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…
There have been some dreadful events in Israel, with terrorists going door to door killing women and children, and more. Meanwhile sections of our media and community refuse to condemn such acts, and call the perpetrators “militants”. Such is the corruption in our society. As I was saying last time, honesty and decency are in short supply, so it’s no small wonder that so many people are suffering. These are troubled times, so much so that the trouble with physics is left in the shade. For…
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,…
If you do a Google search on lifters today, what you see is a bunch of mechanical contraptions such as pallet stackers, disability aids, and cooking utensils. When you finally find something of interest on page 4 of the search results, it’s a Wikipedia disambiguation page saying “Lifter may refer to an ion-propelled aircraft, a device that can generate thrust using ionised air with no moving parts”. The ion-propelled aircraft article then refers to Thomas Townsend Brown in a rather negative way. It says he spent…
I was watching Nope again the other night. I thought it was really cool that the UFO could go from dead slow to a sonic boom in about two seconds flat. See the end of this clip, sorry about the ads. I think Nope is a great movie, but I won’t say any more in case I spoil it for you. However I will say this: I wish we had planes that could move like that. I say that because of our recent family holiday in…
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…
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…
As I was saying last time, the 2022 physics Nobel Prize was awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger for their contribution to quantum entanglement. This is associated with instantaneous “spooky action at a distance”, and is said to play an important role in quantum computing. It all started in 1935 with the EPR paper, where Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen said quantum mechanics must be incomplete because it predicts a system in two different states at the same time. Bohr gave a rambling off-topic…
The 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science". Hamish Johnston gave a brief account in Physics World on October 4th. He said the three laureates performed the key experiments that established the quantum property of entanglement. That’s quantum entanglement, which is often described as spooky action at a distance. The idea is that you produce two photons from one event, and when…
I was pleased to hear about the Artemis space programme. NASA tell us that “Artemis is the first step in the next era of human exploration. Together with commercial and international partners, NASA will establish a sustainable presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars”. That sounds good to me, because the future isn’t what it used to be, and going back to the Moon is like going back to the future. I have fond memories of the Apollo space programme: Public domain images courtesy of…