https://signal-and-syntax.com/tags/physics/Recent content in Physics on Signal & SyntaxHugoen-usSun, 30 Nov 2025 06:00:00 -0700https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/edmund-fitzgerald/Sun, 30 Nov 2025 06:00:00 -0700https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/edmund-fitzgerald/Originally appearing on his 1976 album, Summertime Dream, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a powerful ballad written and performed by folk singer Gordon Lightfoot . In 1976, the song hit No. 1 in Canada on the RPM chart, and No. 2 in the United States on the Billboard Hot 100. The lyrics are a masterpiece, but there was one specific line that always stood out to me: “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/safe-distance-in-traffic/Thu, 23 Oct 2025 09:00:00 -0700https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/safe-distance-in-traffic/While researching why car insurance rates are so extremely high in Las Vegas, I started thinking about the three-second rule and its validity. As I’ve always heard, the three-second rule refers to how far you should be behind a car in traffic. The idea is that you pick out a fixed roadside marker and you are supposed to pass that marker at least three seconds after the car in front of you.https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/five-second-rule/Thu, 04 Sep 2025 06:00:00 -0700https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/five-second-rule/You know the story: drop a cookie on the kitchen floor, swoop in before five seconds are up, and declare it safe. It is comforting. It is also wrong ( Dawson et al., 2007 ; Miranda & Schaffner, 2016 ). The truth is much more interesting than the myth. Germs do transfer gradually, but they are especially fast at the beginning. That means if you want to know whether your floor-cookie is still edible, you need to think in curves, not in timers.https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/rain-paradox/Mon, 18 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0700https://signal-and-syntax.com/posts/rain-paradox/Early in my programming career, I came across a coding challenge that stuck with me for many years: At the time, I didn’t have the skillset or tools to simulate the problem properly. It became one of the first exercises that nudged me toward a lifelong fascination with modeling the real world through code. The problem wasn’t about recursion or memory management. It was about getting wet, and how fast you move through falling rain.