Author: The Physics Detective

This author has written 108 articles

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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The Higgs boson’s most captivating puzzle

If there's one thing I'm not fond of, it's the Higgs boson. That's because the Higgs mechanism is said to confer mass to subatomic particles. The problem with that is that it flatly contradicts E=mc², wherein Einstein said the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. I think the wave nature of matter makes this crystal clear. Especially winhen you've read the likes of de Broglie, Schrödinger, Darwin, Born, and Infeld talking about the electron as a wave in a closed path.…

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Quanta magazine

I've referred to Quanta Magazine articles in a number of my previous posts. For example in Quantum computing and the quantum quacks I referred to a 2019 article by Natalie Wolchover called How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code. In The black hole charlatans I referred to a 2020 article by George Musser called The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End. In Quantum entanglement is scientific fraud I referred to a 2022 article by Natalie Wolchover called Physicists Create a Wormhole…

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Physics World

I bumped into the Physics World website again the other day. As you are doubtless aware, it’s a digital and printed magazine produced by the UK Institute of Physics. The latter is also known as the IOP. It’s the “professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland”. There’s various articles giving news about physics: Screenshot of Physics World 30th April 2024 The picture of the circuit board refers to an article by Tim Wogan called Bolometer measures state of superconducting qubit. A…

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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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