Category: Physics

Gravity is a Harsh Mistress

March 30, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

The Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote is based on Mark Twain’s description of a coyote as “a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” Twain then continues to make an unsavoury comparison between coyotes and native Americans. But this doesn’t take away…

Hard(en) Deceleration

May 3, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

According to Marcus Eliott, who has analyzed the biomechanics of hundreds of NBA players, Brooklyn Nets basketball player James Harden is pretty pedestrian by all traditional performance metrics. But when Harden came for a closer examination there were several areas in which Harden was an…

Vertical Empathy

February 16, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

He who shrank is a 1936 sci-fi story by Henry Hasse, originally published in Amazing Stories Quarterly. It is about a man who is forever shrinking through worlds nested within a universe with apparently endless levels of scale. Written long before moon travel and our current…

Kohrisms

March 15, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

The Austrian economist and political scientist Leopold Kohr opposed the “cult of bigness” in social organization. He inspired the movement for a human scale and the Small Is Beautiful movement. His most influential work was The Breakdown of Nations. In 1983, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. In the…

Unsinkable Jesus Gecko

April 24, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Changing perspective and seeing reality through the eyes of the very small has the potential to unlock previously unimagined, unseen worlds. The Coleodactylus amazonicus, or Brazilian Pygmy Gecko, could sit comfortably on a finger tip. It is so small that no other reptiles in South…

Towards Weightlessness

January 24, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Seeing Jane Fonda’s clumsy striptease in the opening scene of the sci-fi classic Barbarella arouses laughter rather than anything else, but it does trigger a desire to break free from gravitational inhibitions. Weightlessness is defined by the absence of stress and strain resulting from externally applied…

Downsized Flames

July 24, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

Our relationship with fire is one of the oldest and most fundamental relationships with the natural environment. Fire keeps us warm, cooks our food and melts our steel. We know how much heat comes from a gas lighter, how much wood we need to heat…

Small Food Physics

April 5, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

The Disproportionate Restaurant investigates the relationship with food and ingredients from the perspective of a human species of 50 centimeters tall. It maps possibilities that today’s chefs can only dream of, even in the age of molecular gastronomy. There is the relatively predictable resizing of portions and ingredients. A…

Can Shrinking Man Fly?

December 12, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

For some people the most exciting consequence of shrinking the human body is not that we’ll save resources, or the new abundance of space and the challenge of redesigning most of our things. What keeps them busy is if at 50 centimeters and 2 kilograms…

The 9 Lives of Shrinking Man

October 28, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

The final velocity of a falling body is the product of its acceleration and the time the body is accelerating. The smaller the person the smaller the risk of getting seriously hurt. Kinetic energy increases as length raised to the fifth power. If a child…

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

August 16, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

The second law of thermodynamics, also called the entropy law,  says that the disorder of a spontaneous system is a function of its mass and energy. Entropy is a measure of disorder, decay, or chaos within a system. More mass and energy mean more possible…