serkan zorba's blog

It is the mainstay of our electronics technology, from light bulbs to computers. It is also the particle whose dynamics controls all chemical reactions, and our biochemistry and genetics, from the firing of neurons to the information encoding in DNA. A lot of things would not exist if it were not for the electron, one of the main constituents of the atom. It is critical for physics; it is critical for chemistry; it is critical for biology; and it is critical for our civilization. There is no other subatomic particle that is so singularly and pervasively beneficial to our existence and civilization. So, I propound that we celebrate such a prominent entity—in an effort to raise awareness about the critical role it plays in our lives and civilization, and our vital dependence on this seemingly simple (fundamental) but truly versatile particle—by establishing a World Electron Day. This would be a focused opportunity for our youth and general public to appreciate, and raise aw...

The famous Basel problem is an infinite series of the form: It was first posed by the Italian mathematician Pietro Mengoli in 1644. Read on >>

Partly based on my essay:  God is Random: A Novel Argument for the Existence of God , European Journal of Science and Theology (2016). I had the original idea in around 2005 but could not get a chance to present it as an essay until recently. Featured on  islamicity.org  and  iviews.com . The perennial debate between the two camps of Creationism and Evolution is based on a fallacious assumption about chance, randomness, and God. The creationist, by whom I mean the anti-evolution type, shuns the ideas of chance and randomness, as for him/her they are the antithesis of what the concepts of God, order, harmony, and “intelligent design” are all about. Very often when creationists assault Darwin’s theory, they do it by pointing out how it is all based on random chance mutations, and thus an anathema to the notion of God. “How can order of high complexity come out of chance and randomness?” they rhetorically ask. Read on>> ...

Below is my attempt at explaining the problems of dark energy and dark matter that I developed in 2010. The two most outstanding unsolved problems of modern cosmology today are the problems of dark energy and dark matter. Together these two problems imply that about a whopping 96% of the energy content of the universe is simply unaccounted for within the reigning paradigm of modern cosmology. T he dark energy problem has been around only for about two decades, while the dark matter problem has gone unsolved for about 90 years. Various ideas have been put forward, including some fantastic ones such as the presence of ghostly fields and particles. Some ideas even suggest the breakdown of the standard Newton-Einstein gravity for the relevant scales. Although some progress has been made particularly in the area of dark matter with the nonstandard gravity theories, the problems still stand unresolved.   Read on>>