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 […]
Tag Archives: mathematics
One Thing About All This . . .
We need a New Year’s Revolution. (No typo: Revolution with a v.) Last week I suggested that the Large Hadron Collider may find no superparticles and that this could lead to a big change in physics. Indeed a common theme in last year’s posts was the need to complete the Physics Revolution that began a […]
The Supersymmetry Calamity
Sounds like a The Big Bang Theory episode. Maybe someday it will be. But even in the fields of physics, supersymmetry is esoteric. What is it? What is its calamity? Why should you care? What it is is an idea: Particular superheroes! Here’s their story. The Standard Model is the crown jewel of physics. It […]
Losing Time
Time matters to us all. We are defined by time. Mostly we don’t think about it. But it’s easier to think about than you might expect. Time became important in the 15th century. It came to be synonymous with clocks. Accurate chronometers would help sailors figure where they were at sea. Many made bold voyages—or […]
Ebola Concepts You May Want to Understand
Ebola is a scary virus. Most know it is deadly. It is an international problem. We need evidence-based action to solve it, not play-on-fear border closings (c.f., SARS and swine flu) that do no good but damage the economy. We need a public conversation on ebola and it might be aided by some terms you […]
Making Sense of Space
Making Sense of Space Last week we looked closer at the crisis in cosmology. Physicists are inventing increasingly implausible models to describe what they observe. Clinging to descriptions, they abandon understanding. Indeed some heavy-hitter physicists propose to abandon physics. For example, American Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg says: Now we may be at a new turning […]
Thinking the Unthinkable: How Big Is the Universe?
It’s a question many ponder. We know the universe is big. But is it finite or infinite? And why does this matter? It’s 1584. Dominican friar and Neapolitan philosopher Giordano Bruno publishes De l’infinito universo et Mondi. He argues that God, being infinite, would create an infinite universe. He has no evidence to back his […]
AC/DC and Tesla’s Ashes
A question guitar-player Swarup Sinhato posted on Time One’s Facebook Page gets me thinking. He wonders why we hear so little about Tesla these days. I’m not sure. But Nikola Tesla seems to have a way of crossing my trail. (Of course it’s vice versa.) In my teens I was intrigued by Tesla. I built electrical transformers and my own Tesla […]
Einstein and the Death of Physics
Motion is smooth, as any eye can see. In 1738, Scottish philosopher David Hume could―with little chance of challenge―say: ‘The infinite divisibility of space implies that of time, as is evident from the nature of motion.’ But physics now knows that, at scales far smaller than an atom, space isn’t smooth and motion must […]