Physics Alphabet
In classical mechanics, this lowercase letter stands for the coefficient of friction.
What is Mu (μ)?
Known as the "Dog Star," it is the brightest star in the night sky, and its faint companion was one of the first white dwarfs ever discovered.
What is Sirius?
In a famous thought experiment illustrating quantum superposition, this physicist's hypothetical pet feline is simultaneously alive and dead inside a box.
Who is Erwin Schrödinger?
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, this 2026 sci-fi film stars Ryan Gosling as a man who wakes up in space and has to team up with an alien named Rocky.
What is Project Hail Mary?
If you break this standard SI unit of energy down into its fundamental metric base units, you get one kilogram-meter squared per second squared.
What is a Joule?
In wave mechanics, this lowercase letter measures the distance between consecutive wave peaks.
What is Lambda (λ)?
Say its name three times and this red supergiant in Orion might just go supernova, a fate astronomers briefly suspected when it drastically dimmed in 2019.
What is Betelgeuse?
Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally discovered this type of electromagnetic radiation, giving humanity its first spooky look at the living human skeleton.
What are X-rays?
This 2015 Ridley Scott film accurately depicted the orbital mechanics of a "slingshot" maneuver, using Earth's gravity to send the Hermes spacecraft back to the Red Planet.
What is The Martian?
Named after the 17th-century Italian physicist who invented the barometer, this unit is defined as exactly 1/760th of a standard atmosphere.
What is a Torr?
When paired with a zero subscript, this lowercase letter represents the permittivity of free space.
What is Epsilon (ϵ)?
When a massive star's iron core abruptly collapses, it triggers this spectacularly violent explosion that outshines entire galaxies.
What is a supernova?
Einstein famously coined this five-word phrase to describe quantum entanglement, expressing his deep skepticism of the phenomenon.
What is "spooky action at a distance"?
Nobel laureate Kip Thorne provided the math that allowed this 2014 Christopher Nolan film to create the first physically accurate CGI rendering of a supermassive black hole.
What is Interstellar?
Despite what Han Solo claimed about the Kessel Run, this astronomical unit is strictly a measure of distance, equal to about 3.26 light-years.
What is a parsec?
In special relativity, this lowercase letter represents the Lorentz factor, which approaches infinity as velocity approaches the speed of light (c).
What is Gamma (γ)?
If you fall feet-first into a stellar-mass black hole, extreme tidal forces will stretch you into a long, thin string; A gruesome demise given this pasta-themed name.
What is spaghettification?
Because they only interact via the weak force and gravity, these notoriously elusive leptons are often referred to as "ghost particles."
What are neutrinos?
Based on a true story, this 1999 film follows high schooler Homer Hickam as he masters aerodynamics and parabolic trajectories to build amateur rockets in a 1950s coal town.
What is October Sky?
This temperature scale is the spooky imperial twin of Kelvin; it starts at absolute zero, but its degrees scale exactly like Fahrenheit.
What is Rankine?
The uppercase version denotes magnetic flux, while the lowercase version typically represents the azimuthal angle in spherical coordinates.
What is Phi (Φ/ϕ)?
Discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, these rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron stars were initially nicknamed "LGM-1" for "Little Green Men" due to their precise, clock-like radio pulses.
What is a pulsar?
We can't see it or interact with it, but this "ghostly" invisible substance is believed to make up about 85% of all the mass in the universe.
What is dark matter?
In the 1995 film Apollo 13, the crew's life-threatening crisis begins with the historically accurate rupture of a cryogenic tank holding this specific element.
What is liquid oxygen?
Created during an MIT fraternity prank in 1958, this hilarious unit of length equals exactly 5 feet 7 inches and is still officially used to measure the Harvard Bridge.
What is a Smoot?