It all began so easily. Physics uses math so it was natural for physicists to look for math that is convenient. This led physics down a dead-end street. Fixing it could lead to a huge opportunity. The beginning goes back to the 1600s. Having revolutionized what would soon be called physics, Isaac Newton fell into […]
Quantum gravity is all the rage in physics these days. There are books about it but none say what quantum gravity is. And none report real progress. We should be upset about this. Really! Quantum gravity tries to reconcile our two immensely successful—but mutually inconsistent—theories about the world: quantum theory and relativity. A quantum theory […]
What exactly happened when the universe was born? What happened at the Big Bang? is the title of last summer’s popular science exhibition sponsored by six leading British universities and the Royal Society in London. Amid much fascinating information, the exhibition’s answer was: We don’t know. Yet, as Science Seen’s readers will recall, that answer […]
Physics has a fundamental problem. In studying space and things in space, it needs to make measurements. To do this it needs some kind of ruler. It’s called a “metric”. There are many useful metrics. So before doing anything physics must choose the metric to use. The problem then is physics is not studying the […]
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 […]
Reader Stevo asks a deep question: ‘If space is granular and Planck size is the shortest “length” then what geometric “shape” is a single Planck “thingie”?’ Geometry studies size and shape. Last week we saw Bernhard Riemann in 1856 divining how to do geometry in either of two different kinds of space: continuous space and […]
Physics beat out chemistry to become the Senior Science in the second physics revolution starting around 1900. A hundred years ago this revolution held huge promise. Now historians of science call it the Unfinished Revolution. What went wrong? It is a strange but, in the end, illuminating five-part story. Part One: In 1851 mathematician Bernhard […]
Scientists are building better ways to look back into time. A discovery announced last week may be the most exciting thing in physics: a big black hole (called SDSS J0010+2802). It’s not just big; for its age it is a monster. It compels us to rethink our current concepts of the universe. How can we […]