How Do Flatlanders Move?

None of this actually explains how Flatlanders move. We know various things about their locomotion; that travelling somewhere involves some form of effort, that it is harder to travel North than in other directions, especially for women, and that femails "undulate" as they travel, although this is more of a safety measure than a necessity. A mundane explanation, but one that causes a few problems, is the use of very short cilia-like mobile hairs for propulsion. This assumes that Flatland ai...

 The Importance of the Velocity of Light

The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation...

 Science Cannot have Creeds

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our...

 Gravity is an Extremely Feeble Force

...imagine holding an electron in your left hand and another electron in your right hand and bringing these two identical electrically charged particles close together. Their mutual gravitational attraction will favor their getting closer while their electromagnetic repulsion will try to drive them apart. Which is stronger? There is no contest: The electromagnetic repulsion is about a million billion billion billion billion (10 to the 42th) times stronger! If your right bicep represents the s...

 The Marriage of Space and Time

The marriage of space and time that heralded the modern era began with the marriage, in 1864, of electricity and magnetism. This remarkable intellectual achievement, based on the cumulative efforts of great physicists such as AndrŽ-Marie Amp�re, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, and Michael Faraday, was capped by the brilliant British physicist James Clerk Maxwell. He discovered that the laws of electricity and magnetism not only displayed an intimate relationship with one another but together ...