Browsing Archive: May, 2016

Beyond Four Colouring

Posted by on Sunday, May 29, 2016, In : Mathematics 
A couple of years ago I wrote an article on the famous four colouring theorem. (For those who missed it, the basic idea is that any map drawn on a flat plane will be able to be coloured such that no two neighbouring regions have the same colour, using only four colours). Although this problem has been solved, with a proof being completed nearly forty years ago now, it is a controversial problem in that the only known proof of this theorem is a brute force calculation by a computer, rather tha...
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News From Rosetta

Posted by on Saturday, May 28, 2016, In : Astronomy 
After two years of collecting data, the team behind the Rosetta mission has made an interesting announcement today. The Rosetta probe has indicated that the comet it has been studying contains glycine, which is an amino acid considered to be one of the building blocks of life, as well as phosphorous which would be required to form primordial DNA. And while this is far from being life itself, it adds more weight to the theory that life could not only form in other regions of space, but that li...
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Energy Conservation At The Big Bang

Posted by on Friday, May 20, 2016,
I was recently participating in an online Q&A session for theoretical physicists, and I was intrigued that people still believe that there is a flaw in the Big Bang model, as it needs to conserve energy and doesn't. Even worse was the realization that many of the people with this false belief are trained in physics and really should know better!

The simple fact is, the Big Bang might or might not conserve energy. And even the best theories we have and the best experimental data from both parti...
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Gravastars

Posted by on Saturday, May 7, 2016,
By now most people have heard of the success of the LIGO experiment in detecting gravitational waves, and know that they believe the waves were created by a pair of black holes that were merging into one. It is quite an achievement, and will likely lead to many interesting discoveries about violent and energetic events in the Universe.

However in the last week, several science journalists have been reporting on a paper that appeared in the astrophysics research community this week, in which it...
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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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