This post is inspired by this question asked by user Akash on Physics.SE in which he asks whether humans walking and driving around on the surface of the Earth have an effect on the Earth's rotation. In my answer, I estimated that the total moment of inertia of the entire population of the Earth, plus …

The word "field" is sexy in modern physics partly because it appears in the term quantum field theory, and quantum field theories form the basis for our current understanding of particle physics down to incredibly small length scales. But fields have been useful in physics for well over a century. For example, one of the …

In this post, we will introduce Green's functions as a tool for solving ordinary differential equations. Green's functions allow us to convert differential equations that we don't know how to solve into integral equations that we do know how to solve. Let's see how this works by diving into an example. We consider a physics …