More and more physicists are starting to ask: How did the universe begin? Now a battle is breaking out among them. It is about “The Force” that some say flattened out the universe before the Big Bang. This force is called cosmological inflation. The establishment (dare I call it Empire?) claims it is ‘the dominant […]
Twin mysteries arose around 1937 when Italian theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana suggested neutrinos are their own antiparticles. Soon afterward he took the night ferry from Palermo to Napoli and vanished, leaving us to ask: What happened to him; and was he right? The Standard Model has a place for every known elementary particle. It says […]
We see things move. We tend to take motion for granted. But when we think about it closely, the notion of motion becomes a deep philosophical problem: How can something move? In his seminal 1949 work on the origins of modern science, British historian Herbert Butterfield said, ‘Of all the intellectual problems which the human […]
Emergence is the source of all the laws of physics. Strange spots called fairy circles illustrate the way emergence brings new fundamental properties into the world, including space and matter. There are millions of them. Bare patches in grasslands, remarkably well-defined, regular in shape and spacing, and ordered in a roughly-hexagonal array over long distances, […]
Physicists have a mental image of the way the universe works. Most think of it as driven by energy. Even leading British physicist Sir Roger Penrose falls for this. He should know better. The conventional wisdom begins with all mass of the universe exploding out in the Big Bang. No-one knows why it would do […]
Physics has long been said to say we have no free will. Up close and dirty this is a false argument. And the whole issue is on the brink of fundamental change. A deeper grasp of physics brings together many threads to explain free will. In a recent article in The Atlantic Steven Cave says: […]
Planck-scale physics is not yet in its infancy. It is in gestation. Arranging a successful birth requires a strategic discipline. Walk before you try to run! For some reason (we will get to that) physicists seem doomed to run. Indeed—to milk the metaphor for maybe more than it is worth—they essay hundred-meter sprints before they […]
What is mass? An apple has it. Put one on a supermarket scale: Earth’s gravity guarantees you pay in precise proportion. In 1684 Isaac Newton does the math for mass and gravity. In 1915 Albert Einstein cleans it up. But a deep problem remains untouched: Up close and personal, neither Isaac nor Albert nor anyone […]
Teleporting may be an everyday event throughout the universe. Physicists experimentally demonstrated it some time ago. Recently they set a new distance record: six kilometers. Sounds like progress. Problem is that nobody knows: How does it work? ‘Beam us up, Scotty’ are the magic words that Star Trek fans know make it happen. In Captain […]