Another year is now dwindling down to a close, and it makes one want to take a few moments and reflect on everything that has happened. In the scientific community, while not a year of amazing surprises and breakthroughs, it has been a year of consistent advancement for research and knowledge.
We started off the year with a long anticipated fly-by of a comet, and the uncertainty of the future of a little space probe called Philae. And then June brought the unexpected and much appreciated resur... Continue reading ...
Merry Christmas to all of my friends, family, and followers! I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a wonderful New Year! Continue reading ...
The latest data from the Large Hadron Collider has now been released, and it contains a most interesting new result. Perhaps not on par with the Higgs boson discovery, or any of the hundreds of predictions of the theoretical physics community, but still enough to make the research community sit up and take notice.
While most of the data is little more than a confirmation of existing knowledge, there is a new result at 750 GeV. The two detectors at the LHC - CMS and Atlas - have both found an e... Continue reading ...
In the previous article, I wrote about this recurring belief by Star Wars fans that Han Solo made a mistake when he boasted that the Millenium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. Many people have claimed that since a parsec is a unit of distance, this is not an appropriate way of gauging the speed of a spaceship. And I showed how the theory of relativity argues that a parsec is a unit of time, and therefore Han was right.
After enjoying the latest Star Wars movie, I happened to overhear a number of uber-fans making jokes about what they perceived to be inconsistencies and mistakes in the original movies. And while that is fine, and is something I enjoy chatting about as well, there is one point that keeps getting re-hashed and has unfortunately become a symbol of film errors.
In A New Hope, Han Solo boasts about the speed of his spaceship by stating that it made the Kessel Run in than twelve parsecs. And ever ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, December 16, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
The Name The Exoplanets contest is over, and today the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has announced new common names for a number of planets outside of our own solar system. The planets in question will still retain their scientific names, but for common usage the IAU is hoping that their selections will become standard.
The contest began in July 2014, with the general public encouraged to submit possible names for exoplanets that had already been discovered. The public was then asked ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, December 5, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
The New Horizons team has just released high-def photos and video from the Pluto flyby a few months ago. It is amazing to think of how far away Pluto is, and yet because of the hard work of a great many people in the fields of science and technology here we have great video footage of it.
Scientists at Fermilab have released some interesting new experimental results, and although it is a relatively minor result in the grand scheme of scientific research (especially since they found nothing new), the exotic nature of the this experiment makes it interesting. Especially for theorists, who in the last few decades have moved further away from the forefront of experimental knowledge.
The Holometer experiment has now disproven one popular theory of a quantized spacetime, and added mo... Continue reading ...
After completing my review of the equations of general relativity, I was left feeling that something more was needed. The equations themselves are beautiful, but having built up so much mathematical framework, it seemed like I was missing an opportunity by not giving any examples of solutions to the field equations. I intend to rectify that situation today.
As I mentioned at the end of the last article, there are only a handful of solutions to the Einstein field equations, corresponding to spe... Continue reading ...
Posted by The Real Chris Bird on Tuesday, December 1, 2015,
In a trend that is becoming far too common lately, I have been the victim of another security breach due to an online service provider.
Sometime yesterday, an e-mail account that I had retired about five years ago became reactivated by someone telling the company that they were me and had forgotten the password as well as the answers to the security questions. In such cases, e-mail providers are supposed to refuse to re-activate the account.
After that long journey through the mathematics of curved spacetime, we have finally arrived at Einstein's Equations of General Relativity. And where before it was all mathematical foundations, today we arrive at the real physics. And in keeping with my intentions of keeping this entire review intuitive rather than mathematically rigourous, I will introduce the theory using the less common Einstein-Hilbert action, which was introduced by Hilbert rather than Einstein and in my opinion is easie... Continue reading ...
I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.
