Tag: Physics
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In praise of Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose has been awarded a share in the Nobel Prize for physics and I could not be more pleased. It is not that I have met him or even attended a lecture by him and nor do we even see him much on TV – but I owe him a debt for his insight…
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The maths and physics of walking in the sand
I love this – which I picked up from Ian Stewart’s now slightly out-of-date (e.g., pre-proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem) and out-of-print The Problems of Mathematics (but a good read and on sale very cheaply at Amazon) – because it demonstrates the harmony of physics with maths, is based on a common experience and is also…
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A probably entirely naïve question about the principle of relativity
Surely I can quite easily design an experiment that shows the relativity principle is false. If turn around on the spot the principle, as I understand it, asserts that I cannot build an experiment that proves it was me that moved as opposed to everything else that moved while I stayed still. But the rest…
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Perhaps “you” will live forever after all
This is inspired by Max Tegmark‘s Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality: I have been thinking about this since I finished the book and I cannot find a convincing argument against the thesis (certainly the ones Tegmark uses in the book didn’t impress me – but perhaps I misunderstood them.)…
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Deconstructing Max Tegmark’s argument against a simulated universe
In the end Max Tegmark‘s Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality has proved to be something of a disappointment – somewhere along the way the science got lost and was replaced by a lot of metaphysical speculation. I haven’t quite finished it yet – so I’ll do a fuller review…
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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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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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My one problem with Feynman’s QED
Well, as predicted, I finished off Richard Feynman‘s QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter in short order this morning – and it is a truly marvellous book. I just wish I had read it as an undergraduate. My one problem with it was its explanation of “stimulated emission“. Now, as an undergraduate, I…
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What a brilliant book
Just over three hours ago I started reading Richard Feynman‘s QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Penguin Press Science): and now, 110 pages later, I am stunned at its brilliance. If you are any sort of physics undergraduate you must read it. Similarly, if I was teaching ‘A’ level physics I would…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 