] Fermions Main article: Fermion Fermions are one of the two fundamental classes of particles, the other being bosons . Fermion particles are described by Fermi–Dirac statistics and have quantum numbers described by the Pauli exclusion principle . They include the quarks and leptons, as well as any composite particles consisting of an odd number of these, such as all baryons and many atoms and nuclei. Fermions have half-integer spin; for all known elementary fermions this is   1 ⁄ 2 . All know...