Atmosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere: challenging relationships

By Luca Fiorani The story of our planet is a story of relationships among its parts. Let’s focus on three of them, atmosphere, biosphere and anthroposphere. 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen was not present in the atmosphere and human life would not have been possible. Then, thanks to the small contribution of countless and (apparently)…

The texture of the cosmos

By Luca Fiorani For sure you know that all matter in the universe is made of particles like protons, neutrons and electrons. Probably you also know that all radiation is made of photons, particles of light. Maybe you even know that fields – gravitational, electric and magnetic ones – are also made of particles, called…

Maxwell’s equations

By Luca Fiorani Maxwell’s equations are, without any doubt, one of the immortal monuments of physics. You can write them on a bar bill, yet they explain all electromagnetic phenomena, from the operation of your smartphone, to the magnetic field of neutron stars. As usual in science, they are not the sudden achievement of a…

Simply bosons …

By Luca Fiorani The Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa suggested in 1935 that the force between elementary particles, the building blocks of all matter in our universe, can be explained as an exchange of a special kind of elementary particles, similar to two kids who come closer to pass each other a ball while playing. Later, the exchanged…