Science is beautifully interwoven. The light we use to understand the Big Bang is the same kind of light we use to heat up leftovers. The telescopes we use to see distant galaxies focus light the same way an inflated balloon can focus sound. The low pitch of rumbling thunder sounds the way it does for the same reason upstairs neighbors tend to sound like grumbling brutes rather than dainty mice. And so on. The more deeply we investigate the inner workings of our material universe, the more interconnected its processes and its physics seem to be.

In this blog, I want to explore some of those interconnections. My plan is simple: Every week, I’m going to go to this Pictionary word generator, set “Number of Things” to 3, “Category” to either Medium or Hard, depending on how I’m feeling that week, and hit “Generate Pictionary Words.” I’ll pick two of the words that pop up and write a little arc of physical connections from one to the other. I’ll post a screenshot of the result from the website, too, just to keep myself honest.

The goal, I suppose, is to be somewhere between an educational read and a good, regular writing exercise. Hopefully it turns out to be both. I can’t promise perfect rigor; I’ll do my best to source claims and double-check my writing, but there’s always a chance I read something wrong in my haste or just write something wrong. I certainly won’t always use semicolons correctly. Why expect anything more from my physics? If someone reads the blog and points out an error, I’ll correct it in the next post—and if that error breaks the chain from one topic to the next, I’ll find another way to connect them. I’ll also thank them for reading, because that’s about the nicest thing a person can do when another humans writes something.

On that note, whether you’ve read this far or skimmed to the end of this introductory post, thank you for reading.