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.…
The world is a troubled place, and I don’t feel too optimistic about it right now. I won’t go into details because this is a physics blog, not a politics blog. But for me the cherry on top of all the internecine strife comes from Avi Loeb. He’s been saying 3I/Atlas might be a massive alien spaceship. That’s because it’s come in on the planetary plane, and the coma is in front not behind. Wikipedia says it’s just an interstellar comet, but it still bothers me.…
There was really good article in the Atlantic recently. It was written by Ross Anderson, and it was called The Nobel Prize Winner who thinks we have the universe all wrong. It concerns cosmologist Adam Riess¹, who shared the 2011 Nobel prize in physics with Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter. The prize was awarded for "the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae". Adam Riess illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Sources: Janerik Henriksson / AFP /Getty; Getty.…
There was an interesting cosmology article in the Daily Telegraph last week. It was by science editor Sarah Knapton, and it was called Big Bang theory is wrong, claim scientists. I was pleased to see it, because in my humble opinion cosmology articles don’t feature in our newspapers enough these days. Clearly I’m not the only one who thinks like that, because as I speak there are 2,580 comments. Image from The Daily Telegraph, caption: A black hole pictured by the Spitzer space telescope. Credit: AFP/Getty…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…