Philosophy involves the study of ideas. Yet some (like Stephen Hawking) say philosophy is dead. Others (such as Neil deGrasse Tyson) say philosophy may be alive but its ideas have no use in physics. Both of these exemplars hold the degree of Doctor of Philosophy so they should know. But so do I and I […]
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 […]
These days we all have a stake in physics. It’s not just that physics costs and we, the public, pay. Physics drives our economy. We should be concerned when physicists start writing about how badly it is going. When they write books about this, we should worry. It’s almost a decade since American physicist Lee […]
It is ‘an engineering project on a gargantuan scale.’ So says American physicist, P.K. Aravind. ‘By far the largest megaproject ever undertaken,’ says another American physicist, Adam Brown. Each is writing of an antigravity device called a space elevator. The picture shows how it’s supposed to work. The centrifugal pull of a counterweight holds up […]
In your spaceship, far from any star, can you tell if you are moving? Do you even know what moving means? Physicists thought about this long before we made our way into near-Earth space. And they tangled it up with a concept called the æther. The word aether was once widely understood. Winston Churchill uses […]
We need a New Year’s Revolution. (No typo: Revolution with a v.) Last week I suggested that the Large Hadron Collider may find no superparticles and that this could lead to a big change in physics. Indeed a common theme in last year’s posts was the need to complete the Physics Revolution that began a […]
The idea of the universe as a single thing has roots in ancient societies. It speaks to our existential questions: Where are we? What is our relation to the world? In the fifth century BCE, Zeno of Elea ponders whether the world is one thing or many. He says the concept of plurality is a […]
Sir Isaac Newton was a serious two timer long before that term took on its modern meaning. In 1687 he spoke of two kinds of time: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration; [and] relative, apparent […]
Last week’s post looked at how physics turned its back on time. It had consequences. Today, leading physicists speak of time in despairing terms. Some propose to abandon it. Though buried deep in science journals, this situation eats at the roots of our economy. Is time lost beyond recall? Let’s recap: In 1905 Albert Einstein […]