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

There is no quantum entanglement

In physics, there is something called Malus’s law. It’s named after Étienne-Louis Malus, whose name is one of 72 names on the Eiffel Tower. It dates from way back, to 1809, and it gives the intensity of polarized light passing through an ideal polarizer: Malus’s law image from Rod Nave’s most excellent hyperphysics website This intensity is given as I = I₀ cos² θ, where I₀ is the intensity of the light that has passed through an initial polarizer, and θ is the angle between the…

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Bertlmann’s socks and the nature of reality

Last year I wrote about quantum entanglement, looking at the history and talking about the physics. I went through John Stewart Bell's famous 1964 paper On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox, and talked about Bell’s inequality, which is also known as Bell’s theorem. Now I thought I’d take a look at Bell’s 1980 paper on Bertlmann’s socks and the nature of reality. It’s freely available on a variety of websites, including the CERN document server. Bell was of course a CERN employee. It has one of…

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Breakthroughs in physics 2023

So, how has physics been this past year? Let’s start by taking a look at Physics World. In an article dated 7th December 2023, online editor Hamish Johnston said this: “Physics World is delighted to announce its top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year for 2023, which ranges from research in astronomy and medical physics to quantum science, atomic physics and more”. He went on to say the winner will be revealed on 14th December. Sounds good. So, Hamish, what have you got? 1.  Growing electrodes inside living…

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Do black holes have singularities?

I think Roy Kerr’s recent paper is important. It’s called Do black holes have singularities? I think it’s important because it challenges an orthodoxy that’s been taken for granted, and because Kerr has the authority to get some attention. That’s because he was in on the Golden Age of General Relativity, and because the EHT collaboration described both M87* and Sagittarius A* as matching the Kerr metric. To set the scene, black hole physics has been around for a long time, but a major development was…

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The Tomorrow War

I’ve always liked science fiction. I can’t explain why. I just do. When I was a boy I’d go to the library and bring home yellow-jacket Gollancz science fiction books to read. When I was a teenager I’d buy paperbacks from the bookshops. I have about a thousand science fiction books on the shelves in our back room. We call it “the library”, but there’s also an electric piano, a sofa, and a seventy-inch TV. The “library” It’s my favourite place for watching movies. I don’t…

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The Nobel prize in physics 2023

There have been some dreadful events in Israel, with terrorists going door to door killing women and children, and more. Meanwhile sections of our media and community refuse to condemn such acts, and call the perpetrators “militants”. Such is the corruption in our society. As I was saying last time, honesty and decency are in short supply, so it’s no small wonder that so many people are suffering. These are troubled times, so much so that the trouble with physics is left in the shade. For…

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Nature and corruption

There was an important news story in the Telegraph last Thursday: Climate scientist admits overhyping impact of global warming on wildfires to get published. It was written by Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph science editor, and it featured a climate scientist called Dr Patrick T Brown. He’s a whistleblower, and I totally applaud the guy. He was referring to a paper he co-authored that was published in Nature. It was called Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California. Nature cover, Volume 621 Issue 7977,…

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Lifters

If you do a Google search on lifters today, what you see is a bunch of mechanical contraptions such as pallet stackers, disability aids, and cooking utensils. When you finally find something of interest on page 4 of the search results, it’s a Wikipedia disambiguation page saying “Lifter may refer to an ion-propelled aircraft, a device that can generate thrust using ionised air with no moving parts”. The ion-propelled aircraft article then refers to Thomas Townsend Brown in a rather negative way. It says he spent…

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We need better planes

I was watching Nope again the other night. I thought it was really cool that the UFO could go from dead slow to a sonic boom in about two seconds flat. See the end of this clip, sorry about the ads. I think Nope is a great movie, but I won’t say any more in case I spoil it for you. However I will say this: I wish we had planes that could move like that. I say that because of our recent family holiday in…

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The psychology of belief

Many years ago I wrote an article called belief explained. You can find a 2007 version of it on a website called scienceforums.net. A development of that was an article called the psychology of belief. You can find a 2010 version of that on a forum called ILovePhilosophy.com. I wrote it because way back in about 2006, I realised that I believed in things for which there was no scientific evidence at all. I don’t just mean things like religion and politics. I mean things in…

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