Mr Newton liked the blackboard, so his laptop remained in its case on the desk in front of him. He finished drawing his squiggles and arrows with an emphatic chip chip of the chalk. “So,” he said, turning to the class. “What does beta minus decay tell us?” There was a brief clatter of an iPod from the back and a rustle as Johnnie Dalton hid his Heat magazine. Then silence. I always felt out of my depth in Mr Newton’s class, so I kept my…
A lot of people are interested in space. It’s an interesting thing. Especially since it’s a something, not a nothing. Something that used to be called the aether¹. It was also called the fifth element or quintessence, and “was believed to fill the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere”: Abell S1063 image taken by the JWST, see the Space.com article JWST peers through a cosmic lens in deepest gaze to date People tend to think that Einstein dispensed with the aether, and that the Michelson-Morley experiment proved…
I’m so glad the Artemis II crew made it back safely. I was worried that something would go wrong and NASA would have another spectacular on its hands. Regular readers will know that I’m all for this kind of thing, but I think we need something better than chemical rockets: Artemis II launch image, courtesy of NASA I am reminded of what Steve Buscemi said in Armageddon: “we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts…
I just love this time of year. The Sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing, and the birds are singing. I think they’re happy. Like the children we hear at playtime in the nearby school. Like the robin that fluttered around me as I weeded the front border on my hands and knees. Flowers in my front border Spring is a time of optimism and promise¹, with so much to look forward to. I look forward to picnics on the beach, sundowners…
The Mechanical Universe is the name of a series of YouTube videos by Chantal Roth and James Ellias¹. As per convention I will refer to them by their surnames: I know Roth. I’ve spoken to her on Zoom about physics and simulations. She has a YouTube Channel called Red Pill. I don’t know Ellias, but he has a YouTube channel called Inductica. I didn’t mention either of them when I talked about YouTube physics a couple of months ago. Sorry about that. Screenshot from the Mechanical…
One website I rather like is called PhysOrg. It’s a news aggregator website which nowadays puts up about two hundred science stories a day. I’ve referred to a fair number of them in my Physics Detective articles. PhysOrg was around when I started digging into physics twenty years ago. Back then the website was PhysOrg.com, now it’s Phys.org. See the Phys.org entry on Grokipedia for some background. It was founded in 2004 by two anonymous PhD students “in response to the scarcity of accessible, high-quality science journalism…
Merry Christmas to one and all. It’s been another day in paradise here on the South coast of England. The sky was blue, the beach was beautiful, and I even saw a lizard basking in the sun. It was a wall lizard, also known as Podarcis muralis: Poole, UK, December 20th 2025, clockwise: 1) looking towards Bournemouth, 2) looking towards Sandbanks, 3) a wall lizard It was another day in paradise last Sunday in Bondi beach when our daughter was walking past the pavilion. Fortunately she…
Einstein said “You know, it would be sufficient to really understand the electron”. At least that’s how Hans Dehmelt quoted him in 1989. As for the original source I’m not sure, I think it goes back to Stanford in 1950, but no matter. The electron was discovered by J J Thomson in 1897, and here we are 128 years later and people still don’t understand it. So much so that people like Frank Wilczek say “to understand the electron is to understand the world”. Even though…
Scott Aaronson is a Computer Science professor at the University of Texas at Austin. See his Wikipedia entry, which says he’s the founding director of UT Austin's new Quantum Information Center. Aaronson is into quantum computing in a big way, and is a famous blogger on the subject. His blog is called Shtetl-Optimized, and one of his recent posts was called Quantum Information Supremacy. I take an interest in this sort of thing because I have a Computer Science degree, and I know a thing or…
I don’t normally talk about politics¹, but the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. So I will say this: I thought what happened to Charlie Kirk was dreadful. There he was, a young man with a young family, intent on bringing debate to the campus, and he got shot and killed for it. How awful. Look how happy his wife looked: Image from people.com: Charlie Kirk and Erika Frantzve Kirk with their two children in May 2025.…