Tag Archives: gravity

The Origins of Einstein’s Ideas

Albert Einstein is mostly known for physics theories. Or for E=mc2 (though he didn’t write it in that way). But his biggest contribution was the boldness, number, depth, diversity, originality and sometimes sheer courage of his ideas. Every one of these ideas was controversial at the time; now they underpin the world economy. What’s the […]

WIMPed Out?

The mystery of the missing WIMPs is heading for a crisis. It’s looking like the reason we can’t find them is they don’t exist. Most people never heard of them. What is a WIMP? It is Dark Matter by another name. It stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. They must be weakly interacting because no-one’s […]

LIGO’s Tiny Twitch is a Big Deal

It may be the top science story of this century so far (though I hope an even bigger one is coming): Physicists detected gravitational waves; you can hear them here. This discovery has profound implications for the future of cosmology. It will affect our lives in ways we cannot yet conceive. It was a long […]

Extreme Physics

In its search for new discoveries physics seeks extremes. Now an inconceivably vast explosion is in the news. What can it teach us? First let’s be clear about the extremes that physics seeks. They want information about the very small, smaller than atoms for example, and the very large, larger than our Sun and other […]

Hawking’s Missing Black-Hole Radiation

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 […]

First Stars

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 […]

Do Stars Make Buckyballs?

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 […]

Go Jets Go!

How about those jets! Jets in space are hot in science news these days. They are hot because they are a huge problem. How huge? Try thinking of a billion times a billion miles. Let’s start small. Archerfish find breakfast using water jets. Their jets are longer than their body size. How they shoot their […]

Going Up?

It is ‘an engineering project on a gargantuan scale.’ So says American physicist, P.K. Aravind. ‘By far the largest megaproject ever undertaken,’ says another American physicist, Adam Brown. Each is writing of an antigravity device called a space elevator. The picture shows how it’s supposed to work. The centrifugal pull of a counterweight holds up […]