Physics has an ongoing obsession with time. Some of the most important discoveries about time have been made with so-called thought experiments. Gedankenexperimenten, as Albert Einstein called them, have advantages. They need not be practical. They use no apparatus. Anyone can play. Many people have heard of the so-called twin paradox. It’s a Gedankenexperiment.You travel […]
New science is using genetic analysis to discover more of who we are. We now know most of our cells are bacteria. Until recently we knew little about what they do. Mostly we get rid of them as best we can. This turns out to be a major oops. In a previous post I reviewed […]
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 […]