Trouble with physics

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 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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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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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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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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Quantum entanglement is scientific fraud

The quantum entanglement story began in 1935 with the EPR paper. That’s where Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen said quantum mechanics must be incomplete, because it predicts a system in two different states at the same time. Later that year Bohr replied saying spooky action at a distance could occur. Then Schrödinger came up with a paper where he talked of entanglement, a paper where he used his cat to show how ridiculous the two-state situation was, and a paper saying he found spooky action at a…

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