Ant-Man is back this week in a new sci-fi movie. Rumor says your favorite shrinking superhero’s set to shrink even smaller than before. This could set a trend. Will we soon see Ant-Man in action all the way down to Planck-scale? The sixties comics and the 2015 movie Ant-Man were about scale and a suit […]
Tag Archives: quantum
At last an answer: What happened at the Big Bang
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 […]
Stephen Hawking’s recipe for the universe may be good religion but it’s bad physics
Stephen Hawking says he has a deep belief. He calls it nothing. He says this is good physics. I say it it is not. He says it is real. I say it is only an idea. Explaining his own curiosity he says, ‘I wanted to understand how the universe began.’ Many physicists see this as […]
Twin mysteries: A ghostly fundamental particle and a physicist who disappeared after saying its antiparticle may not exist
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 […]
Thinking of moving: Solving this key puzzle of philosophy—and the central problem of physics
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 […]
Physics has long been confused about the concept of ‘now’. New insights show that it is fundamental.
A sense of Now is the universal human experience. Yet modern physics cannot handle the concept of the present moment. Indeed relativity—our great theory of space and time—insisted on embedding it within a time dimension and then crossbreeding this dimension with three space dimensions to make spacetime. This was a blunder. It blocks progress. Physics […]
No, the universe is not driven by energy. Sir Roger Penrose almost gets it.
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 […]
At last there is a solution to the elementary-charge problem and it turns out to be stunningly simple.
It has long been a deep and frustrating puzzle. The charge on the electron, symbol e, is said to be an elementary quantum. That is, neither the electron nor its charge is ever seen to be subdivided. Lots of measurements reveal the charge on every electron has exactly the same value. For more than a […]
Taking Lessons from the Universe
Arithmetic is fundamental to science; but we tend to take it for granted. Few realize its foundations are shaky. Now there are exciting ways to firm them up. We are sold a knowledge pyramid like this: Sciences rest on a foundation of physics; physics on math; math on arithmetic. And arithmetic on logic— but, actually, […]