New Scientist

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 built by the lowest bidder”. Artemis II only carried a million pounds of fuel and there was no nuclear weapon, but you catch my drift. Bad things can happen with chemical rockets. Hence I must try to get through to some people about gravity. Sadly I will have to strike UFO guy Nick Pope off my list, because he’s just died of cancer aged 60. How sad. His wife said “my heart is breaking”. There but for the grace of God go I¹.

The glue that holds reality together

It makes me think of my own wife. I was in the supermarket with her at the weekend, doing the shopping. It’s a simple pleasure, but one that I somehow cherish. She’d gone back to look for cherries leaving me to kick my heels with the trolley. I was next to the magazine rack, where I saw a copy of New Scientist magazine. I was talking about that last time, so I took an interest. The cover had a gooey-looking image of a ceramic-bowl universe and said something about the glue that holds reality together:

New Scientist cover image for the 11^th April 2026 issue, from New Scientist

That sounds like particle physics², I thought. Something to do with gluons. It was the only copy on the rack, and when I picked it up I noticed it was very thin. Surprisingly thin. Much thinner than when I had a subscription years ago. It was so thin I opened it to check the page count. It was only 48 pages. I’m sure it used to be at least double that.

Table of contents

I flipped through the magazine and thought about buying it. Then I saw the price. It was on the lower right side of the front cover in super-small letters: £7.95. Whoa, I thought, you won’t be selling many of these at that price. No wonder it’s the only copy on the shelf. But I did decide to review it for you, using the £10 trial digital subscription I bought last month. So: check out the issue web page. It’s quite lengthy, with some rather confusing repetition. It starts with two “On the cover” feature articles, followed by a list of six “On the cover” news items. It then gives four “Editor’s picks” before starting the table of contents proper:

 New Scientist table of contents image for the 11^th April 2026 issue, from New Scientist

I’d say the editor’s picks are superfluous, and should be the same as the on-the-cover items, but never mind. The table of contents is broken down into a number of sections, namely Leaders, News, Aperture, Features, Culture, More, and Regulars.

The first quantum computer to break encryption is now shockingly close

There was only one Leaders article. It was called The first quantum computer to break encryption is now shockingly close. It’s about two studies of ECDLP internet encryption. The two studies were conducted by an Oratomic team, and a Google Quantum AI team. They claim that internet encryption will soon be cracked by a quantum computer using only 10,000 qubits. The writer of the New Scientist article is one Karmela Padavic-Callaghan who uses the ridiculous woke pronouns “they” and “their”. He/she/whatever tells us that when it comes to quantum computers, both theory and engineering have advanced with staggering speed.

Google Willow image courtesy of Google Quantum AI, from the New Scientist article The first quantum computer to break encryption is now shockingly close

Really. Even though the only thing that has advanced with staggering speed is the hype and the horseshit. I don’t say this lightly. I say it because I’ve looked into the history and know that there is no quantum entanglement. Because the Bell test experiments are just Malus’s law in disguise. It doesn’t matter which way the light goes through polarizers A and B. The expression cos² θ applies in both cases because a polarizer rotates the light going through it. That’s the hidden variable. The rest is just emperor’s new clothes. So do not invest in quantum technologies. Put your money on optical computing instead.

News

The table of contents then gives 16 news items, six of which were cover items. These were on plug-in solar panels, the weird physics of plant-based milks, octopus sex, memory training, bumblebees with a sense of rhythm, and the aforementioned The first quantum computer to break encryption is now shockingly close. I liked the article on plug-in solar panels, and took note of this: “This is the watershed moment, the tipping point toward a world where the dirt-cheap cost of renewables is actually passed on to the consumer”.

Solar panel balcony image from New Scientist, originally from imageBROKER.com / Alamy Stock Photo

But I’ll believe that when I see it. Because in my experience climate change is just a globalist reverse-Robin racket that takes from the poor and gives to the rich. Meanwhile the real problem is third world population growth of circa one billion every twelve years. That’s what’s causing deforestation, desertification, habitat loss, mass extinction, and mass migration. The latter is turning our country into a corrupt crime-ridden shithole full of parasites who just love murdering our children. Moving swiftly on, the next New Scientist news item was on plant-based milks, which, apparently are non-Newtonian liquids. Big fucking deal. Especially since plant-based milks aren’t milk, and should not be advertised as such. They should be advertised as gunk. The item on octopus sex, was interesting. The third right tentacle on a male octopus is called a hectocotylus, and a male octopus protects it like you protect your crown jewels. So to speak. I didn’t care much for the memory training news item, but that’s just me, there was nothing wrong with it. I did however really like the article about bumblebees with a sense of rhythm – I think bees are smarter than people think³. Overall I’d say most of the news items are reasonable, and there’s a fair salting of physics and cosmology. See for example Why the lack of water on Mars is so mysterious, We may have just glimpsed the universe’s first stars, and We may have seen a dirty fireball star explosion for the first time. They’re not huge articles at circa 500 words apiece, but I have no complaints about that. They are what they are.

Patterns: art of the natural world

Next was the Aperture section, which is about photography. The subtitle this week is Stunning photographs show the dynamic patterns of the natural world. It’s about a £50 coffee-table book by Jon McCormack. It’s published by Damiani books, and is called Patterns: art of the natural world:

“Patterns” image from the 11^th April 2026 issue of New Scientist

The Apertures section is followed by the Features section. This gave three longer items, namely The invisibility cloak inventor now has better tricks up his sleeve, We’re solving the fundamental mystery of how reality is glued together, and I don’t see images in my head. Can training give me a mind’s eye?

The invisibility cloak inventor now has better tricks up his sleeve

The first feature article, about the invisibility cloak inventor, was written by Jacklin Kwan. She tells us that Sir John Pendry, FRS HonFInstP, is known for inventing an invisibility cloak. Only it’s not really an invisibility cloak. It’s more of a metamaterial microwave lens. Kwan goes on to say this: “Twenty years on, he has used the same principles to fashion an even more powerful kind of metamaterial that can teach us about the wild frontiers of physics”. Only he hasn’t, and it won’t. Pendry has allegedly turned his mind to the question of bending light through time instead of space, and “build materials that can simulate the wild physics of black holes”. But if you know how gravity works and what black holes are all about, you know that it’s not wild physics at all. It’s simple physics. It’s just a refraction, like both Newton and Einstein said. Kwan goes on to say metamaterials appear to be finally taking off, “with some of the most striking advances appearing in so-called metalenses”. She explains that metalenses redirect light using surfaces patterned with dense forests of nanoscale structures. Later on she gives an example of a butterfly’s wing as a natural metamaterial:

Butterfly image from the 11^th April 2026 issue of New Scientist. Caption: The colour of an Adonis blue butterfly comes not from a pigment, but from how the structure of its wings scatters light. Credit: Fabio Polimadei/500px/Getty Images

That’s fair enough, but there’s nothing to live up to the wild physics promise. All there is some vague stuff about a material whose internal pattern changes over time. Wherein “an experimental realisation of his ideas could provide a new way to study black holes in a lab”. There’s a reference to a paper co-authored by Pendry called Time varying gratings model Hawking radiation. Ah, Hawking radiation. Something that has never been observed, which was proposed by a mathematical media darling who never read the Einstein digital papers and never understood gravity. So he never understood black holes either. And now we supposedly have some metamaterial which is going to tell us all about them? No it isn’t. This is just hype. Just like the hype about using metamaterials to control seismic waves and “divert an earthquake from a building’s foundations”. For fuck’s sake.

We’re solving the fundamental mystery of how reality is glued together

The next Features article was the cover article. It was called We’re solving the fundamental mystery of how reality is glued together. It’s by Michael Brooks, who starts by saying scientists have failed to explain the strong force. He also tells us that “new mathematical tools are finally prising the problem open”.

Image credit Simon Danaher, see New Scientist

Brooks says every atom in your body “is desperately trying to tear itself apart”. He goes on to tell us that the positively charged protons in an atomic nucleus ought to repel one another, but the strong force intervenes. Brooks also says “the deeper physicists have probed this force, the stranger it has seemed”. And that a theory built from weightless ingredients somehow produces particles that are unmistakably heavy. Then he says this: “sweeping away this inconsistency wouldn’t just tidy up our understanding of the force that binds atoms together and cement one of the most successful theories in modern physics. It could also illuminate the mysterious nature of mass”. Here’s somebody who doesn’t understand electron capture, or the way the charge distribution of the neutron matches the profile of the nuclear force. He doesn’t understand mass either. Instead he spins ignorance into mysticism. He tells us the usual Standard Model fairy story about the quarks that nobody has ever seen, and the “mysterious nuclear glue” that holds them together. He refers to Yang-Mills theory, which was part of the nuclear disaster, along with gluons and glueballs. All the while studiously ignoring E=mc² and the inertia of a body is a measure of its energy-content. It’s all downhill after that, a smorgasbord of chaos, stochastic differential equations, roiling quantum fields, infinities, fractals, renormalization, probabilistic structures, quantum correlations, and quantum fluctuations which look like a lava lamp. Brooks ends up saying we will maybe soon “reveal the true origins of mass”. Even though Einstein did that in 1905. Once you know about the wave nature of matter and the electron, you appreciate why: mass is just resistance to change-in-motion for a wave in a closed path. Which means everything Brooks was saying was a tottering tower of tripe.

I don’t see images in my head. Can training give me a mind’s eye?

The third and final Features article was I don’t see images in my head. Can training give me a mind’s eye? It’s about aphantasia, which apparently is “the inability to create mental images”. I read the article, but didn’t like it. That’s because it was a personal recount that was short on facts. And because I just couldn’t empathise with writer Shayla Love. To be blunt I’m not sure I believed her. At the back of my mind I was wondering if this might be something else that the scroungers, spongers, and shirkers could use to claim benefits⁴.

Culture, More, Regulars

Anyway, the Features section was followed by the Culture section, which tells us about a book about ageing, eating dirt, and a couple of robot science fiction books. Meh. After that was a section entitled More which included an obituary on Anthony Leggett, an item on The best kind of olive oil for brain health, a cartoon called twisteddoodles on a helpful new drug delivery system, and a cartoon giving a standard model of Easter egg structure. Look closely at the theoretical column on the right. It includes an Easter egg that consists only of a soft filling, and another one that consists only of cocoa dusting. Very droll:

 Image credit Tom Gauld, see New Scientist

I have to say though that the latter two items were humour, which didn’t sit well with the obituary. Finally there’s a Regulars section, which includes a “Feedback” item on the Foraminiferal Sculpture Park in Zhongshan in China, a letters section, and the last word where readers email in their questions and answers.

New Pseudo Scientist

So, what’s the verdict? All in all I don’t think the future bodes well for New Scientist. The News section is fair enough, but people can get all that for free from the likes of PhysOrg. The sections called More, and Regulars are in the same boat because most of them are news items one way or another. What’s left for your £7.95? Or for your £32.50 three-month digital subscription? Puff pieces, product placement, and propaganda. There are no online comments in the last word section, or anywhere else as far as I can tell. Free speech in science is not permitted by the New Scientist thought police⁵. When an article is not paywalled, such as the Particle discovered at CERN solves a 20-year-old mystery, it’s because it’s CERN publicity. As for that thin 48 pages, I am reminded that my mother used to keep chickens⁶. She said you could always tell when a chicken was going to die because it went light. That’s what’s happening to New Scientist. It’s dying because it’s like the BBC. It doesn’t deliver honesty, it peddles cargo-cult woo. It’s the churnalist lap dog that does not bite the hand that feeds it. It is fed pseudoscience, and that’s what it poops out for you. It can’t stop doing it, just as the BBC can’t stop putting black actors into period dramas. The difference is that people have to pay for the BBC on pain of prison, but they don’t have to pay for New Scientist. That’s why at £7.95 for 48 pages, the print version won’t last much longer. After that the digital version won’t last much longer either. Not just because the millenials don’t like paying for anything online. Because it isn’t a New Scientist magazine. It’s a New Pseudo Scientist magazine:

Altered New Scientist cover image for the 11^th April 2026 issue, original image from New Scientist

 

_{1  I’m not religious, but I do think the Judeo-Christian ethic of do unto others as you would have others do unto you is a good thing. I think co-operation as opposed to conflict is what built the modern world. So I feel empathy for certain religions, and I like some of the sayings.}

_{2  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Imagine the BBC was the only TV channel. Imagine The Guardian was the only newspaper. Imagine Cuba was the only country. That’s what particle physics is like.}

_{3  Check out my garden of a thousand bees. That’s about a lockdown cameraman who decided to film bees in his Bristol back garden. They learned to recognise him, and trust him. Next time you see a bumblebee sunning itself, stick a finger out to poke it, and watch it put an arm out to ward you off. It’s like back off, I’m taking a break here.}

_{4  Here in the UK we have a growing problem with people claiming that they have mental health issues and are unable to work. Our civil service, who nowadays “work from home” on the sofa in their pyjamas, accepts what’s called self-certification and pays them free money. See for example PIPs.}

_{5  If anybody knows anything about this please let me know.}

_{6  My late mother had a wire mesh chicken run at the bottom of the garden. On one visit I got in there with a spade to dig some of the ground over. I dug up lots of fat pink worms. The chickens were very excited at this, and gobbled them down happily. They started following me around and getting right under my feet. Those chickens loved me. The next morning my mother frowned at the breakfast table and said this egg tastes earthy. I never did tell her why.}