How do things move? At first glance this may not seem to be a problem. We tend to take motion for granted. But a long-standing mystery lies behind it. Now new answers are becoming clear, with cutting-edge insights into the nature of space and time and matter. Philosophy and physics have long studied motion (aka […]
What is time? This is the central mystery of physics. One might think that physics would give a clear answer. Not so. Although most physics is about change, it has lost touch with time. Indeed physics now cloaks time in myths. Let’s see what we can find behind them. British physicist Edward Anderson says: ‘The […]
Strategy—as I use the term—is all about survival in a situation. So much of what we know of it relates to war. But the world has many other life-and-death situations. Seeing them through the eyes of those who choose to live can cast new light on complex questions. Recent news gives us an example: Why […]
Strategy (in its strict sense) is about survival in a situation. I have studied it for forty years. The Syrian situation seems to center on Bashar al-Assad’s survival. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin—also a survivor—is making a move. The news says Russia is flying planes and tanks and troops into Latakia, a port city in […]
There are billions of black holes in our universe. Maybe gazillions. Stephen Hawking says they give off a strange kind of radiation. So we should see them, right? Here’s a cosmological Catch-22. To set the scene, the Albert Einstein Institute says: ‘If, in our universe’s fiery youth, “mini black holes” of very little mass had […]
Nineteen times out of twenty. We come across these numbers almost daily in the news. But behind them there’s an old problem. In the 1800s British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli famously said that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Or so American author Mark Twain claimed. Too bad for his story that Disraeli died […]
Good news for patients who need cancer radiotherapy about ways to devise more-effective and less-harmful cancer treatments using radiation. Also, good news for radiobiology researchers who design experiments to better understand and measure what is actually going on when radiation is used to kill cells. Both flow from a definitive book published by Canadian biophysicist […]
Here’s more news from big telescopes. The galaxy depicted in the illustration is called CR7. It has a football flavor: Google tells me CR7 is Cristiano Ronaldo, star player for famed Spanish soccer team, Real Madrid. The galaxy named after him shows up way down on page three of my search results! That bright patch […]
No doubt you never thought about this question. But suddenly it is hot science news. The answer that we get is: Yes. And it has interesting implications. The story starts with the odd properties of carbon. (It’s our story too because they are the basis for life, not to mention much of our industry.) Carbon […]