On January 5, 2020, the Earth will be the closest it will ever get to the Sun in the 21st century, at a nice and cozy distance of 91,398,199 miles. The pair will be about a million and a half miles nearer to each other than they are on average, which is over six times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Since it’s in vogue to call large full Moons “supermoons”, I would like to dub this event the “supersun”. Of course, there’s a lot to the hows and whys and what it means other than “it’s big and close”, so I wanted to spend some time talking about it.
Continue reading The Supersun of 2020Category Archives: Physics
Applying Physics to The Avengers
(WARNING: The following post contains physics as well as spoilers for a certain film.)
A couple months ago, I was watching The Avengers for the third time, and when the portal opened to start the alien invasion, I noticed that they kinda ignored the physics of the whole thing. The most obvious one (at least for me) was that for some reason none of the air was escaping into the vacuum of space. In addition, the Earth should have a gravitational pull on the space station, yet that doesn’t appear to be visible. And so, for whatever silly reason, I decided to actually crunch the numbers on the whole thing.