Trouble with physics

An introduction to LENR

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…

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Cold fusion

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…

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The Standard Model of particle physics is wrong on multiple counts

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…

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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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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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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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