Here is a mystery that needs help from armchair philosophers. Nowadays physics describes the world in terms of “fields”. What, then, is a field? It is weasel math that physicists invented to allow them to ignore the paradox of action at a distance. In the annals of thought the concept of action at a distance […]
Tag Archives: space
Trips in Space and Time
Physics has an ongoing obsession with time. Some of the most important discoveries about time have been made with so-called thought experiments. Gedankenexperimenten, as Albert Einstein called them, have advantages. They need not be practical. They use no apparatus. Anyone can play. Many people have heard of the so-called twin paradox. It’s a Gedankenexperiment.You travel […]
The Mystery of Motion
How do things move? At first glance this may not seem to be a problem. We tend to take motion for granted. But a long-standing mystery lies behind it. Now new answers are becoming clear, with cutting-edge insights into the nature of space and time and matter. Philosophy and physics have long studied motion (aka […]
Iridium Skies Will Become Safer
Iridium Skies Will Be Safer Losing an international flight over the ocean should soon become a thing of the past. This is a perk that we will get from a new satellite array and a new airspace-safety business. The new satellites will do much more than that. Raymond Hall, a former trans-Pacific pilot, says they […]
First Stars
Here’s more news from big telescopes. The galaxy depicted in the illustration is called CR7. It has a football flavor: Google tells me CR7 is Cristiano Ronaldo, star player for famed Spanish soccer team, Real Madrid. The galaxy named after him shows up way down on page three of my search results! That bright patch […]
A New Eye on Our World
Think for a moment about the big picture of physics research. New physics comes from analyzing strange events. That’s why the biggest and most expensive experiments create strange events. Such events usually happen in small volumes for brief times. For example, the $10-billion-dollar 27-km-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) mashes two protons into a subatomic-sized volume […]
Einstein’s Funhouse Mirror
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 […]
Lessons from Lost Worlds
In The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time Brazilian philosopher, Roberto Unger, and American physicist, Lee Smolin, team up to bring unruly mathematics and fanciful multiverses under control. They seek a renaissance of natural philosophy—ideas—as a driver of future physics. Let’s swing along with them. Central to their thesis is the idea of the […]
A New Window on the World Black Hole That Should Not Exist Can Be Explained
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 […]