Before you read this, I suggest you read posts 16.4 and 16.16. In post 16.16 we met the concept of a gravitational field. Are there other kinds of fields? Yes – two that we encounter in everyday life are the electric field and the magnetic field. Both arise because some objects can have a property… Continue reading 16.25 Electrical charge

Before you read this, I suggest you read post 16.7. A scientist measures the temperature at which a liquid boils and gets the result 80oC. This result is worthless unless we know how reliable it is. We can gain some idea of the reliability from the number of figures given in the result (see post… Continue reading 16.24 Accuracy and precision

Before you read this post, I suggest you read posts 16.20 and 16.21. Power is often confused with energy (post 16.21) and sometimes with force (post 16.13). But power is the rate at which something does work (see post 16.20). This is another way of saying that it is the rate at which something converts… Continue reading 16.23 Power

Ludwig Boltzmann was a successful nineteenth-century physicist who extended the work of James Clerk Maxwell in understanding how the movement of atoms and molecules explains many of the properties of things. He was a professor at the University of Munich and later at the University of Vienna. His greatest success was explaining the nature of… Continue reading 16.22 Science can’t explain everything