"Perhaps the past, if looked upon with care and hindsight, may teach us where we possibly took a wrong turn"

Quantum Frontiers

When I search the internet on physics blogs, a website called Genius Lab Gear comes top of my search results. They list the 13 best physics blogs in 2025. Top of the list is Quantum Frontiers. It’s a blog by Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM). The About page tells us how the IQIM is the newest Physics Frontiers Center supported by the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. They say this: “Here at IQIM, we study physical systems in which…

Continue ReadingQuantum Frontiers

Gerard ‘t Hooft says quantum mechanics is nonsense

There was an interesting article in Scientific American a couple of weeks back. The title was Quantum Physics Is on the Wrong Track, Says Breakthrough Prize Winner Gerard ‘t Hooft. However the URL was breakthrough prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft says quantum mechanics is nonsense. That has just got to be deliberate. Check it out for yourself. You usually have to pay to read online Scientific American articles, but I was able to read this article for free for a while. Then once my grace period…

Continue ReadingGerard ‘t Hooft says quantum mechanics is nonsense

An introduction to LENR

Last time, I talked about cold fusion, which was strangled at birth by Big Science vested interest. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons gave their press conference on March 23rd 1989 in Salt Lake City. Just over a month later on May 1st 1989, eighteen hundred physicists in Baltimore gave a standing ovation to accusations of incompetence and delusion. A whole host of organisations piled on the opprobrium, including the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Caltech, CERN, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, MIT, Nature, the University of Rochester, Science, and…

Continue ReadingAn introduction to LENR

Cold fusion

I feel unhappy that so many physicists have been so disparaging about cold fusion for so long. Not because the 1989 cold fusion experiment by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons didn’t seem to work. Not because we still don’t have a hot shower that runs off an AA battery. Au contraire, I feel unhappy because the disparaging physicists still don’t understand the neutron¹, and they still don’t² understand the nuclear force³: Image from History Rundown. Caption: all nucleons, both protons and neutrons, attract one another by…

Continue ReadingCold fusion

Guidance notes for simulations

I’ve spoken to various people about simulations over the years. The latest conversation I had was on a Zoom session a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about how Einstein viewed space as some kind of gin-clear ghostly elastic, and how he said a field was a state of space. I was reminded that it would be a good thing if somebody did a simulation to depict things like the photon in this elastic space, along with gamma-gamma pair production, the electron, the positron, and…

Continue ReadingGuidance notes for simulations

The Standard Model of particle physics is wrong on multiple counts

The Standard Model of particle physics is said to be the most successful scientific theory ever. That’s what Quanta Magazine said, and plenty of other people say much the same thing. New Scientist called it a scientific masterpiece. Modern physics dot org called it a pillar of modern physics. Space dot com said it was one of the most successful scientific theories of all time. CERN said it’s “one of the most successful theories in physics”. It’s a common theme. Case Western physicist Glenn Starkman called…

Continue ReadingThe Standard Model of particle physics is wrong on multiple counts

The Nobel prize in physics 2024

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was announced on 8th October 2024. I’m writing about it after the event because I wanted to wait for some reaction. If you haven’t already, check out the press release. The prize wasn’t awarded to people who worked on the James Webb Space Telescope. It was awarded to John J Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. The press release goes on to say “they trained artificial neural networks using…

Continue ReadingThe Nobel prize in physics 2024

The Standard Model of Cosmology is wrong on multiple counts

The Standard Model of Cosmology is also called the Concordance model, which means the currently accepted model. Another name for it is the Lambda-CDM model, where Lambda is the cosmological constant, and CDM is an acronym for cold dark matter. In a nutshell, the Standard Model of Cosmology says the universe started with the Big Bang, which was followed by a very rapid expansion called inflation. After this came the formation of photons and leptons plus other particles, then hydrogen and helium, then stars and galaxies…

Continue ReadingThe Standard Model of Cosmology is wrong on multiple counts

The James Webb Space Telescope and the massive early galaxies

As I was saying last time, there was a interesting news article recently. I saw it in The Telegraph myself. It concerned observations of massive early galaxies by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Written by Joe Pinkstone, the article was dated 26th August 2024, and was called How scientists used black holes to solve mystery of earliest galaxies. Pinkstone told us that early galaxies had long been thought to contain relatively few stars, and so wouldn’t be particularly big or bright. However when the JWST…

Continue ReadingThe James Webb Space Telescope and the massive early galaxies

APS Physics Magazine

If you search the internet on best physics blogs, you can find a FeedSpot website listing the 60 Best Physics Blogs and Websites in 2024. There are perhaps some issues re paid promotion and the way the ranking is performed, and it only lists 30 websites. But it's better than nothing. Top of the list is Physics World, which I talked about a few months ago. In second place is Sabine Hossenfelder's now-lightweight Backreaction, and in third place is Quantum Frontiers, which is also lightweight. But…

Continue ReadingAPS Physics Magazine