Recently, the White House responded to a petition to “begin construction of a Death Star (the planet buster from the Star Wars movies) by 2016. They declined, partially on the grounds that it would be too expensive, with the numbers having been crunched by the folks over at centives.net, saying that the steel would cost around $852 quadrillion. However, we think that in reality, it would actually be much cheaper, and is a proposition that Mr Obama should reconsider.

Firstly here is a link to the original post analysing the cost on centives.net, an excellent blog on “quirky economics” from how much of a cut Domino’s take on your toppings to the game theory involved in The Hunger Games. I recommend that you take a bit of time to read this before getting started on our article.

Schrödinger’s cat is one of the most famous physics thought experiments. In this post, I will explain what the thought experiment is, the weird phenomenon it seeks to express and the origins of it.

So lets start with what Schrödinger’s cat really is. Erwin Schrödinger was a fantastic physicist in the 20th century. His influence spread across numerous fields, but he is best known for his work in quantum mechanics, even forming a whole new part, involving waves and which spawned the second most famous physical idea with his name associated with it, Schrödinger’s wave equation. But that isn’t what we are talking about today. Quantum physics is a very strange subject, we have talked about it before so I’m not going to go into much detail, but because of its complexity, there are many ways to interpret it. At Schrödinger’s time, the most popular was something called the Copenhagen interpretation.

It’s just after Christmas: and many of you will be sitting around with your family playing board games. Contrary to popular belief, these games are not about family spirit, instead they are about bringing out your competitive side and asserting your supremacy over the family, so let’s have a look at the statistics of Monopoly, and how to play these to your advantage!
So we all know the classic family board game, Monopoly, where players roll dice to move round the board, and purchase and improve their properties. If you land on an opponent’s property, you have to pay them rent. This rent is higher if they build houses or hotels on these properties, but you can only build on a property if you own all the properties of that colour group. If you land on a property that you cannot pay the rent for, you are bankrupt and out of the game. The winner is the last remaining player after everyone has been bankrupted.

Christmas is a magical time all around the world. Tomorrow night, millions of children will be putting out their stockings, ready to wake the next morning to delights delivered by the fat red man (and his reindeer) we all hold close to our hearts, St Nick himself, Father Christmas, Santa Claus. However, his one-night-only trip may just cost nearly the same as a luxury yacht, and that doesn’t include the presents!

In this post, we are going to be talking about how Santa will travel. I’m sure I’m not the only one that wondered about the logistics of one man, with a vehicle powered by flying reindeer, visiting every celebrating child in world so this year, I decided to actually look into it! We will be looking at the distance he travels, how much energy he needs and how much that could cost.

Now that we have taken a look at the brutal power of fission, lets take a look at its younger sibling. Nuclear fusion is a much newer idea than fission. It is not yet done on a large-scale and we cannot harness its energy properly, but it shows potential to be more useful, safer and easier than fission, so what is it?

Well in fission, we take one heavy thing and split it in two. Fusion is the opposite. We take two very light particles and push them together to make a new one.

In 1938, two chemists and two physicists made an interesting discovery. They bombarded Uranium nuclei with neutrons and found the nuclei split in two and released a large amount of energy. This was the first instance of a nuclear process called “fission” occurring in a lab. Now, this process produces 13% of the Earth’s energy. So how does it work?
There are two main types of ways for us to harness energy usually wrapped up in the nucleus of an atom. Today we will be looking at one, fission, and tomorrow we will be looking at the other. Before we go into specifics, lets take a look at what where all these things take place.

The universe is made of matter. Everything we see is matter. All we touch, smell and feel is matter. I’ve talked before about how matter is only 8% of all the stuff in our universe, but this week I’m going down a different route. Have you ever heard of antimatter? Well, antimatter makes up a fraction of a percent of all the stuff in the universe. However, it shouldn’t, in fact, there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter, but there isn’t. So what is going on here?

Firstly, lets define some things. What is matter? This, surprising, is pretty tricky to define. Matter is the name we give to parts of space with properties such as mass, in other words particles. However, not all particles are matter, and here we can describe antimatter.

Confined to a particularly geeky section of all of our minds, is part us of that thinks about very large numbers. As children, we tried to think of the largest numbers we could. It seems that sometimes there is a point where numbers become so arbitrarily large that we find them difficult to comprehend, and need to use analogies. But this number, has a claim to be the largest number ever used for constructive purposes. It’s so large, that it’s almost impossible to describe how large it is. This is Graham’s number.

The first question you are probably asking is “Who’s Graham?”. This is Ronald Graham, an American mathematician born in 1935 from California. He began looking into Ramsey Theory, a field in Combinatorics, which generally poses problems in the following style.

Question: “If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?” by Harry Gething from Back To The Battle

What is your first reaction when you read this question? I’m sure a large amount of you who are only familiar with classical mechanics would have thought that they would work, but the light would just travel at the same speed as the car that is moving.  Those of you that are familiar with what we do here would realise for it to warrant a post, it just couldn’t be that simple!  So what is happening?  Well, for this, we have to bring in a new type of physics, relativity.