Category Archives: Physics

Is it possible to build a wind-powered vehicle that can continuously travel faster than the wind, in the same direction as the wind? Like the airplane-on-treadmill problem and the Feynman sprinkler problem, this question has spawned endless Internet arguments. Continue reading →

Electromagnetic radiation is something that has often eluded my intuition. Electrical engineering depends on numerous abstractions: current flowing in wires like a fluid, capacitance/inductance in lieu of near field interactions, antenna theory to model far field interactions, etc. These abstractions … Continue reading →

You may have heard of the incident where a helium leak suddenly disabled many iPhones at a medical facility. The root cause — tiny MEMS oscillators being susceptible to helium leaking into their hermetically-sealed casings — is interesting but not … Continue reading →

For a long time I thought of the H field as being generated by free currents only. The problem with this view is that it leads us to make erroneous assumptions. We know from the definition of H that:   … Continue reading →

One of the simplest solutions for sending measurement instruments up into the stratosphere is a rubber balloon filled with hydrogen or helium. While the physics of such a balloon would seem to be simple, there are actually some interesting considerations.