In early December 2018 the physicists' blogosphere went berserk because of a 2017 paper (in fact still a preprint to this date: arXiv:1712.07962) in which the author James Farnes, University of Oxford, tries to explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy with a seemingly preposterous hypothesis: the presence of a negative-mass fluid that permeates the Universe. … Continue reading When Your Gravity Fails and Negativity Don’t Pull You Through: The Case for Negative-Mass Dark Matter
processing
Touring the Solar System
Recently, I have read a very recommended book called "The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission" by Jim Bell (see its Goodreads entry). The book, as you can imagine from the title, recounts the story (so far) of the two Vogayer spacecrafts, and of the people who made this possible. There is also a … Continue reading Touring the Solar System
The three-body problem
The publication of the novel "The three body problem" written by Chinese author Cixin Liu rekindled my interest about this long-standing issue in classical dynamics. As also pointed out in the novel, an empty space is stationary (and boring). An empty space plus a spherical body is also stationary (still boring). An empty space plus … Continue reading The three-body problem
The Dark Matter is Out There
In the last 10 years evidence piled up that the largest part of the Universe is not made by ordinary (baryonic) matter. Atoms and neutrinos account to about 5%, while the remaining fraction is partly due to another form of mass that does not interact electromagnetically, called Dark Matter (25%). There are indications that it is … Continue reading The Dark Matter is Out There
Re-discover Neptune with Processing
As we saw in the previous post, it's quite easy to make even not-so-basic physics simulations with Processing and Jeffrey Traer's library for physics. This time we'll give a closer look to the discovery of Neptune. We won't be really accurate here, I just want to give you the gist of it. Reverse engineering the … Continue reading Re-discover Neptune with Processing
Simulate The Solar System with Processing
It's New Year's eve and it's time for horoscopes! Or maybe not. If you are a believer, or if you're not, it's still a good time to learn something more about celestial mechanics. We'll make use of Processing, an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. You … Continue reading Simulate The Solar System with Processing
Beyond the Standard Model Pub 