Marc-Antoine Fardin won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize for a playful application of rheological language to cats. The Deborah number De = τ/T is a standard timescale ratio for materials; assigning a cat a relaxation time is an analogy, not a rigorous material classification.
Finding planets around other stars sounds like it requires a space telescope. It does not — at least not the analogy version. This is the story of how a lamp, a ball, and a smartphone became a peer-reviewed physics classroom experiment, published in The Physics Teacher in 2024.
For an imperfect binary classifier with unequal group base rates, predictive parity and equal false positive and false negative rates cannot all hold simultaneously. This is not an engineering failure. It is a theorem. Choosing which criterion to prioritise is a normative decision, not one made by mathematics alone.
The classroom videography manual we published in 2023 was about filming teaching. Music education has the same word in it — teaching — but it is a fundamentally different recording challenge. Sound is the subject matter. The lesson is often one person, in a practice room. And the feedback cycle the teacher needs to reach is mostly the one that happens when no camera is present. A reflection on what the manual missed, and a software prototype that tries to address part of it.
The Kuramoto model explains how heterogeneous phase oscillators can develop collective synchrony. It is a useful analogy for ensemble timing, applause, and delayed feedback, but it does not by itself predict a universal networked- music latency limit or prove neural coupling between musicians.
A regular heptagon is not constructible by classical compass and straightedge. That theorem can illuminate seven-fold imagery, but it does not document Danny Carey’s compositional or symbolic intent.
Why has twelve-tone equal temperament become so useful? Continued fractions explain its unusually good fifth; cyclic-group structure explains some pitch-class symmetries. Neither fact makes it the only musical possibility.
Socks before shoes is a useful analogy for order-dependent operations. It does not explain quantum uncertainty, and infant sequence memory is not evidence of group-theoretic understanding. The shared structure is narrower: changing operation order can change, or prevent, the result.
On July 22, 2023, a Korean preprint claimed that LK-99 — a copper-doped lead apatite — was a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Within six weeks, converging null results and impurity studies had rejected the claim. The episode is more interesting for what it revealed about the sociology of science than for the compound itself: how a global community self-corrected at extraordinary speed, and how the media managed to fail at conveying uncertainty despite watching it happen in real time.
A cat dropped upside-down rotates 180° and lands on its feet, despite having zero angular momentum throughout. This is not a trick and not a violation of physics. The explanation took physicists from 1894 to 1993 to fully work out, and the answer — a geometric phase arising from the holonomy of a fiber bundle — is the same mathematics that governs the Berry phase in quantum mechanics and the Aharonov-Bohm effect in electrodynamics. We adopted two strays this year. They fall beautifully.