Tag: General relativity
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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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Interstellar
I watched Interstellar last night. It’s rare that I don’t like any half-decent science fiction movie, so it gets a thumbs up, though it had its high- and low-points. It would be difficult to get away with describing Interstellar as truly a “hard science” movie – but it makes quite a few nods in that…
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The gravitational perpetual motion machine?
Perhaps I should have thought about this years ago – when I was surrounded by physicists and cosmologists and the like, and so could have got an answer: but I didn’t – until I started reading Lee Smolin‘s Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Here’s the issue: as Smolin…
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Copernicus was wrong (maybe)
No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses and decided the Sun moves around the Earth (but here is a pop quiz for all of you laughing at that idea – can you think of a simple experiment that would prove to a 10-year-old that the Earth moves around the Sun?). In fact the issue…
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Integration by parts
Saw this referred to in A Most Incomprehensible Thing: Notes Towards a Very Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics of Relativity and it made me shudder – as I always seemed to struggle with it at ‘A’ level maths – so here, for my own benefit, is a quick proof/explanation of the method. The general rule…
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In what sense do photons exist?
This is a genuine question on my part – and I would be grateful for any answers! The inspiration for asking the question comes from Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics – my current “listen while running” book – along with Feynman’s own description of radiation in QED – The Strange Theory of Light and…
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“Crowd sourcing” to play a key role in fundamental physics experiment
Ordinary people are to be asked to make a contribution to an experiment which aims to determine key facts about the nature of the physical universe – reports the New Scientist. Particle physicists at CERN – the join European experiment famous for the Large Hadron Collider – are conducting an experiment – AEgIS – into…
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Schrödinger’s cat: for real
Quantum Mechanics is, along with General Relativity, the foundation stone of modern physics and few explanations of its importance are more famous than the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment. This seeks to explain the way “uncertainty” operates at the heart of the theory. Imagine a cat in a box with a poison gas capsule. The capsule…
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Time’s arrow
The forward march of time is possibly the most basic and shared human experience. Whatever else may happen in our lives none of us can make time run backwards (the title of this post recalls Martin Amis‘s brilliant novel premised on this idea – time running backwards – if you’ve read it you will understand…
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Patenting reality
(I was about to post something about this when I noticed the Stephen Fry nomination of Turing’s Universal Machine as a great British “innovation” and decided to write about that first … but the two dovetail as I hope you can see.) I was alerted to this by an article in the latest edition of…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 