Microwaves are a low frequency light, at least compared to visible light, say, or ionizing radiation like gamma rays. Thus, microwaves are quite harmless. A microwave oven baths the food in an oscillating electro-magnetic field. Molecules with permanent electrical dipole moments wiggle in the field and thus heat up the food.

The US is supposedly the leader in terms of scientific output. However, there is supposedly also "a threat" of losing this position. To counter this, there are suggestions such as giving out more visas to foreign scientists and engineers. Even “don’t make Americans scientists, make scientists American” passes as valid argumentation.

College Scholarships gives away 10.000 dollars to support a young blogger still in college. You can surf to their site and vote for the one you think is most deserving, the one who should get supported and may be in need of further support. However, you might as well not vote, because the contest is already “won”. Why? Because she is already having support more than enough: The whole SB front page was set up for days in order to get their large base of sheepish readers to support their own blogger, and do not think SB would encourage readers to first look at the other blogs to build an informed opinion, an out of fashion approach you may associate with the term “science”.

In one description, an observer falls freely through empty space, in another one, she hits a surface smack on, yet both descriptions are completely equivalent. This example for a duality in modern physics was explained the last time in this series. There we saw that a black hole can also be described by a string theoretical membrane at the event horizon. The observer cannot escape the black hole because she literally gets stuck to the black hole’s event horizon, glued to it via strings.

Israel’s national lottery is all over the news these days because the same numbers (13, 14, 26, 32, 33, and 36) came up twice during one month.

A journalist called an expert on gambling, Z. Gilula, a professor of statistics in Israel, and asked him about the probability of the same set of numbers being randomly picked twice.

Energy (E) is a useful quantity. It has certain properties and connections with other such measures, like momentum p. E is paired with time t, much like momentum p and distance x are such a pair. This pairing is known from classical mechanics and it shows up in relativity: The merging of t and x into one entity, space-time, leads straight to such a melting also of E and p. In quantum physics, the uncertainty Δx ~ 1/Δp is important, and it translates into Δt ~ 1/ΔE. We do not think that momentum p is a substance!