Dice Rolls are Suspect

It is true that every aspect of the role of dice may be suspect: the dice themselves, the form and texture of the surface, the person throwing them. If we push the analysis to its extreme, we may even wonder what chance has to do with it at all. Neither the course of the dice nor their rebounds rely on chance; they are governed by the strict determinism of rational mechanics. Billiards is based on the same principles, and it has never been considered a game of chance. So in the final analysis...

 Scientist on Trial for Teaching Physics

After waiting patiently for the noise to subside, one of the male Red Guards turned to the victim. “Ye Zhetai, you are an expert in mechanics. You should see how strong the great unified force you’re resisting is. To remain so stubborn will lead only to your death! Today, we will continue the agenda from the last time. There’s no need to waste words. Answer the following question without your typical deceit: Between the years of 1962 and 1965, did you not decide on your own to add relat...

 Foundation and Empire

"Well," Bayta's eyes misted with thought as she curled her bare toes into the white softness of the rug and nestled her little chin in one plump hand, "it seems to me that the whole essence of Seldon's plan was to create a world better than the ancient one of the Galactic Empire. It was failing apart, that world, three centuries ago, when Seldon first established the Foundation – and if history speaks truly, it was falling apart of the triple disease of inertia, despotism, and maldistributi...

 Loss of Hope Accelerates the Death of Trantor

"The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that onl...

 Science of a Second

The old definition of a second was based on the rotation of the Earth. As it takes the Sun one day to rise in the east, set in the west and rise again, a day was almost arbitrarily divided into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minutes, and the minute into 60 seconds. However, the Earth doesn’t rotate uniformly. In fact, it’s rotation decreases at a rate of about 20 millionths of a second every calendar year due to tidal friction caused by the Moon. Atomic time relies on the energy transition w...

 Gedankenexperiment

However, the subject need not be an esoteric one for a gedankenexperiment to be fruitful. My own favorite is Galileo’s proof that, contrary to Aristotle’s view, objects of different mass fall in a vacuum with the same acceleration. One might think that a real experiment needs to be conducted to test that hypothesis, but Galileo simply asked us to consider a large and a small stone tied together by a very light string. If Aristotle was right, the large stone should speed up the smaller one...