You can’t be 100% certain. Werner Heisenberg made this point in his experiments with subatomic particles. Heisenberg stated while you can approximate both the velocity and position of a particle at a specific instant in time, it is impossible to exactly measure both. The more tightly you focus in on one measuring one aspect, the […]
Dead Cat Marketing
Posted on November 19, 2009 //
Suppose your business sells something to a customer. Following the sale, you gather no information about them. Instead you send the customer out the door and off into the universe, hoping they will come back again someday. In the time that follows, you make no direct or indirect attempt to determine if the customer is […]
The Physics of Marketing – The Doppler Effect
Posted on September 11, 2009 //
Have you ever wondered why music blaring out of an approaching car changes in pitch as it passes by you and then moves further away from you. This phenomenon can be described by the Doppler Effect, named for Austrian physicist Christian Doppler. Who knew Doppler was more than just the ridiculous brand name of the […]
The Physics of Marketing – Fraunhofer Diffraction
Posted on March 6, 2009 //
Joseph von Fraunhofer lived a short, difficult life, but that did not stop him from becoming one of the world’s most talented makers of optical glass and an expert on the dispersion of light. According to Wikipedia, he was orphaned at age 11. Fraunhofer then went to work as an apprentice for a glass maker. […]
The Physics of Marketing – Bragg’s law
Posted on January 29, 2009 //
Born in 1890, William Lawrence Bragg was the son of a Sir William Henry Bragg, a professor of science and mathematics. So in his work, William Lawrence Bragg was simply carrying on the family business. In 1915 the two father and son shared a Nobel Prize for their work which involved using X-rays to analyze […]
The Physics of Marketing – Snell’s Law
Posted on November 21, 2008 //
Willebrord Snellius saw the light. Well actually he saw the light do funny things, and then went on to describe why it was so. The output was Snell’s Law, which describes how light travels at different speeds through different substances. Ever wonder why that drinking straw looks different in the glass of water than it […]
The Physics of Marketing – Huygens’ Principle
Posted on September 26, 2008 //
You would think that if you did something like discover the rings of Saturn, discover Saturn’s largest moon – Titan – and then go on to invent and patent the first pendulum clock, that you would be a household name. Now assume you not only did all those things, AND also collaborated with Robert Hooke, […]
The Physics of Marketing – Newton’s Theory of Color
Posted on September 5, 2008 //
It never occurred to me that someone invented the color wheel, but in fact Isaac Newton did just that and more with his Theory of Color. Newton used prisms to show that white light was actually made by a combination of the “ROY G BIV” colors of the rainbow. At that time there were varying […]
The Physics of Marketing – Chaos Theory
Posted on August 1, 2008 //
Chaos Theory states that little things can mean a lot. For example, the wind created from a butterfly flapping its wings in the jungle could result in a tornado forming in Southwestern Ohio. Chaos Theory is why the weather can only be predicted for a few days out. There are so many variables that come […]
The Physics of Marketing – Brownian Motion
Posted on July 23, 2008 //
In 1827 Robert Brown was trying to observe the fertilization process of flowers under a microscope when he noticed slight movements in the grains of pollen, which were suspended in water. “Were the particles alive?” “No, so how did they move?” The answer is Brownian Motion. The pollen on the microscope’s slide was suspended in […]