Hessaby’s Theory of Infinitely Extended Particles
Introduction In 1947, an Iranian physicist named Seyyed Mahmoud Hessaby proposed a radical departure from the dominant picture of elementary particles. Rather than treating particles as dimensionless points — the assumption underlying most 20th-century quantum theory — Hessaby argued that particles must have infinite spatial extension: their energy and charge spread continuously across all of […]
The Coriolis Effect: Physics of Rotating Reference Frames
Picture this: you’re standing on a spinning turntable and you throw a ball toward your friend. The ball travels in a perfectly straight line — but because you and your friend are rotating with the platform, you both perceive its path as curved. That, scaled to the entire Earth, is the Coriolis effect: any object […]
Kepler’s Third Law — Planetary Harmony: T² = a³
Mercury orbits the Sun in 88 days. Earth takes 365 days. Jupiter takes 12 years. Neptune takes 165 years. Are these numbers random? No. Kepler discovered that they follow a precise mathematical relationship. Kepler’s Third Law The square of a planet’s orbital period (T) is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its […]
Kepler’s Second Law — Equal Areas: Why do planets speed up near the Sun?
Summer in the Northern Hemisphere lasts about 93 days. Winter lasts 89 days. Where does that 4-day difference come from? Doesn’t Earth orbit at a constant speed? No. This is exactly what Kepler’s Second Law explains. Kepler’s Second Law The line connecting the Sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time intervals. […]
Newton’s Second Law — F=ma: The harder you push, the faster it goes
Try an empty supermarket trolley — it flies forward with a small push. Now fill it with groceries. Give it the same push. It moves much more slowly. Why? Because the mass increased. And this is exactly what Newton’s Second Law explains. The Law The net force acting on an object equals its mass multiplied […]
Newton’s Third Law — Action and Reaction: Every force has a counterforce
How do you walk? You put your foot on the ground and push backward. But what moves you forward — you didn’t apply any force to yourself! Actually, you did — you pushed the ground backward. And the ground pushed you forward. That’s Newton’s Third Law. The Law Every force that object A exerts on […]
Kepler’s First Law — Elliptical Orbits: Why don’t planets move in circles?
Before Kepler, everyone believed planets move in circles. Why? Because a circle is “perfect” and the heavens must be perfect — or so they thought. But the observational data said otherwise. Johannes Kepler spent 20 years analysing Tycho Brahe’s observatory data before discovering something simple yet revolutionary: orbits are ellipses. Kepler’s First Law Every planet […]
Newton’s First Law — Inertia: Why does everything want to stay the way it is?
A question: when you’re sitting in a car and the driver suddenly brakes, why does your body lurch forward? Nobody pushed you. Yet something invisible seems to pull you ahead. This is exactly where Newton’s First Law comes in. The Law in Plain Language If something is at rest, it wants to stay at rest. […]
Viscosity — Shear Rate, Shear Stress and Newton’s Law
Learn about fluid viscosity, shear stress, shear rate, and Newton’s law of viscosity with a Couette flow simulation. Applications in Reynolds number and IYPT snail ball.
Chladni Figures: Visual Music in Vibration
When a metal or glass plate is set into vibration and lightly dusted with fine sand, the grains migrate along specific paths and settle into striking, symmetric patterns. These shapes — known as Chladni figures, after the German physicist Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756–1827) — are a direct visual map of the plate’s vibrational mode […]