More and more physicists are starting to ask: How did the universe begin? Now a battle is breaking out among them. It is about “The Force” that some say flattened out the universe before the Big Bang. This force is called cosmological inflation. The establishment (dare I call it Empire?) claims it is ‘the dominant […]
Science Seen
Physicist and Time One author Colin Gillespie helps you understand your world.Things that go bump in the night: What happens when BIG black holes collide
Fifty years ago black holes were science fiction. Today they are observational physics and what we see is stranger than fiction. They send us messages about space and time. Black holes form when the matter of a star more massive than our Sun collapses under its own gravity. Other black holes may have formed in […]
Twin mysteries: A ghostly fundamental particle and a physicist who disappeared after saying its antiparticle may not exist
Twin mysteries arose around 1937 when Italian theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana suggested neutrinos are their own antiparticles. Soon afterward he took the night ferry from Palermo to Napoli and vanished, leaving us to ask: What happened to him; and was he right? The Standard Model has a place for every known elementary particle. It says […]
Genius, Einstein and much ado about nothing: Let’s fix the fallacy of empty space
We think of space as empty. It’s not. Quite aside from stray hydrogen atoms and fleeting quantum particles in the vacuum, space is substantial. It has mass. Indeed Planck-satellite measurements now show space is three times denser than the average of the universe’s matter. Yet like the rest of us most physicists still treat space […]
Thinking of moving: Solving this key puzzle of philosophy—and the central problem of physics
We see things move. We tend to take motion for granted. But when we think about it closely, the notion of motion becomes a deep philosophical problem: How can something move? In his seminal 1949 work on the origins of modern science, British historian Herbert Butterfield said, ‘Of all the intellectual problems which the human […]
Understanding time travel . . . and travel time – Part II
Time is just a tale we tell ourselves to help us manage motion. Last week’s post rocketed you at near light speed to swiftly tour the center of our galaxy. The round trip took you about an hour. Arriving back you found the Earth was 50,000 years older. Time travel— predicted by Albert Einstein in […]
Understanding time travel . . . and travel time
Albert Einstein predicted time travel in 1905. It was demonstrated in 1971 and many times since. The twin paradox provides a dramatic illustration of time travel: You travel to a distant star and return to find you are far into your twin’s future. No-one has done this; but it is a real effect. It has […]
A new look at the tiny photon answers some vexing questions and offers a big opportunity.
Albert Einstein introduced the photon to the world more than 100 years ago. Though physicists doubted—even ridiculed—his idea for years, it set off a scientific revolution. The photon now underpins foundations of the world economy. Yet to this day it is a mystery. Even when we know a photon has gone from A to B […]
Physics has long been confused about the concept of ‘now’. New insights show that it is fundamental.
A sense of Now is the universal human experience. Yet modern physics cannot handle the concept of the present moment. Indeed relativity—our great theory of space and time—insisted on embedding it within a time dimension and then crossbreeding this dimension with three space dimensions to make spacetime. This was a blunder. It blocks progress. Physics […]