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 […]
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 […]
These days the halls of physics are so vast the first problem for those who seek new physics is: Where is one to begin? History shows physics offers signposts of a sort: The path to new physics starts with what is wrong with old physics. At the beginning of the twentieth century only a few […]
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: […]
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 […]
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. – J.R.R. Tolkien How can we possibly develop Planck-scale physics? Since 1899 we’ve known that Planck scale is incredibly tiny. We need to go there; it’s where the real action is. New theories (such as string theory) tap […]
Of all questions the most fundamental is: What was the initial condition of the universe? It is fundamental for philosophy and religion. It is even more fundamental for physics. Unfortunately it is a realm where physics fears to tread. Yet we may need to tread this realm to find the much-sought Theory of Everything or […]
Precise measurements say the universe is expanding. The measurements don’t show new matter. They show new space. This leaves those who think of space as empty with a conceptual puzzle. As cosmologist Marcus Chown once said, ‘How can nothing expand?’ Muralidharan Thiyagarajan, who is a systems engineer with Infosys in Chennai, has another way to […]
In recent posts we’ve touched upon the sorry state of physics. ‘Sorry state’ is not just my view; many physicists and science writers see this the same way. Physics has now all but lost experimental contact with the real world. What went wrong? How can we fix it? And why should we care? What went […]