The Planck-scale physics story begins long ago. In 1901 German physicist Max Planck publishes an explanation for strange properties of radiant heat. He says its energy is quantized. In other words, it radiates in distinct little bits. He sees this as a mathematical convenience and doesn’t really believe it. His math requires a constant he […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By 1900 the speed of light was known to be a constant. Many experiments had measured it. In 1905 Albert Einstein took a giant leap forward. He said this cosmic speed limit—denoted by the symbol c—is not just a measured fact; it is a fundamental property of the universe. This became the basis of his […]
What is mass? An apple has it. Put one on a supermarket scale: Earth’s gravity guarantees you pay in precise proportion. In 1684 Isaac Newton does the math for mass and gravity. In 1915 Albert Einstein cleans it up. But a deep problem remains untouched: Up close and personal, neither Isaac nor Albert nor anyone […]
For more than a hundred years a metric has been seen as a good thing. Turns out it’s not; indeed it’s definitely bad. First, what’s a metric? That gets complicated; it’s an assumed property of space. It’s like a ruler science uses to make measurements of many kinds, like lengths of lines (both straight and […]