Browsing Archive: May, 2015

Crowdfunded Space Sailing

Posted by on Thursday, May 14, 2015, In : Fundraising 
Another great crowdfunding project has been launched, this time to produce an experimental light sail for use in space exploration. The planetary society wants to raise $1.2million to build a light sail and test it for thirty days sometime next year. If successful, it could be a more efficient method of launching probes to other planets and interesting objects within our solar system.

Traditional rockets work by burning fuel - essentially creating a controlled explosion. The high speed gas par...
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Before Time Began

Posted by on Monday, May 11, 2015,
One of the most common questions asked in popular lectures on astrophysics and cosmology - and one that often gives lecturers the most trouble in answering - is the simple question of "What came before the Big Bang?".

According to the laws of general relativity, and to observations made by Hubble and others in the last century, the Universe itself is constantly expanding. At first some physicists thought that perhaps the Universe still possessed an infinitely long past, with it being small and...
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Koide Formula

Posted by on Friday, May 8, 2015, In : Particle Physics 
A few months ago I wrote an article on the Standard Model of particle physics, and made passing reference to the little know Koide relationship of lepton masses. A few of you wrote to ask me about this formula - which proves that some of you did not read the detailed review of it that I wrote a few years ago :-)    (In fairness though, that article was on another website which may have since been de-activated by its managers.)

Let me begin by reviewing the leptons. One of the first subatomic p...
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About Me


Dr. Chris Bird I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.

   


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