Tag: Albert Einstein
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Wormholes and quantum entanglement
View image | gettyimages.com Been a while… There is a fascinating article in this week’s New Scientist about the idea that quantum mechanics and general relatively could be linked via the idea of the “wormhole” – a fold in spacetime that links what appears to be two very distant parts of the universe. The article…
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Why we’ll never meet aliens
Well, the answer is pretty plain: Einstein‘s theory of general relativity – which even in the last month has added to it’s already impressive list of predictive successes – tells us that to travel at the speed of light a massive body would require an infinite amount of propulsive energy. In other words, things are…
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Lorentz and Einstein
When I was at York University earlier this week I took a break from computer science to remind myself of some of the basics of (special) relativity and was struck, while reading the opening few pages of Rindler’s Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological (which would appear to be the set text at York), just…
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How random is random?
What is a truly random event? We are used to the idea that flipping a coin is likely to generate a random sequence of heads or tails but, of course, it is perfectly possible to predict, using the rules of classical mechanics, the outcome of a series of coin tosses if we know the values…
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If it wasn’t for those pesky neutrinos
Neutrinos have proved to be nothing but trouble for scientists over the years. They could not detect them from the Sun (where they are produced as a by-product of fusion), then they did or did not have mass. Now, it seems, they travel faster than light and are threatening to overturn the apple cart of…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 