Strange all this Difference should be ’Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee! — John Byrom (1692 – 1763) Twist and shout … Come on and work it on out — Phil Medley & Bert Berns (1961) Australian physicist Sundance Bilson-Thompson made a stunning discovery. He starts with a simple entity—a tiny twist. With the quirky humor that […]
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 […]
Plato set out to explain everything with five perfect shapes. His theory died centuries ago. But in 2013 a shape called the amplituhedron burst upon the science scene. Physicists find it performs a miracle. But they don’t know how. The answer may hold a deep truth physics can sense but can’t quite find. Understanding the […]
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 […]
The Large Hadron Collider or LHC was to find new particles. Aside from possibly the expected Higgs boson the report from the physics front is a deafening silence. This silence says a lot. At some $10 billion, the LHC is the world’s biggest and most costly science experiment ever. It pushes atom-smashing to new energy […]
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 […]
As Chubby Checker sang and showed a 1960s generation, “Let’s do the twist.” Twist is not only an important thing. It is the only thing. Look around; all that you can see is made of twist. How so? The explanation starts with atoms and takes us through topology and Solitaire to the final fate of […]
When did time begin? Science now has an answer. How did time begin? For millennia this was a subject for speculation, little of it based on science. But there is now a philosophic answer. Space came first. Time began soon after space. Very soon. Here’s how. From recent measurements we know that time began 13,799,000,000 […]