Is there life out there? has long been an issue. Recently the issue has been shifting to: How many planets harbour life? Winston Churchill (with whom I’m proud to share a publisher) was among the first to ask this question. In 1939—shortly before he became Prime Minister of Britain—he penned an unpublished work of careful […]
Vera Rubin was a very rare bird forty years ago: a female astronomer. Galaxies were her life’s work. In her day the notion that there are many galaxies outside our own was only a few decades old. Inspired by her ‘just plain old curiosity’, her PhD thesis suggested galaxies are not scattered randomly: they come […]
Emergence is the source of all the laws of physics. Strange spots called fairy circles illustrate the way emergence brings new fundamental properties into the world, including space and matter. There are millions of them. Bare patches in grasslands, remarkably well-defined, regular in shape and spacing, and ordered in a roughly-hexagonal array over long distances, […]
These days the halls of physics are so vast the first problem for those who seek new physics is: Where is one to begin? History shows physics offers signposts of a sort: The path to new physics starts with what is wrong with old physics. At the beginning of the twentieth century only a few […]
Plato set out to explain everything with five perfect shapes. His theory died centuries ago. But in 2013 a shape called the amplituhedron burst upon the science scene. Physicists find it performs a miracle. But they don’t know how. The answer may hold a deep truth physics can sense but can’t quite find. Understanding the […]
Physicists have a mental image of the way the universe works. Most think of it as driven by energy. Even leading British physicist Sir Roger Penrose falls for this. He should know better. The conventional wisdom begins with all mass of the universe exploding out in the Big Bang. No-one knows why it would do […]
Seas are rising. It is no longer a question of whether this will be a problem. It is a matter of: How high and how fast? Recent science has both uncertainty and answers. Together they explain why geopolitics may soon become a much more common word. Science studies evidence of two kinds of steady sea-level […]
A recent estimate tells us the next deep new idea in physics could lead to a quadrillion-dollar economic boom. This gives us a huge self-interest in moving new physics along. How does new physics happen? Specifically, what we are waiting for is Planck-scale physics. It deals with what goes on at a scale far smaller […]
Physics has long been said to say we have no free will. Up close and dirty this is a false argument. And the whole issue is on the brink of fundamental change. A deeper grasp of physics brings together many threads to explain free will. In a recent article in The Atlantic Steven Cave says: […]