Posted by on Tuesday, January 2, 2024,
In :
Administrative
Happy New Year!!
We have made it through another wild year, and now we are faced with the blank slate of 2024. Just one day in, and all we can only speculate what great discoveries and advances will be made in the scientific fields this year.
But that is not why I am writing this article today. This is a time when people throughout the world look at making changes to their lives and routines, and I am no different. Some of you may have noticed a decline in the number and the depth of the articl... Continue reading ...
Here we are once more, watching as another year passes into the history books. In world news it has been a year filled with wars, pandemic/disease, and both natural and man-made disasters. In certain scientific circles it has also been the dawn of the anthropocene era, in which humanity was first deemed to have had a measurable impact on the planet's geological history. But as a physicist and mathematician, my highlights of the year's news are more exotic...
What an interesting year this has been for the Nobel Prizes!
As most of you know, I don't usually write about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, because I am not a chemist by training. I have always been interested in chemistry, but my training and research is entirely in theoretical physics and mathematics. However this year is a bit of an exception for one simple reason - the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for work that is closely related to quantum physics, which was always one of th... Continue reading ...
The winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics have just been announced, and once again it is a fascinating area of research that I think most people would not have thought about as a potential candidate for the top prize in science, but which is very worthy of this recognition and reward.
This year's award was given to to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for their extensive research on the dynamics of electrons, an... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, September 28, 2023,
In :
Particle Physics
Today it was announced that antimatter falls down.
That might sound trivial, but it is an interesting an important result in our understanding of particle physics and the laws of nature.
Everything that we see around us, and most of what we see in space, is formed of matter. However just over ninety years ago, physicists discovered that every known type of matter particle in nature is paired with another type of particle, known as antimatter. And whenever matter is created or destroyed, th... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, September 14, 2023,
In :
Astronomy
Sometimes it amazes me how quickly science advances.
Just over thirty years ago there were no known exoplanets, and some astrophysicists were even speculating on whether they ever would be detected. Then in the early 1990s, multiple teams of astronomers were able to detect the periodic dimming of distant stars, and later the Doppler shift in the light from other stars, and from that data they were able to conclusively prove the existence of exoplanets. Now there are several thousand known pla... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last eight years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week (unless there is another pandemic outbreak). And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle on... Continue reading ...
Over the last few days, the scientific media has been reporting on a new result in quantum mechanics and particle physics, and promoting it as a major discovery or as the first signs of a fifth force of nature. The actual experimental result is the announcement of a more precise measurement of the magnetic moment of the muon, and further confirmation that it does not agree with the standard predictions of theoretical physics, but unfortunately it may not be as revolutionary as some articles a... Continue reading ...
There has been a lot of news coverage in recent weeks regarding the claimed discovery of a room temperature superconductor, and a lot of justified skepticism from the scientific community. In my own personal opinion, I believe that this latest claim will not withstand rigorous review and will be disproven, just based on some of the preliminary information from other research teams. However that is a different topic - today I will instead be reviewing exactly what a room temperature supercondu... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, June 29, 2023,
In :
Astronomy
There is another historic announcement from the astronomy community today, with the first detection of the gravitational wave background.
Our current best theory for explaining gravity is the general theory of relativity, created by Einstein (and arguably by Hilbert at the same time), in which what we perceive as the force of gravity is actually a warping of spacetime itself. One of the predictions of Einstein's theory is that when a system changes, such as a massive object moving or two obj... Continue reading ...
One of the unexpected benefits of the explosion of superhero movies and television programs is the popularization of the "Multiverse". This is a topic that has been discussed by theoretical physicists for decades (It was actually a key component of some of my own research a few years ago, and continues to be one of my interests for future research.), but in recent years it has also become a topic of discussion among the general public. In fact the inspiration for today's article was a chat I ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, April 14, 2023,
In :
Astronomy
There is an interesting piece of news from the space exploration and planetary science community today (actually it was yesterday, but the news came out today), with the launch of the JUICE mission. This is a planetary probe that will spend the next eight years traveling through space to the planet Jupiter, where it will then explore three of the ice moons there before settling into a long term orbit of Ganymede. Although JUICE is not equipped with life detecting experiments, these three moon... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, February 25, 2023,
In :
Astronomy
There is another interesting news story from the astronomy community, and this time it involves a rogue black hole.
What the astronomers believe that they have observed is actually a supermassive black hole, of the type believed to be at the center of most galaxies including our own, except this one appears to have been ejected from its host galaxy and is now travelling through space on its own.
Actually to be more precise, it isn't on its own. The other interesting discovery from this ob... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, January 13, 2023,
In :
Astronomy
To be fair, this comet isn't so much from the stone age itself, but that is the last time it was visible from the Earth.
For those of you who haven't been following this news story, there is currently a bright green comet passing through the inner solar system, and with any luck (and a bit of nice weather) will soon become visible to the naked eye.
Of course there are many comets passing by our solar system every year, but the the reason that comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is in the news is that it... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, January 7, 2023,
In :
Mathematics
As we start into a new year, and start to anticipate all of the amazing new discoveries and scientific theories that will come with it, I was trying to think of a good subject for the first article of 2023. I considered writing reviews of leading edge artificial intelligence or quantum computing techniques, or perhaps a discussion of some of the latest theories in astrophysics or exotic particle physics. In the end though, I decided that coming out of the holidays we should go with a bit of l... Continue reading ...
Here we are again, watching another year end and thinking back on everything that we have achieved over the last twelve months. It has been a year of turmoil for the world, with the ongoing pandemic, record setting economic problems, and more war and political scandals dominating the headlines. And yet for the scientific community, the year has not been too bad.
All through the year we have been seeing a steady stream of images from the new James Webb space telescope, with stunning images of d... Continue reading ...
Just when you thought the year was over in terms of major scientific breakthroughs, we get another one. And this one has such widespread implications that it has the potential to change our society in general.
Today it was announced that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have successfully completed a fusion reaction that produced excess energy.
Let me begin with a quick explanation of the science involved. Back in 1905, Albert Einstein published the special theory of rela... Continue reading ...
The 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics was announced today, and it is a well deserved win for the quantum mechanics community.
The three recipients this year are Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their work on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, and in particular on quantum entanglement. The research that they conducted in the 1970s and 1980s forms the basis of many of the emerging technologies in quantum computing and quantum communication, and will become increasingly importan... Continue reading ...
After nearly three years with a global pandemic that everyone thought would be over in a matter of months, the world is starting to recover and return to some semblance of normalcy. And for the scientific community, a significant part of that normalcy is the annual Nobel Prizes, which are set to be announced in the next few days.
As with the past two years, it is quite difficult to predict who will win this year. The scientific community saw many smaller advances, but did not see a major brea... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last seven years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week (unless there is another pandemic outbreak). And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle on... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, September 1, 2022,
In :
Astronomy
There is yet more exciting news from the astronomy community this morning with the announcement that the James Webb Space Telescope, which is already been making headlines all through the summer with its amazing discoveries, has completed the first direct imaging of a planet in another solar system. (Details and images can be viewed on the NASA website)
The target planet is a gas giant, believed to be about ten times more massive than Jupiter, and orbiting the otherwise uninteresting star, HIP... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, July 12, 2022,
In :
Astronomy
After many years of planning and preparation, today the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were released today, showing some of the most distant galaxies in the visible Universe.
Today's image is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe ever taken. This image is of the galactic cluster SMACS 0723, and displays several thousand galaxies in a single image (hence the title "Webb Deep Field"). For scale, all of these galaxies fit into a section of the sky eq... Continue reading ...
There are days when I despair at the state of scientific education and knowledge in the world. This is one of them.
In my wildest imaginings I never thought that I would have to say this, but the particle physics community has not opened a portal to hell.
For those who have not read about this odd theory yet, let me explain. As many of you are aware, on July 5 the Large Hadron Collider restarted after a break, and set a record for the highest energy particle collisions in a manmade experiment. ... Continue reading ...
Time Crystals. It sounds like something that would only exist in the mind of a science fiction writer, and until a few years ago that would have been true. However recent experimental advances combined with the potential to make a significant impact on the rapidly expanding field of quantum computing have made time crystals a hot topic of discussion right now.
But what are time crystals?
To understand the nature of time crystals, we must first understand what a crystal actually is. Why do some ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, May 7, 2022,
In :
Astronomy
Just when you thought that we knew everything there was to know about black holes, astronomers have discovered an anomaly.
The history of black holes in the modern sense goes back to 1916, just after Einstein published his general theory of relativity, when fellow physicist Karl Schwarzschild published a solution of the Einstein equations giving the gravitational field of a spherical object. His solution predicted that if mass exceeded a certain density, then not even light could escape from... Continue reading ...
Some of my loyal readers have noticed that I haven't updated my websites in the last three months, and have been wondering why that is. I assure you that it is nothing to worry about.
In February I was approached by a high tech start up to provide some consulting work on deep learning in medical imaging, and some related topics, and it has been devouring all of my spare time since then. It is a really exciting project, but unfortunately I am not at liberty to discuss the details at this point.... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, February 9, 2022,
In :
Astronomy
For as long as mankind has known of planets beyond our own, they have dreamed of travelling to them and expanding into the Solar system. And a recent proposal from a team at McGill University might have just made that dream a little more plausible.
The biggest obstacle to planetary exploration and colonization is the technological limitations on the speed of our spacecraft. When humans went to the moon half a century ago, it required astronauts to live in a small capsule for the better part of... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, January 26, 2022,
In :
Astronomy
There is good news from the astronomy and astrophysics community today as the James Webb telescope has now reached its final orbit and completed its deployment. It was launched on Christmas Day of 2021, but has been in development for thirty years already, and this summer all of that work and preparation will be paid off with the first of many new images of the distant reaches of the Universe.
In September 1989, before the now famous Hubble Space Telescope had even launched, astronomers around... Continue reading ...
Here we are in a new year, with hopes that it will be better than the last two. This was a year of events that would never have been predicted just a few years earlier, starting with an attempt to overthrow the US government and ending with growing claims of an international conspiracy to fake a pandemic while hordes of people attempt to shut down healthcare systems around the world and wage war over the use of vaccines. But as usual, I shall leave political and social news stories for the ma... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, November 12, 2021,
In :
Astronomy
There was an interesting announcement today from the world of extra-galactic astronomy, as a team from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (a name which I think sums up the creativity of scientists perfectly) have published evidence of the first black hole to be detected outside of our own Milky Way galaxy.
(For those few who do not yet know what a black hole is, it is a region of space and time that is so strongly curved, or has such a strong gravitational field, that not... Continue reading ...
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2021 has just been announced, and the winner is climate change!
To be more accurate, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to three of the pioneers in mathematical modelling of climate science, which uses fluid dynamics and other physical theories to produce better models of how our climate is changing, and what we can do to prevent worsening catastrophes. Given the events of the last few years, it seems like a very appropriate selection!
Who would have thought one year ago that we would still be dealing with the global pandemic for this year's Nobel prize season, but here we are. And just like last year, with the entire world shut down it is difficult to think of any major scientific advancements this year that have warranted the biggest prize in science, and thus this year's predictions will be very similar to last year's.
As with last year, we really didn't see a major scientific discovery as we did with the Higgs discovery... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last seven years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week (unless there is another pandemic outbreak). And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle on... Continue reading ...
Let me start with a full disclosure here - I was unaware of the research that I am going to be covering today until I saw a wonderful video produced by Veritasium. It can be viewed here.
As many of you already know, we are entering a vastly different era of prototyping and technological development. This is the era of 3D printing.
Just a decade ago, inventors and start up companies had to invest in tools and machinery, and in workers who had training in a number of fields of machining and manu... Continue reading ...
Another bit of sad news today for the physics community, with the passing of Steven Weinberg. He was not only a Nobel Laureate and well respected expert in several branches of theoretical physics, but was also a very talented writer and lecturer who brought modern physics to the general public with his many books and articles.
In the physics community he is best known for being one of the people who unified electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces into a single theory, known as the SU(2) Gauge... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, July 24, 2021,
In :
Astronomy
Yes, this week astrophysicists made the slightly provocative claim that our entire Universe is a giant doughnut. And no, this isn't a pandemic induced mass delusion.
Let us begin with a little background information. For the past century scientists have been aware that space itself is curved in the presence of mass and energy, which is one of the basic principles of general relativity. In fact it is the curvature of space and time that creates the phenomenon that we perceive as gravitational f... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, June 17, 2021,
In :
Medical
As many of my long time readers are aware, I fit into the Venn diagram of research scientists and 3D printing enthusiasts. Add in an interest in medical research, and one can see why this latest scientific breakthrough caught my attention this week.
Biomedical researchers have finally been able to 3D print human tissue.
Technically scientists have already produced 3D printed tissue, but there has always been a major obstacle to producing functioning organs. When organs grow naturally, they deve... Continue reading ...
A bit of news for my fellow University of Victoria alumni, there is some sad news today with the announcement that Dr. Reg Mitchell has passed away. To most of the community he is better known as Dr. Zonk, the green-haired chemist who demonstrated cool chemistry experiments to school children (and many adults) for over thirty years at public events and lectures.
He was a skilled chemistry researcher, and an even better educator, and he will be missed by the local scientific community. Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, May 18, 2021,
In :
Astronomy
I still remember that day over twenty years ago when I was just starting out as a graduate student in theoretical physics, and hearing the faculty and students buzzing about this shocking new discovery from the astrophysics and cosmology community. Not only was the Universe expanding, but it seemed to be accelerating.
Subsequent studies using supernovae and the cosmic microwave background confirmed this discovery, leading to the dark energy problem in cosmology. Approximately three quarters of... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, April 27, 2021,
In :
Administrative
Welcome!
As many of you are already aware, for the past fifteen years I have been maintaining a series of scientific blogs in which I write simple reviews of complicated scientific theories and concepts, as well as articles summarizing recent news and research from the scientific community.
Within those articles I have often created very brief explanations for concepts in modern physics and related scientific fields. These often take the form of simple analogies or diagrams that simplify the id... Continue reading ...
With the landing of Perseverance on Mars, and the ongoing research into the use of mRNA splicing and viral vector vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants, it is easy to overlook other less publicized research results. This is even more true of results that do not affect our daily lives, such as the announcement from the particle physics community today regarding the magnetic properties of subatomic muons.
Most people know about electrons. They are tiny particles that orbit th... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, February 19, 2021,
In :
Astronomy
Perseverance is a good word to describe the year that was. We have persevered through a global pandemic at a level of severity not seen in more than a century, and we have persevered through endless restrictions and lockdowns that were instituted to combat it and stop its spread.
And so it is that this news story is particularly appropriate now.
Perseverance is the name of the latest NASA mission to the planet Mars, and today the team behind it announced that it has landed safely on the red pl... Continue reading ...
Every year at this time I wrap up the year with a quick review of the scientific highlights of the year, but I think we all know that there was only one story dominating our attention for the past twelve months - the global nightmare that has been COVID-19. It has not been a great year for anyone, and certainly not one conducive to scientific advances.
And yet there were a few.
Of course the lead story must be the record setting development of a COV... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, December 12, 2020,
In :
Medical
By now I am certain that everyone has heard the most uplifting news of the year - the first COVID-19 vaccine has received approval for use and limited supplies are now being distributed to the most vulnerable members of our society.
However there is a more interesting aspect to this vaccine, at least to scientist such as myself, in that it is the first human vaccine to use the mRNA techniques that were first proposed over twenty-five years ago. (Not to be confused with the dreaded MRSA infecti... Continue reading ...
This has been a most interesting day for the physics community.
As most of you are aware by now, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded this morning to three eminent researchers in the field of black hole physics, with two being astronomers and astrophysicists, and the third having worked on the theory of black holes.
However there was also a less publicized announcement today from the LHCb collaboration, with the discovery of time dependent matter-antimatter asymmetry being observed in certain... Continue reading ...
In the midst of a global pandemic and economic woes around the world, we have the glimmer of optimism known as the Nobel Prize. It was first created to focus the world's attention on the great progresses of mankind in scientific and social fields instead of on the negatives in the world, and it seems that we need it today more than ever.
But enough of the doom and gloom, it is time to focus on what is really important - physics!
This year's award was split equally between theoretical physics an... Continue reading ...
What a crazy year this has been so far! In fact it has been so insane due to the COVID-19 virus and to world politics that I nearly forgot to post my annual predictions for the Nobel Prize in physics this year. For while there were even rumors that it might have to be cancelled this year if the pandemic worsened, but fortunately that did not happen.
However I must also say that it is quite difficult to predict this year. We did not see a major breakthrough in recent years as we did with the Hi... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 22, 2020,
In :
Astronomy
There has been a lot of media coverage in scientific circles this week regarding a recent discovery on the atmosphere of Venus, and which may indicate some form of life on our neighbouring planet. At the very least, it is causing astronomers who study planetary atmospheres to rethink some of their existing models.
The actual result seems rather mundane at first glance. Terrestrial telescopes located in different parts of the world were used to measure the absorption spectrum of electromagnetic... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last six years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
Posted by Chris Bird on Wednesday, September 9, 2020,
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week (unless there is another pandemic outbreak). And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle on... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, July 23, 2020,
In :
Astronomy
For those of you who are growing bored in lockdown, there is an interesting object in the night sky for most of this month. And even better, it can be observed without any special equipment, and while maintaining social distancing and isolation.
Back in March, while the rest of the world was dealing with the growing pandemic, a team of astronomers working on the the Neowise space telescope mission made a fascinating discovery. They observed a comet traveling past the Sun, and which was not pre... Continue reading ...
In the previous article we reviewed the sticky bead argument, which is often used to prove that gravitational fields must carry energy. We also stated without proof that the argument is wrong. In this article we will show an analogous thought experiment which is known to be false, and demonstrate how it applies to the issue of gravitational fields.
Let me also state from the start that I am not arguing for one side or the other in this debate, and also make it clear that there are a number of ... Continue reading ...
It seems like a simple question, with an obvious answer, and yet this question is still debated by some of the leading experts in the theory of gravity. There is no doubt that electromagnetic waves carry energy, or that pressure waves or sound waves or any other form of wave carries energy, and yet gravity is somehow quite different from all other known phenomena.
The reason for this is the general theory of relativity, first proposed in 1915 by Albert Einst... Continue reading ...
Who would have believed just two months ago that we would all be in isolation and the world would be shut down due to a simple little virus...
By now many of you are likely going crazy with boredom, and looking for productive things to do with your time. There is the temptation for all of us to waste this time binge-watching television or playing mindless video games. However today I would like to suggest a few ways that we can challenge ourselves and keep our minds active, while still respect... Continue reading ...
With the current global pandemic and dominance of negative news in the media, it is easy to look more optimistic stories that show how the world continues to function. In particular, it is easy to overlook stories of scientific advancements than are happening in spite of isolation and world health issues.
And while there are many rapid advances in the field of virology and immunology, the news story that I want to cover today is in a far more esoteric branch of science - the study of exotic... Continue reading ...
We have some incredibly sad news today, with the announcement that the legendary mathematician John Horton Conway has died from COVID-19. He may not be as famous outside of academia as some, but his silly little recreational games have resulted in some of the most interesting fields of mathematical research.
His work is too extensive to review everything, but I would like to briefly cover a few of his more interesting games. (For those who don't know Conway's work, a lot of his mathematical r... Continue reading ...
By now probably everyone has heard the same standard information on preventing the spread of COVID-19/Coronavirus/"The Lastest Big Fear", but in keeping with the trend of repeating information, here is what Health Canada is saying:
"Canadians should continue to think ahead about the actions that they can take to stay healthy and prevent the spread of any illness, especially respiratory infections.
Now and always during cold and flu season, stay home if you are sick. Encourage those you know a...
I just received news that Freeman Dyson, one of the giants of twentieth century physics, has passed away at the age of 96. And while I do not usually cover such events here, some people are just too important to the history of science to be overlooked.
I am certain that there will be numerous articles on Dyson's research and career, most of which far more informative and written by individuals who knew him far better (and not written at three o'clock on a Saturday morning by a sleep deprived a... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, January 17, 2020,
In :
Medical
Welcome everyone to the first regular article of the new decade!
And as a result of recent medical testing, the subject that I have selected for today's entry is the mathematics of reconstructing medical magnetic resonance images - or MRIs.
Some of you may recall a pair of articles that I published last June on the qualitative meaning of the Fourier transform and how it applied to reconstructing medical computed tomography images. In those two articles I provided a very basic - and possibly ov... Continue reading ...
That's right, we are starting a brand new decade of scientific exploration and technological developments. As scientists and engineers we can only dream about what the coming years will reveal.
But in looking forward, we must also take a moment to look back at how far we have already come. And to that end, I will be blatantly copying the trend of every other news organization this week and giving you my top ten scientific discoveries of the decade! (Although to be fair, as a ... Continue reading ...
Here we are again, watching as another year moves into history and speculation about what the new year might bring. This year also sees the end of a decade, and the beginning of the 2020s. As always, this has been an exciting year for the scientific community, and one that has marked a number of interesting new advances at all levels - from hints of a new particle up to images of a massive black hole.
I must also add a small disclaimer here, and mention that I have been distracted by other iss... Continue reading ...
As many of you know, I haven't been writing many articles lately for a variety of reasons both medical and technological. However there have been several articles in the media lately about this latest "discovery" in particle physics, and so I feel that a brief comment on it is necessary. Today's article represents my own opinions on this research.
For the last week the news media has been reporting on an announcement in particle physics, with the claim of a new particle being discovered. Howev... Continue reading ...
Once again we are at the biggest day of the year for the physics community - the announcement of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. And this year's recipients are well deserving of the award.
One of the details that I found particularly intriguing was that the award went to three individuals in two very different aspects of physics. Usually the Nobel committee selects a scientific achievement, and then determines which scientists contributed most to that research. But it would seem that this yea... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last five years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week. And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle one small aspect of student life by providing ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, August 10, 2019,
In :
Astronomy
It is official - there is life on the moon!
Admittedly, we were the ones who put it there so maybe it isn't such a good thing after all.
Last April a team from Israel sent an unmanned spacecraft known as Beresheet to the Moon. They were able to take some photographs as the probe approached the lunar surface, but then lost contact with it shortly afterwards. With no means of controlling the spacecraft it would have crashed violently into the lunar surface and broken apart.
Sometimes in life strange coincidences happen. For example, a few weeks ago I wrote an article on the science behind computed tomography scanners that are ubiquitous in modern hospitals. Then today there is an article in the local newspaper reporting that the hospital I was at in April has just purchased and installed a PET/CT medical imaging device. And so rather than accept this as a random coincidence, I will take it as a sign that my readers would like to know more about this imaging meth... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, June 26, 2019,
In :
Medical
In yesterday's article I demonstrated an intuitive explanation of the Fourier transform, which is used in nearly every branch of physics and mathematics. It allows an image to be stored in terms of its properties, such as average brightness and weighting of different regions of the image, and therefore is more useful for data analysis than a bitmapped image would be.
Today I will demonstrate one of the many applications of the Fourier transform. As promised, today I will be demonstrating how a... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, June 25, 2019,
In :
Mathematics
I have spent the last few weeks pondering what I should write about for my first article back. Should I go into something exotic in astrophysics such as magnetic monopoles or topological defects? Should I go into complicated mathematical research and paradoxes? Should I go into the bizarre world of quantum mechanics and its foundations? Nothing seemed quite right.
So I decided to write about Fourier transforms. That's right, after thinking about some of the strangest concepts in physics and ma... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, April 30, 2019,
In :
Administrative
Today's article is going to be very different from my usual writing, in that it does not contain scientific or mathematics news, but rather news of a more personal nature. Ordinarily I would keep my private life private, but enough of my loyal readers have been asking about my recent absence that I feel it is worth giving a few updates.
For those who have not heard, on April 13th I was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. I had been having abdominal pains for a few days before, but early ... Continue reading ...
And Canada is officially back in the space race, with the announcement today of two billion dollars over twenty-four years going to aerospace companies that will help to build the Lunar Gateway project.
For those who have not followed this project, Lunar Gateway is a plan by NASA to place a manned space station in polar orbit around the Moon, and to use it as a staging area for future missions to Mars or beyond. It will take two decades to complete, but when finished will provide both a labor... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, February 15, 2019,
In :
Astronomy
Nearly fifteen years into what was meant to be a three month mission, NASA's Opportunity rover has finally ended its mission.
The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe dust storm on the surface of Mars covered the rover last June. NASA engineers and technicians have sent over a thousand messages and commands to the rover since then in an attempt to recover it, but all of them have failed. On Tuesday they made one final attempt at communication, and when that was n... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, January 4, 2019,
In :
Astronomy
The new year is only a few days old, and already we have exciting news from the astronomy and astrophysics community with the announcement that the New Horizons probe has just completed the most distant flyby in history.
Many of you will remember the New Horizons probe for its flyby of the planet Pluto and its moons a while back in 2015, with the stunning photos of the icy planet still being studied and analyzed to this day. The data sent back by New Horizons from Pluto and Charon have reveale... Continue reading ...
May you all have a happy and healthy 2019, full of enjoyment and prosperity. And may we all still be together again when the year ends and 2020 begins.
Greetings all! I hope that you each had a relaxing and enjoyable holiday, in whichever form you celebrate it, and are refreshed and re-energized for the coming year!
It is also that time of year again when everyone looks back on the achievements of the year, and this year has been a good one for the scientific community. And so without further ado (or a don't), here we go...
This year has been particularly interesting for the astronomy community. Back in February we had the announcement that a ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, November 27, 2018,
In :
Astronomy
Planetary scientists are celebrating today, with the announcement from NASA that the InSight rover has successfully landed on the planet Mars.
The NASA spacecraft is designed to burrow beneath the surface of Mars, and relay back data on the inner structure of the red planet. Previous spacecraft that were sent to Mars were able to dig down a few inches and studied the surface rocks and dust, but this will be the first probe to go deep into the underlying rocks.
Today we have more of an announcement than a scientific article, so I hope you will forgive me for doing a little promotional work for a change.
A couple of my friends from the physics and mathematics community have launched a new online science series, and have asked me to promote it through my website. It is called The Edge Of Reality, and will be using professional scientists and mathematicians to present some very modern and exotic scientific theories to a general audience. The goal is to ... Continue reading ...
A slightly different form of science today, as the international scientific community has today officially changed the definition of the kilogram. And while it may not be the most exciting scientific discovery, it has many ramifications for a number of future research projects and experiments.
In a historic vote, scientists and engineers (and a few politicians) from more than sixty different nations unanimously approved a change to the international measurement system that is the basis for g... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, November 3, 2018,
In :
Medical
Normally I would not comment on political stories or news items about funding announcements, but I will be making an exception today as this news item not only concerns a major particle accelerator in Canada, but also the facility where I did a significant portion of my own research when I started out as a graduate student. (Which also means I may be a little biased on this particular item :) )
For those of you who are not familiar with this story, last Thursday the prime minister of Canada ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, November 2, 2018,
In :
Astronomy
There is some sad news from NASA this week, as two major space probes have both been declared dead within the last few days.
Just two days ago, NASA announced that the 9 1/2 year old Kepler space probe, which has detected thousands of new exoplanets over its near decade long mission, had stopped working. Some readers may remember that earlier in the year the control team were having some trouble with the probe, but managed to get it working again. This time it is more serious and more perman... Continue reading ...
The big day has arrived, and the Nobel committee has now announced the recipients of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. And as I predicted, this year they have gone with a technological development rather than work in pure science. However the research that resulted in this year's prize is still pretty amazing.
I must also start with a disclaimer here that this research is well outside my own specialist field of theoretical and mathematical physics / astrophysics / particle physics. As such I ca... Continue reading ...
Yes folks, its that time of year again. This week the Nobel committees will be announcing the 2018 winners of the most prestigious prize in science, and that means it is time to once again make a few predictions.
As usual I will begin with some comments on which theories and potential candidates will not be receiving a prize this year.
Every year when I make my predictions, I have readers from outside of the scientific community complain that I "forgot" to list certain people. I won't name the ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 11, 2018,
In :
Astronomy
Just when you thought you knew the solar system...
Some long term readers may recall a heated debate twelve years ago over the nature of Pluto. When it was first discovered over a century ago, astronomers named it and labelled it the ninth planet. Generations of students learned the names of the planets, and wrote endless reports about the ninth planet. A few years ago the New Horizons probe sent back detailed images of its surface, taken from orbit during a flyby as the probe left the solar s... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, September 7, 2018,
In :
Fundraising
Now that everyone is settling back in to their school and work schedules, I thought it was time to give a few updates on my life and websites and whatever else comes to mind.
First off is a blatant money grab :)
For a few years I have been accepting donations of bitcoins or litecoins to help offset the costs of maintaining my various websites, and I appreciate the response that I have received. It is certainly not required and I do not expect people to donate. I will always keep my website free... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last four years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week. And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle one small aspect of student life by providing ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, July 27, 2018,
In :
Astronomy
For those who are interested in astronomy, tonight Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in fifteen years. That means that it will be both large - though still only viewable in detail through binoculars or a telescope - and very bright.
As most people already know, both the Earth and Mars orbit the sun, in neighbouring orbits. Usually they are at different points in their respective orbits, and so Mars appears small and distant. Roughly every two years, the two planets pass close toget... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, July 19, 2018,
In :
Astronomy
Neutrinos are popular right now.
Last week the IceCube neutrino observatory announced the discovery of the origin of many high energy cosmic rays as being a massive black hole and active galaxy, using the flux of neutrinos that it produced as a pointer to their source. The observations were then confirmed by a variety of observatories working in radio waves, visible light, and gamma-rays, but the original signal was through neutrinos.
Today we have the announcement that the University of Victo... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, July 13, 2018,
In :
Astronomy
After weeks of speculation, today the IceCube neutrino observatory has revealed their big news. After more than a century of debate about the origin of high energy cosmic rays, the IceCube team together with astronomers around the world have managed to pinpoint the source of at least some high energy cosmic rays as being a very active and violent distant galaxy known as a blazar. (For those interested in the technical details, the two research papers can be found here and here)
There has been a lot of discussion lately of the possible existence of sterile neutrinos in the Universe, due in large part to a few papers in the recent weeks making claims of possible signs of detection in one of the bigger neutrino observatories. And although these results are preliminary, with the formal announcements coming later this week, and may show no clear sign of anything other than a statistical fluctuation, the theory of sterile neutrinos is still quite interesting to the theore... Continue reading ...
Among physicists, there is a popular story told and retold about a pair of lectures that were given at a conference in 1948 that demonstrates the brilliance of Richard Feynman. How much of it is true and how much has been embellished to build up the legend is unknown, but it is still an entertaining and information anecdote.
Since the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s there had been an unsolved problem regarding the proper treatment of particle interactions. The laws of q... Continue reading ...
In honour of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman, I will today present a very basic overview of one of the great ideas of modern physics which was developed and popularized by Feynman. And the first part of that theory is the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
By now quantum mechanics is firmly established as a confirmed and proven theory of nature. Even popular society has come to embrace some of the stranger aspects of quantum theory (though unfortunately they ...
I do not normally celebrate celebrity birthdays and anniversaries, since the focus on this series of articles is on the principles of science and the laws of nature. However I do feel that today's anniversary warrants an exception to this general rule. It was one century ago today that Richard Feynman entered the world and would go on to change physics forever.
Although never reaching the same level of popular recognition as Einstein or Newton or Hawking, in many ways Richard Feynman was grea...
Today marks the anniversary of one of the biggest events in local astronomy history, and probably in the history of science in Canada. It was exactly one century ago today that the Plaskett telescope at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory on Little Saanich Mountain in my hometown of Victoria,British Columbia, first collected light from the stars and became the second largest telescope in the world.
For those who haven't had a chance to see the telescope, it is an amazing piece of equipment ... Continue reading ...
There has been a lot of discussion in the media over the last few months on the rise of bitcoins and cryptocurrencies, and what it means for society and the economy. With uncertainty in the world due to Brexit and Trump and countless other political crises, individuals and organizations have been increasingly turning to the decentralized currency that is controlled by the masses, and as a result what was once given away for free a mere decade ago is now selling for tens of thousands of dollar... Continue reading ...
Today's article will be a departure from my usual scientific fare, and is a copy of an article that I recently wrote for a futurist website that I also contribute to. This is more of an editorial than a scientific review, and some users may wish to skip over it.
This has been a bad week for Facebook. By now I suspect most people are aware of the latest scandal, in which the user data of tens of millions of users was harvested by a British company that then used the information to influence vot... Continue reading ...
With the recent passing of legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, I have received a number of requests to explain some of his pioneering research work in a popular format. To be honest it is simply not possible to do better than Hawking's own work in communicating his research to the masses. I would strongly encourage those who are interested to read some of his many popular science books to get a true understanding of his genius.
There is sad news this morning with the announcement that the legendary theoretical physicist and science popularized, Stephen Hawking, has passed away at the age of 76.
He was a rare figure in the scientific community in that he made significant contributions to research, and yet he was also a famous celebrity outside of the theoretical physics community due to his popular books and willingness to bring modern physics theories to the masses.
Posted by on Saturday, February 24, 2018,
In :
Astronomy
One of the great unsolved problems in modern physics is the nature of gravity. Since Einstein first published the general theory of relativity over a century ago, it has proven to be a very accurate model of the solar system and the cosmos. Repeated experiments have confirmed its predictions in the form of planetary orbits, gravitational lensing, and high precision measurements of time and frequency on the Earth and in orbit. So far no deviations from the predictions of general relativity hav... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, February 23, 2018,
In :
Mathematics
I am always amazed at how simple some of the most interesting ideas and research in modern mathematics truly is. There are problems in mathematics that can be explained to a small child and yet the greatest minds of the past centuries have been unable to solve. Mathematics is one of the few fields of study where anyone can understand topics that the leading experts are still trying to solve. One such topic is the surreal numbers.
Everyone remembers as a child learning the integers, or counting... Continue reading ...
After the memorial I posted earlier in the week, I have had a few readers ask me for more details about energy localization in the general theory of relativity. There are a few variations on this theory, and so I will try to focus on generic properties and as usual I will try to minimize formal equations in order to make this article accessible to a general audience.
The general theory of relativity was first published in 1915, and quickly confirmed by astrophysics experiments over the followi... Continue reading ...
There is some sad news to report this month, with the passing in January of one of my friends and mentors, Dr. Fred Cooperstock. Not only was he an accomplished physicists making significant contributions to the study of the general theory of relativity, but he was also a much loved and respected instructor to generations of physics students at the University of Victoria.
As a theoretical physicist he was best known for the Cooperstock Energy Localization Hypothesis, which argued that gravitat... Continue reading ...
May you all have a happy and healthy 2018, full of enjoyment and prosperity. And may we all still be together again when the year ends and 2019 begins.
Here we are at the end of another amazing year - it seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the start of 2017 and now it has come to an end. And though it was not the greatest year for the world at large, it has been a very good year for the scientific community.
The year started off with some very preliminary results being announced. The theoretical physics community saw a few hints of evidence of a holographic Universe in experimental data - though that is still quite controversial - w... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, December 16, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
The astronomy community has been buzzing this week with discussions of a new object that has been seen in the solar system. Its formal name is A2017UI (with the proposed common name Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for "messenger from the distant past" ), and it is assumed to be an asteroid - but one such as we have never seen before.
First off, it has entered the solar system from deep space, making it the first such asteroid in recent history to do so. Being extra-solar already makes it a valua... Continue reading ...
Let me begin by saying that I believe that the popularization of science in general and physics in particular is a very good thing. The more educated a society becomes, the more it is able to function and advance. And in the internet age in which false information is able to spread so rapidly, it is more important than ever for trained, professional scientists such as myself to promote skepticism and rational thought, and to try to communicate what is accepted scientific fact from superstitio... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, November 17, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
Since mankind first looked up at the night sky, one of the biggest questions has been "Are we alone in the Universe?". Philosophers and theologians have debated this issue for centuries, while astronomers and astrobiologists continue to look for evidence and explore the data. When NASA sent probes to the edge of our solar system and beyond, they included information on our location in the galaxy and our culture in case other life forms one day discover them. Projects such as SETI have spent d... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Monday, November 6, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
In my previous article I discussed the possibility that the Universe contains a strange type of star called a Planck star, which is prevented from collapsing due to the effects of quantum gravity. However they are not the only type of exotic star which may exist, and certainly not the only kind that can be searched for with modern telescopes.
Another interesting possibility that is being studied by the theoretical physics community is the dark star.
Posted by on Saturday, November 4, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
For most of us, our first experience with astronomy is looking up at the stars. Whether it is a prehistoric humanoid or a child living in a major metropolis, at some point we have all looked at the night sky and wondered at the distant point of light. As a result you would think that we know everything that there is to know about stars, but we do not.
Recently the theoretical physics community has started discussing a new type, called a Planck Star. At the moment it is a very theoretical and s... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, October 17, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
There was an interesting joint announcement today from the LIGO, Virgo, and Fermi telescope teams, and one that will have great value to the astrophysics community. For the first time, all three simultaneously detected a neutron star collision and were able to collect data regarding both its gravitational wave signature and its gamma-ray signature. This new data will provide for interesting new studies on the physics of neutron stars and on the origin of several heavier elements in the Univer... Continue reading ...
The 2017 Nobel Prize in physics was announced today, and as expected it was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne their work in developing the LIGO experiment that recently made the first detection of a gravitational wave. The experiment itself was an amazing piece of engineering, and its ability to detect and study gravitational waves is going to make it a very important tool in the future for understanding the Universe.
Just over a century ago Einstein published the general t... Continue reading ...
Once again we are at the most important week of the year for the scientific community, the week of the Nobel Prize announcements. This year there are a few serious contenders for the physics prize, and they all involve very interesting fields of research.
The leading candidate for the prize this year is probably the LIGO experiment, which last year detected the first gravitational waves. Since then they have confirmed the detection with two more gravitational waves and just recently detected t... Continue reading ...
It is that time of year again - the week of the Nobel Prize announcements!
As usual, there is a significant amount of discussion and debate in the scientific community as to who will receive this year's prizes. And also as so often happens, there is no clear frontrunner for the prize this year.
Before I start making predictions though, I must take a moment to make clear who will not be winning. After last year's predictions I received a few communications from people who were unhappy that their... Continue reading ...
A few days ago I wrote a brief review of the Seesaw Model of particle physics. Being a theorist, I forgot to mention that the motivation for that review was a new set of results from the experimental community that constrains such models. And so I thought that today I would give a few details on these new results.
In the model I reviewed, known as a Type-I model, each of the species of neutrino that are part of the Standard Model are partnered with a second, very heavy neutrino that provides a... Continue reading ...
Neutrinos are very mysterious particles. They do not carry electric or magnetic charge, and so they do not interact very much with anything else. In fact we are constantly being showered with neutrinos from space that fly straight through us without interaction, and in fact straight through the entire Earth without even being slowed down. They are so difficult to detect that the weak nuclear decays that generate them were at first thought to be violating energy and momentum conservation since... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, September 15, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
After twenty years of studying the planet Saturn, the working life of the Cassini spacecraft will come to an end in the next few hours. On Friday, September 15, 2017 at about 7:55 am EDT, NASA will crash the probe into the surface of Saturn and end its mission.
As far back as the 1980s astronomers from around the world were making plans to send a probe to the gas giant, Saturn. We had already explored both Mars and Venus, and the Voyager probes had made flybys of the outer planets, but Saturn ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, September 14, 2017,
In :
Particle Physics
As students around the world return to school, or start college, or begin new coursework and training of other kinds, particle physicists are also starting new things in the form of new data runs from the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC has already produced evidence of the Higgs boson, and added further constraints to many other theories of nature. The next data run could easily find evidence of dark matter, dark energy, or even hidden higher dimensions in the Universe.
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last three years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week. And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle one small aspect of student life by providing ... Continue reading ...
Another interesting result from the Canadian led team at the ALPHA collaboration, with a paper publish today in Nature in which they present the hyperfine spectrum of anti-hydrogen.
Anyone who has the least interest in either physics or astronomy is aware of atomic spectra. Over a century ago scientists discovered that each chemical element emits a signature series of wavelengths of light, which is unique to that element. From the colour of emitted light we can identify each element that is p... Continue reading ...
Happy 10th Anniversary to the team behind the GalaxyZoo website!
Back in 2007 a group of astronomers set up this program that would provide images from professional telescopes to the public, and allow dedicated volunteers to classify the different types of galaxies that were visible. This has produced countless academic papers in peer reviewed journals, and has allowed an army of amateur scientists to have a real impact on our understanding of the Universe.
Posted by on Monday, July 10, 2017,
In :
Mathematics
A while ago I wrote an article about an interesting statistical phenomenon known as Simpson's Paradox. According to Simpson's Paradox, a company can have discriminatory hiring policies in spite of each of its individual departments being completely fair. A new medical treatment can work better than existing methods for both the young and the old, and yet it gives worse results when you don't know the age of the patient. And it can make a single data set produce opposite and contradictory resu... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, June 7, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
After forty years of speculations ranging from exotic particle decays to advanced alien civilizations, the famous 6EQUJ5 signal has now been explained, and the explanation is embarrassingly rather basic.
In August 1977, astronomers at the Big Ear observatory at Ohio State university were scanning the sky for radio signals from space. There are numerous sources of radio waves in the galaxy, and a lot of interesting science can be done using a map of the sources of radio signals. And of course m... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, June 1, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
Yesterday I wrote about the theory of neutron stars and pulsars, and about the NICER mission that is about to begin examining them in more detail. After fifty years of theoretical study and limited astronomical data, we are soon to have a dedicated x-ray telescope with the primary purpose of studying the composition and properties of pulsars in the galaxy.
However the mission has a second goal, and one with a more practical purpose than studying distant neutron stars and pulsars. The mission w... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, June 1, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
Nearly fifty years ago, astronomers discovered a bizarre signal in the sky coming from an unknown, mysterious object. Where most astrophysical objects send a steady stream of particles, light and radio waves, this new object was rapidly pulsing x-rays.
These objects were eventually found to be very compact objects, known as neutron stars. When a star reaches the end of its life, and has exhausted its supply of nuclear fuel, it will expel its outer layers and the core will collapse into a smal... Continue reading ...
Forty years ago today the movie Star Wars opened in theaters, and inspired a generation to study and explore the depths of space. Many people of my age entered into science and engineering fields after first getting excited by the possibilities presented in the entire septet of films.
In honour of the anniversary, I thought I would discuss one of the interesting technologies used in the Star Wars universe. (Which as I wrote in a previous entry, may actually exist in a galaxy far, far away if y... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, April 11, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
Congratulations to the researchers and volunteers with the Exoplanet Explorers project, with the announcement today that they have discovered four new planets orbiting a distant star.
These planets have been nominally named EE-1b, EE-1c, EE-1d, and EE-1e and are orbiting a star similar to our own sun, but located six hundred light years away in the Aquarius constellation. Each of them is approximately twice the mass of the Earth, but they have years that last between three and thirteen days. ... Continue reading ...
There is an interesting new result in the physics community today, with the possible discovery of a new force that acts on very small objects. This result has just been announcement, and as such it is still far from being independently confirmed, but if it is true then it will have a number of implications for the growing field of nanotechnology.
The new force is being called the lateral Casimir effect, and appears to be a variation on the well known Casimir force that affects other nanoscale ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, February 24, 2017,
In :
Astronomy
Another interesting announcement from NASA today in regards to the search for exoplanets. Using a combination of several ground based telescopes together with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the team has discovered seven new planets, each of which is roughly Earth sized, and orbiting a star a mere 39 lightyears away from the Earth. The star at the center of this system is a very small, very cold star which was not observed until last May. It has been named TRAPPIST-1, short for Transi...
Over the past week I have been reviewing some of the possible solution for the fine tuning problem of cosmology. One option is that some aspect of quantum mechanics requires the Universe to contain a sentient observer, and in effect cause the Universe to fine tune itself. Another possibility is that there are a very large number of Universes aside from our own, and with each Universe having slightly differently properties it follows that a few will be habitable. Today we will look at another ... Continue reading ...
In the previous article, I gave an overview of how the fine tuning problem of cosmology could be an effect of some as yet unknown aspect of quantum mechanics and its requirement that the Universe always contain an observer. While this solution is quite interesting, it is also quite speculative and requires many assumptions about the nature of quantum mechanics. However there are other solutions to the fine tuning problem which are less speculative.
In the previous article I gave a very quick overview of the fine tuning problem of cosmology. Why do the laws of physics and the fundamental constants of nature, which are believed to be random, just perfect for creating a Universe that permits life to develop and exist.
One particularly interesting potential solution arises from the foundations of quantum mechanics. While it might sound more like philosophy than physics, it is possible that the Universe cannot exist unless there is someone he... Continue reading ...
It is a question that has been asked many times in classrooms and lecture halls around the world, but it does have a deeper meaning in physics and cosmology. Why should it be that the Universe, with seemingly random laws and variables, should happen to suitable for the formation of life? With so many possible states of the Universe that are completely sterile, why did it just happen to form in the perfect way to provide a home for beings like us?
The scientific media has been buzzing this week about the possibility that our Universe is holographic. All across the internet I have seen headlines claiming that we live in only two dimensions, and that everything we see and sense is an illusion. And while both the media coverage is definitely overhyping what should be a minor scientific paper, the entire topic of a holographic universe is an interesting subject that is worth exploring.
A few weeks ago there was an announcement by a team of researchers from the University of Amsterdam that claimed they had analyzed the gamma-ray background and found no evidence of dark matter. It was a good result, and a valid claim, but unfortunately some of the online and mainstream media misunderstood exactly what the team was claiming. And while I wrote about this misunderstanding and tried to clarify it at the time, some people I have been speaking with are still confused.
A few days before the holidays began, I made a passing mention of an interesting new result from the ALPHA collaboration relating to the measurement of the spectrum of anti-hydrogen. Since that time a few people have inquired about it, and asked for more details.
Let me begin with a little background on the topic.
As most of us recall from high school science class, everything that we see around us is made of atoms. Protons, neutrons and electrons combine in different amounts to form diffe... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Monday, January 2, 2017,
In :
Administrative
It is true, I am capable of reading a calendar and I am aware that Christmas and New Year's Day were over a week ago. I could bluff and argue that since my grandmother was Ukrainian I am celebrating the orthodox Christmas instead, but the real answer is far more boring. For reasons that I still haven't been able to ascertain, the company that hosts my blog on this site and one of my other websites suddenly closed down their blogging program on Christmas Eve. Because of the holidays I haven't... Continue reading ...
Another year has passed by, and what a year it has been. It has been a year of highs and lows, but most important a year of great progress (and one rather obvious setbacks) for the scientific community.
We began the year with a lot of interesting rumors. As 2016 began, the scientific community was quietly talking about leaked claims that the LIGO experiment had detected gravitational waves after thirty years of searching. These rumors were to be confirmed one month later, with the formal ann... Continue reading ...
As you might guess from the title, today's article will be slightly less serious than normal, and a lot more lighthearted. Those of you who prefer serious science may want to skip this one...
Now for those who are still reading this, the topic today is the physics of Santa Claus. I will not weigh in on the reality or lack there of of the magical elf, but rather I will be addressing how modern physics makes some of the more questionable aspect of the story of Santa Claus a little more plausible... Continue reading ...
The speed of light has been in the news recently - or at least the new sources I rely on - and it has left some people confused. For over a century we have been told that the speed of light is constant. No matter how fast you are traveling, or how bright or energetic the light is, it has a constant speed. That is the basis of the special theory of relativity which is one of the most experimentally verified theories in all of science. And now a team of physicists is claiming it might be wrong.... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, October 13, 2016,
In :
Mathematics
Mathematics is the pinnacle of logic and science. Most people assume that mathematics is based on solid foundations of logic, and that everything is well understood. Some sciences contain controversies and differing opinions, but surely mathematics is pure and definitive. At the very least the basics that are taught in school must be based indisputable.
And yet deep in the heart of mathematics lies a problem, known as the axiom of choice.
The Nobel Prize in physics was announced today, and it has surprised a lot of people.
As I wrote in my predictions a couple of days ago, the vast majority of the physics community had assumed that the prize would go to the LIGO team for their detection of gravitational waves earlier this year. Many articles on the Nobel prizes had gone so far as to claim that this was a certainty with no other candidates even being considered. And yet the award committee went a different way.
It is that time of year again - the week of the Nobel Prize announcements. And as usual, the academic community is buzzing with discussions of who will be this year's recipient of the most prestigious prize there is.
For many in the physics community this year, there is not much doubt. Most years there are several potential recipients, but the discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO almost guarantees that the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics will go to the team that designed and built it. It is ce... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 13, 2016,
In :
Mathematics
A couple of years ago I wrote an article explaining one of the most interesting phenomena in statistics, Simpson's Paradox. For those who have forgotten (or just didn't read it), Simpson's paradox occurs when a single set of data is analyzed by two different, equally valid methods, and the results of the two methods give opposite conclusions. The reason for this is that often a data set contains information that is not included in the analysis but is important to the results, such as drug tes... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last three years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
Posted by on Friday, September 2, 2016,
In :
Astronomy
By now many of you have heard the preliminary reports from the astronomy community that a team of researchers has detected an interesting signal from a distant star. At this point it is impossible to know what generated this signal, but one possibility is that it could be a product of an advanced alien civilization. However it is far more likely that it is a natural astrophysical phenomena, which would be just as interesting for the scientific community but less newsworthy.
Can we change the past? It would seem to be obvious that this is not possible - once an event happens it is part of history and cannot be altered in anyway. Even in the most speculative theories on time travel there are usually strict restrictions on what is possible.
But today's article is not on time travel, but rather it is on the mysterious quantum effect known as a quantum eraser, and how experiments in this field have suggested that on small scales, the future really can affect the past... Continue reading ...
More disappointing news from the experimental physics community today as the teams that operate the Large Hadron Collider have formally announced that there is no new particle at 750 GeV.
Many people will remember that at the end of last year the particle physics community was buzzing over a new and unexpected result from the LHC. Their data showed something being produced at 750 GeV and decaying primarily into two photons. This did not match with any known particles, and immediately produced ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, July 22, 2016,
In :
Astronomy
I always love to see people excited about exploring new technologies and new scientific fields. This has been especially true of the Breakthrough Initiatives program funded by philanthropist Yuri Milner, and now the team have announced a very exciting new project.
We are going to send probes to other solar systems!
Recently it was announced that the Breakthrough Initiatives is beginning work on Project Starshot, whose goal is exactly that. They will be spending $100 million dollars developing h... Continue reading ...
There is some disappointing news for the particle physics/astrophysics/cosmology research community this week as the Large Underground Xenon experiment has completed its data run and found no clear signals of any new particles. Due to its long run and its sensitivity, many had hoped for a significant dark matter detection, but it simply isn't there.
As many of my readers already know, our best models of the Universe include a mysterious form of matter known as dark matter. In fact it is believ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, June 16, 2016,
In :
Mathematics
For those who have been enjoying my recent series on unsolved mathematical problems, we have another entry today. This time featuring the properties of prime numbers. (And for those who prefer my physics and astronomy articles, I promise that I will try to write a few more of those as well in the coming weeks).
As most (and hopefully all) of you know, a prime number is a number which cannot be written as the product of two other numbers. It can only be properly divided by the number 1, and by ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, June 7, 2016,
In :
Mathematics
Continuing with this week's theme of simple yet unproven mathematical problems, today I thought I would discuss perfect numbers. Although they appear to be simply counting numbers, they have some very unique properties and mysteries.
First though I must apologize for part of yesterday's article. As I wrote in the introduction, my aim was to provide three simple problems in number theory. And while readers did enjoy both the Erdos-Strauss conjecture and Pillai's Conjecture, it would seem that m... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Monday, June 6, 2016,
In :
Mathematics
Last week I wrote an article outlining a few simple yet unsolved problems in mathematics. At the time I had thought it would be a one off posting, rather than the start of a series of articles. However based on the positive responses I have received and the numerous inspiring mathematical discussions it has provoked, it is clear that there is a demand in society for more of these type of mathematical articles.
And so here we go again...
The last article that I wrote focused on colourings and on... Continue reading ...
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... Continue reading ...
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... Continue reading ...
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... Continue reading ...
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... Continue reading ...
In my previous article, I wrote about the exciting world of quantum computing and outlined some of the many benefits that it has the potential to bring to society. However as I alluded to previously, there are still a number of technical challenges that need to be overcome. Today I will try to give brief overviews of two of the most difficult challenges.
The first difficulty is known by many names and covers many related technical challenges, but is usually called decoherence. A quantum comput... Continue reading ...
I awoke this morning to a flood of emails and direct messages from people forwarding a link to a news video. By now most of you (or at least those living in Canada) will have also seen this video, in which the new Prime Minister of Canada is shown excitedly explaining quantum computing to journalists during a visit to the Perimeter Institute this week. In a world in which politicians increasingly ignore science, or in some cases actively wage a war against science, it is a hopeful sign that w... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, March 9, 2016,
In :
Philosophy
A few years ago, a friend of mine shocked the audience at a science outreach lecture for the public by telling them the laws of physics say that every book, stage play, movie, and television program they have ever seen is real. No matter how bizarre the plots may seem, somewhere people with the exact same names and physical appearances actually did the exact same things in real life. Somewhere out there, a strongman name Hercules really did complete the labours described in mythology. Somewhe... Continue reading ...
I have just finished watching the final episode of Mythbusters, and I must say that it was a great ending to a truly great television program.
I still remember the night when I was working late writing up one of my first academic papers as a graduate student, just beginning my doctorate in theoretical physics, and had the television on in the background to keep me company. Suddenly instead of the usual dull nature programs or documentaries, there were these two guys applying the scientific me... Continue reading ...
For just over a year now, I have been told by various people that some browsers and search engines were raising security issues about some of my older websites. This past weekend I finally had the time to explore this issue further, and I have found the explanation.
I have been maintaining both personal and professional websites for over twenty years now. Due to changing technologies and services, some of the javascript and PHP widgets that I wrote many years ago needed to access remote reso... Continue reading ...
A few days ago I was chatting with some physics students online, as I often do, and one of the students asked me if there were any well motivated theories for why the laws of physics in our Universe should happen to be just right to support life. In fact there are many very good theories on this point, ranging from landscape theories in the multiverse, to a Universe that evolves baby Universes through the formation of black holes, and through to very speculative ideas that have been put forth... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, February 25, 2016,
In :
Astronomy
I feel that I must being this article with a disclaimer. Although I usually try to keep my science news articles neutral, some of the comments in this particular article should be considered more of an opinion piece on the silliness of certain definitions in astronomy. Those who only wish more serious, formal articles might want to skip this one...
By now even the most casual of astronomy fans will have heard the reports that astronomers believe they have discovered the ninth planet in the sol... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, February 16, 2016,
In :
Astronomy
In astronomy news this week, another big mystery has (possibly) been solved, and unfortunately it is a rather mundane solution.
In the early 1970s, astronomers who were studying distant galaxies noticed that they were being pulled towards a mysterious region near the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, approximately 200 million lightyears away from us. Assuming that gravity had the same properties on cosmic scales as it does within our own galaxy, this region appeared to contain a concentrated mass... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, February 11, 2016,
In :
Astronomy
Some people stay up all night for movie premieres, for rock concerts, or for sporting events. I stay up all night watching rocket launches. Or at least that is what I am doing tonight.
Just before 4:00am Eastern Time the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched a rocket carrying its sixth scientific satellite from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima, Japan, and in the next few hours it will deploy the ASTRO-H experiment into orbit. And if all goes well, it will be providing astronomer... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, February 11, 2016,
In :
Astronomy
First let me congratulate the LIGO team and its collaborators on the first confirmed detection of gravitational waves! It is a milestone for astronomy and astrophysics, and one well worth celebrating!
The gravitational waves that they have detected passed through the Earth on September 14, 2015 at 5:51am EDT, and are believed to have been generated by merger of two black holes that had been orbiting one another. Based on the data, this particular collision likely occurred 1.3 billion years ago... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, February 10, 2016,
In :
Astronomy
By now most of you will have heard the rumors. This Thursday the team behind the LIGO experiment are scheduled to give a press conference, and the most likely reason is that they are going to announce the detection of gravitational waves. Of course at this point we do not know how strong the signal is, or even that it is true, but if it is it will be an interesting confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
According to the general theory of relativity, mass and energy warp space... Continue reading ...
In my end of year review article a couple of weeks ago I made reference to the possible discovery of a Weyl fermion. Since then a few people have asked me what a Weyl fermion is and how it differs from a regular fermion. In fact there are three common types of fermions, and I thought I would give a brief review of them today.
Let me begin by explaining what fermions are. When quantum mechanics was being developed in the early 20th century, it was discovered that particles could exist in two po... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Monday, January 4, 2016,
In :
Administrative
With the beginning of the New Year comes the beginning of many other challenges and opportunities, and I will be sharing these throughout the year as plans become finalized. However my first big change is the creation of a new website, and the start of the end of several old ones.
As some of my longtime followers know, I setup my first personal webpage twenty years ago when I was just a first year student at the University of Victoria. In keeping with the technology of the time, it was a rathe... Continue reading ...
May 2016 bring all of my friends, family, and loyal readers all the health, happiness, and prosperity that they deserve. And may we all get together again as friends when the year comes to the end one year from now.
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 ...
Today's article is going to be a short one, because we are nearly at Einstein's equations of general relativity, with only one more minor tool needed to make the final leap.
In the last two articles I gave intuitive definitions of both the Riemann tensor and the Ricci tensor, which are used to define the curvature of spacetime. The third element of this trio of curvature measures is the Ricci scalar, which can be thought of as an average of the Ricci tensor, which itself is an average of the R... Continue reading ...
Having now defined the Riemann tensor, which provides one measure of the curvature of spacetime, the next step towards general relativity is to define two variations on it.
The first object that we can define is called the Ricci Tensor, and it is closely related to the Riemann tensor that we defined last time. Recall that the Riemann tensor was defined as function
B = R(A,U,V)
in which A is the vector being moved, and U and V represent two other vectors that define the two paths along which we a...
In the last article I reviewed the problem of having vectors defined in a spacetime where the metric function gives different lengths in different parts of spacetime, and outlined how this could be resolved using connection variables to move vectors around. Although this allows the comparison of two vectors in different parts of spacetime, it creates a new problem.
What happens if we move a vector along two different paths?
Using the covariant derivatives and the connection variables, a vector ... Continue reading ...
In the last article we saw how special relativity is really nothing more than a function that gives the distance between two points in a four-dimensional spacetime, and the requirement that this distance be the same for all coordinate systems we might use. We also saw how, in the most general metric function this distance could vary depending on both time and on position within space. And that leads us to a new problem.
If the distance between two points can vary depending on where in spacetim... Continue reading ...
To me it has always seemed natural to divide the equations of general relativity into five distinct levels, each of which has its own laws and constraints. In my opinion each level must be studied and understood separately before they can be combined into one complete theory.
The foundation of the theory is the spacetime metric, which is the subject of today's article.
And while the name sounds impressive, it is actually a very simple object. A metric is just a fancy mathematical name for any ... Continue reading ...
In the previous article, I introduced the Minkowski metric as a generalization of the theorem of Pythagoras and stressed the importance of the distance between two points being invariant under a change of coordinates. In fact the entire special theory of relativity is nothing more complicated than the statement that the distance between two points in four-dimensional spacetime, and given by the Minkowski metric, is the same for all coordinate systems. A few readers have asked me to give a few...
This week is a very important anniversary in the scientific community, as it was 100 years ago this week that Albert Einstein submitted an academic paper for peer review, creating the General Theory of Relativity.
In the century that followed, the theory has developed from an obscure mathematical exercise that was famously claimed to be understood by only three people in the world, to a tool so useful that no GPS system would work properly without it. Only one hundred years after it was fi... Continue reading ...
Exactly one century ago today, Albert Einstein submitted a paper for publication in which he generalized his already successful special theory of relativity. The single paper contained the bulk of the theory of general relativity in a clean finished form, and would forever change not only all of physics, but also our view of nature itself.
It must be said as well that there is some controversy on the authorship, as the brilliant mathematician David Hilbert had submitted a nearly identical theo... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, November 3, 2015,
In :
Mathematics
A few days ago I was watching an old re-run of the excellent British television program, QI, and the host of the show made an interesting claim regarding a normal deck of playing cards. He took a new deck, which is ordered by number and suit, and gave it a few shuffles. Afterwards he claimed that no deck of cards had ever before been in that order, as the number of possible orderings was so large that statistically it was (almost) impossible that two randomly shuffled decks could ever be in t... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, October 15, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
When I opened my e-mail this morning, I was stunned to find a number of messages all regarding the same astronomical oddity. Since it is rare for astronomy to make headlines, this was a most interesting start to the morning.
The topic that everyone is talking about today is the so-called 'most mysterious star in the galaxy' (as several of these e-mails called it). And the reason this star has everyone talking today is that one of the most plausible explanations for it is that it is home to a t... Continue reading ...
The Nobel Prize committee has spoken, and the recipient for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics is Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for their discovery of neutrino oscillations! Congratulations to both the winners themselves and to their teams who made it possible.
By now the story of the neutrino oscillation is well known, at least in academic circles, and so it is fitting that the actual discovery should receive an award.
The story begins in 1930, when physicists were puzzled at beta decays... Continue reading ...
Sometime tomorrow morning the Nobel Prize committee will announce the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics. And that means that physicists around the world are spending the afternoon speculating on what achievement has been significant enough to warrant a prize. And in many case, further speculation on who among its discoverers will be chosen.
This year there are no clear front runners, but I have been hearing some speculations that are interesting.
Posted by on Monday, September 28, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
As predicted last week, the major announcement from NASA today is that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has discovered that liquid water flows on present-day Mars. And while it may only be a seasonal flow, its mere existence has scientists excited. (The original press release can be found here)
The MRO contains a spectrometer which allows it to look for signatures of different materials. In this case the orbiter detected minerals that had been recently deposited by flowing water. The mine... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, September 26, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
It was announced this morning (September 25) by NASA that they are planning a major announcement of a discovery on the planet Mars. And while no one outside of the research group knows exactly what it will be, that has no stopped rampant speculation. Not being one to avoid a good bit of science speculating, here is my prediction for what the announcement will be.
The most obvious and debated would be some sign of life. Not little green men walking around and building things of course, but rath... Continue reading ...
It is one of the great embarrassments of modern physics – the overwhelming literature on dark matter. A quick search through the arXiv (the repository for academic papers) reveals thousands of papers generated every year on the nature of dark matter, and even limiting it to serious contenders still provides a list of over 100 possible forms that dark matter could take.
When physics is focused on finding the one correct model, how could it happen that we have spent decades studying dark ma... Continue reading ...
A friend of mine forwarded a popular physics article to me this morning titled "A Crack In The Standard Model". My first thought was that it was either a crackpot article that wasn't worth reading, or that it was the biggest breakthrough of the last thirty years. As it turned out, it was neither.
The Standard Model of Particle Physics was developed through the 20th century, as new particles and new forces were discovered. However the last new particle discovered in an experiment was the top qu... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, September 10, 2015,
In :
Puzzles
A few weeks ago I posted an interesting mathematical puzzle involving a randomly generated maze. The short explanation of it was, "What is the probability that a randomly generated maze will be solvable?"
After many responses and stimulating discussion, it has become clear that no one has been able to solve it. And so I took some time this weekend to work out a brute force solution. And while it is not the simple solution that I was hoping for (and am still hoping someone will discover), it is... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 8, 2015,
In :
Administrative
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last three years. Each year it gets a good response, and kudos from my readers, and so as before I must appease my loyal followers...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
Posted by on Tuesday, September 8, 2015,
In :
Administrative
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week. And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle one small aspect of student life by providing ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 1, 2015,
In :
Puzzles
A few months ago I posted an article about an interesting little mathematics problem called "The Random Maze", and based on the responses it got it would seem that my readership enjoys such things. And so to keep the enjoyment going, (and as a warm up exercise for the millions of students returning to school next week) I will be proposing another curious puzzle in today's article*.
As with my previous puzzle postings, I suspect that this one has been studied before but the few colleagues that ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, August 26, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
One of the trending topics on various social media websites today has been the claim by Stephen Hawking that he has solved the information paradox. (To be fair to him, I believe he has just proposed a possible solution, and the media has exaggerated his claims for dramatic effect). And while what he has proposed has been suggested in other forms in the past, and other experts in the field disagree with the validity of his idea, it is still and interesting argument and one well worth exploring... Continue reading ...
Science reporters around the world are going to have a field day with the headlines today.
In a paper published today in Nature, a team of physicists have set a record for the hottest superconductor. And it smells really bad.
It has been known for many decades now that some materials, when cooled to very low temperatures, exhibit no resistance at all to electrical currents. This has many implications for technology, as no energy is wasted in the form of heat, higher currents can be achieved, an... Continue reading ...
The ALICE experiment has released some interesting new data today, and while there are no great new discoveries in these latest results, they have improved our knowledge of a basic symmetry of nature.
Nearly a century ago physicists were excited by the early success of quantum mechanics and were trying to construct a relativistic theory of quantum mechanics. In the midst of this work, British physicist Paul Dirac developed a new equation that described the properties of atoms and smaller part...
Posted by on Thursday, August 13, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
A reminder to those of you interested in astronomy and astrophotography that for the next two days the annual Perseid meteor shower will be at its peak. And this year should be especially spectacular as there is not going to be a moon to ruin the darkness, and in this part of the world the skies are supposed to be cloud free.
The Perseids are an annual meteor shower, formed by the debris left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. Every 133 years this comet passes through our solar system, and leaves b...
Posted by on Thursday, July 23, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
The team behind
NASA's Kepler space telescope has just announced the discovery of
another very interesting new exoplanet. The newly named Kepler-452b
would appear to be a planet slightly larger than our own Earth, that
is orbiting a Sun-like star at just the right distance to be in the
“habitable zone”. They are claiming that this new planet is the
most Earth-like that has yet been discovered in the twenty years of
exoplanet hunting.
On the same day that the New Horizon probe makes history as the first man-made object to do a fly-by of the planet Pluto, the LHCb experiment is claiming a fascinating new discovery on the subatomic scales. According to results announced today, they seem to have produced and detected a pentaquark system.
Allow me to begin by (briefly) reviewing the theory of quarks. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, there are six flavours of quark as well as a matching set of six anti-quark ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Monday, July 13, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
This Tuesday will mark a historic event in planetary exploration, as after nine years and three billion miles of travel the New Horizon probe becomes the first man-made object to do a close fly-by of the planet Pluto. (And yes, I still consider it a planet!)
It should be exciting to see what images and data it returns to Earth on the day. However even now as it makes it approach it is sending back a lot of fascinating information. The first images of the surface have already been mapped in Goo... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, July 7, 2015,
In :
Philosophy
A few days ago I happened upon an online discussion of probability theory, and the issue of the doomsday argument came up. This is an odd bit of mathematics that seems to predict the end of the world is coming soon, and it has been bolstered in recent years by academic articles written by respected scientists and published in peer-reviewed journals. While I disagree with some of the arguments used in this calculation, it is still worth studying and understanding if for no other reason than to... Continue reading ...
Over the past few years there have been many opportunities for average citizens to participate in scientific research, whether by classifying galaxies or hunting for supernovae, or watching the oceans and the grasslands for wildlife. However until recently there have been few opportunities to work with the particle physics community.
However a new project has just started through the zooniverse website, in which users can help the MoEDaL (Monopole and Exotics Detector at LHC) team to hunt for... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Sunday, June 14, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
There is some great news from the Rosetta mission this morning, as the Philae lander which was not entirely successful in landing on its cometary target last has today come back online and is broadcasting data back to Earth.
Some of you will remember the roller-coaster ride of news from the Rosetta mission back in November 2014. The Philae lander successfully deployed after spending the better part of a decade flying out to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The plan was for it to descend to the... Continue reading ...
Once more the internet is buzzing with reports over the past few weeks and months that NASA has successfully tested a 'warp drive' prototype, leading to many fanciful speculations about travelling to distant stars in the near future. I have said from the start that I do not believe these reports - for several reasons based in accepted science - and indeed today NASA has officially denied it.
First, what NASA actually tested is a device called an EMDrive, in which microwave radiation is contain... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Monday, June 8, 2015,
In :
Philosophy
Over the weekend I happened upon a discussion online on whether the Universe and the laws of nature support free will or not. This is not a simple question, and the technical details are well beyond the scope of this blog. However I thought I would spur further debates with a simple model that suggests how the Universe could be deterministic and support free will at the same time. I must also add a disclaimer that this is a very simplistic overview of a much bigger debate, and I will be skipp... Continue reading ...
Earlier this week I wrote an article about an interesting (and possibly previously unpublished) about a mathematics puzzle that so far as I know does not have a simply solution. Apparently it was popular, and as such I have decided to devote today's article to another interesting puzzle. As with the previous one, I have asked a number of mathematician friends about this one and as yet I have not found a previously published source, or a solution for it. Perhaps one of you reading this will fi... Continue reading ...
Today I thought I would take a break from serious science and mathematics, and present for your viewing pleasure a beautiful little puzzle. This puzzle comes from a discussion I had with a student I was tutoring many years ago, and although it seems quite simple as yet no one I have shown it to has been able to solve it (and I must admit, that includes me). I also do not know the origins of this puzzle, as I have never seen it published before and so I do not know whether or not it is already... Continue reading ...
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... Continue reading ...
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... Continue reading ...
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, April 24, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
Happy Anniversary to the Hubble Space Telescope!
It was 25 years ago today that it was launched from the Discovery shuttle, and placed in orbit to start studying the Universe. And while it did need a proverbial pair of glasses shortly after launch, in those twenty five years it has done an amazing job of sending back photos and data of all aspects of the cosmos.
We have seen everything from detailed images of our neighbouring planets, to distant galaxies many millions of lightyears away, to st... Continue reading ...
With the LHC coming back on line, and starting on its next run of data collection, it seems like a good time to review another particle accelerator that is still in the developmental stage, and to advocate for more investment in the fundamental sciences.
Most people with a serious interest in science in general and particle physics in particular have heard of Fermilab. They were the lab that discovered many of the fundamental particles of nature. And they came close to discovering the Higgs bo... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, April 16, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
There is another interesting result from the astrophysics community today, this time from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment, which is located on the International Space Station.
One of its tasks in recent years has been to measure protons, anti-protons, and helium nuclei that are present in high energy cosmic rays, and to record where they are coming from and how much energy they carry. Our best models of the Universe at present predict that these cosmic rays can be generated from a l... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, April 10, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
Today the ALMA telescope array in Chile has made an announcement that has caught the imagination of astronomers, astrobiologists, and sci-fi dreamers around the world. By analyzing the light spectrum from MWC480, a young star roughly 455 lightyears away from us, they have determined that it is surrounded by a chemical cloud that contains several complex organic compounds.
Of course organic compounds is still a long way from life, but it is a necessary precursor. This star is similar to what we... Continue reading ...
Today is the day when the greatest we have ever known has been resurrected, to bring us into a bright new world and new understanding. That's right - the Large Hadron Collider has been successfully restarted after a two year upgrade, and is once more ready to explore the world of subatomic particle physics!
The LHC was built through the 2000s, and started up in 2008 only to have a major meltdown almost immediately. It was repaired and restarted the following year, and started hunting the Higgs... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, March 27, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
After nearly a year of debate, it seems that the much heralded experimental evidence of inflationary physics was actually nothing more than dust. It is a bit of a disappointment for cosmologists, and especially for those who work in the field of cosmic inflation, but as with all of science the facts and the evidence must always take precedence over popular theories.
One year ago I wrote about an interesting new result from the BICEP experiment (original article), in which measurements of the p... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, March 25, 2015,
In :
Mathematics
Last week I wrote about the state of modern physics, and how - in my opinion - it was now so complex and filled with subtle technicalities that an untrained amateur would have no chance of producing some great new theory or result. However it is interesting to note that although theoretical physics and mathematics are very closely related, the field of mathematics is still ripe for amateurs to produce important results. Even primary school students can understand mathematics problems that the... Continue reading ...
Earlier this week I wrote an opinion piece about the difficulty and possible impossibility of a dedicated but untrained physicist discovering a revolutionary new theory or phenomenon in modern physics. In that article I made reference to several interesting open problems in modern physics, and since then several people have asked me to explain these in more detail. Today's article is the second in this mini-series, and is actually a collection of problems.
Earlier this week I posted an opinion piece on whether or not untrained amateur scientists could ever again make major contributions to the fields of science, and specifically to the area of modern theoretical physics. In that editorial, I commented on a few topics that are as yet unresolved, but which contain many subtle technical details that require many years of specialized training to even understand the problem. In response I have had a number of inquiries about two specific physics que... Continue reading ...
A few days ago I was participating in a discussion panel on topics in modern physics research, and specifically on unsolved problems in physics. In the course of discussions, the question arose about whether an uneducated but dedicated amateur could discover a solution that the experts never thought of. Could problems such as the quantum theory of gravity, the unification of the Standard Model or the fundamental interpretations of quantum mechanics be one day explained by someone working from... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, February 28, 2015,
In :
Administrative
I feel compelled to take a break from my usual posts on interesting topics in science and technology to address an issue that has been raised this morning.
Apparently some security software has been warning people that my webpage has been reported for phishing. For those of you not familiar with the term, phishing is a scam in which people are fooled into submitting personal information or private banking information to a fake website. Sometimes these websites claim to be a bank or credit card... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, February 21, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
Well, technically it is dwarf planet Ceres....
And it has been in the news this morning because the NASA Dawn probe has just sent back some of the best photos yet taken of these little known planet.
Although it was first discovered as far back as 1801, it was considered just a very big asteroid until 2006 when the astronomy community chose to create a new classification of "dwarf planet" to cover objects such as Ceres which are smaller than a planet, but too big to be an asteroid. This one obj...
Posted by on Thursday, January 22, 2015,
In :
Astronomy
As most of you will have heard by now, NASA this month has released a stunning 1.5 Billion pixel photograph of our neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy. (For comparison, the average household camera can produce about 10 million pixels per photo, so you would need 150 photos stitched together perfectly to match this one.). This is the highest resolution, sharpest photo ever taken of the Andromeda.
It was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, and is believed to show over 100 million separate stars.... Continue reading ...
May 2015 bring all of my friends, family, and loyal readers all the health, happiness, and prosperity that they deserve. And may we all get together again as friends when the year comes to the end one year from now.
The year 2014 is coming to a close, and what an amazing year it has been for the scientific community.
January started off with a bang - literally - as a supernova was spotted in the night sky that was visible with the naked eye. It is rare to have one in our local part of the galaxy, and this was spectacular even without a telescope. The year continued to be a fun one for amateur astronomers, with April seeing a lunar eclipse, an evening of meteor showers, and Mars in opposition. Through the ... Continue reading ...
Merry Christmas to all of my friends and family, and to all of the many friends I have made online through my various ventures. You are all very special people, and I am honoured to know all of you.
Posted by on Friday, December 19, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
The team running the NASA Curiosity probe has made an amazing announcement this week, with the confirmation that the little rover has discovered organic compounds on the planet Mars. (Scientists thought they had found similar compounds two years ago, but at the time there was uncertainty whether the tests were correct)
And while this is still a long way from claiming there is life on Mars, it is worth noting that these compounds on Earth were required to form primordial life. Most likely they ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Sunday, December 14, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
For those of you in areas with clear skies tonight, there is another celestial show happening. Sometime overnight the Geminid Meteor shower will reach its peak.
The Geminid were first observed in 1862, and are believed to have originated with debris cast off by the Palladian asteroid known as 3200 Phaethon, making them one of only two major showers not caused by comets. If conditions are right, viewers can expect up to 150 meteors per hour. And because it is in the winter sky, it should be eas... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, December 6, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
It is another exciting day for the space sciences community. After almost nine years in transit, today the New Horizon probe will be sent the wake-up signal and will prepare for its mission to Pluto. Let us hope that it goes better than the last long distance space probe...
The New Horizon probe was launched in January 2006. Once it started on its journey to the outer solar system, its electronics systems were shut down to avoid wear and power usage and to avoid the need to monitor it constant... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, December 5, 2014,
In :
Philosophy
A friend of mine asked me a few days about something that he had heard in a quantum physics lecture, feeling that he had surely misunderstood the lecturer's comments. And being quantum mechanics, which is bizarre at the best of times, that is always a possibility. However the comment in question is in fact an interesting aspect of quantum physics which is still hotly debated by the experts.
According to quantum mechanics, you are immortal and will never die.
Posted by on Wednesday, November 19, 2014,
In :
Particle Physics
More news from the particle physics community with the announcement by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider that they have produced and detected two new particles which have never been seen before. (It should be noted though that these particles have existed before in nature, produced by high energy cosmic rays in the atmosphere, but they decay too quickly to be observed and studied)
However before the news media starts writing headlines, it should also be made clear that this is a minor an... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, November 15, 2014,
In :
Mathematics
In my continuing series on curious mathematical paradoxes, I have reviewed several interesting and counter-intuitive phenomena in both mathematics and statistics. Recently a couple of readers of my blog asked me about the Three Game Paradox. I must admit that I don't see this as a true paradox, but rather simple statistics, but it is still interesting and as such I present it here for your pleasure...
Suppose that you have just joined a chess club, and you are really a novice player. It seems ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, November 15, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
The excitement and jubilation of the Rosetta team and the scientific community seems to have turned sour today. The Philae lander seems to be in serious trouble, and is not expected to live much longer.
Just a few days ago (aka Wednesday) there was celebration as the Philae lander left the Rosetta orbiter after a decade travelling together, and started its descent toward the surface of comet Chury 67P. It landed where it should have, and started preparing to collect data. The technicians said ... Continue reading ...
In the last few days, there have been several news articles in the popular media suggesting that the LHC did not discover the Higgs boson and that what they saw might be something else. This is unlikely to be true, but it has lead to several people asking me for my opinions on the issue. And so for those who have been asking, here is a very brief summary of these claims.
The simplest model of the Higgs boson involves a single particle, relatively heavy compared to other fundamental particles, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, November 12, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
After more than a decade of travel, and many tense moments for the scientists, the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission has made history this morning by successfully landing the Philae lander on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It is the first time a man made object has been placed on a comet surface, and now it will begin to transmit data to Earth that could help to understand how comets helped to create our own world.
It was a difficult maneuver, as the Philae cannot really... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, October 17, 2014,
In :
Philosophy
Last Spring I wrote a series of articles on interesting paradoxes in mathematics and logic, and based on the response from several correspondents these were relatively well received. It would seem that many of my readers quite enjoy these thought provoking problems, and spent enjoyable hours contemplating their complexities.
And so I thought I would write another one today, just to give my reader more to ponder this week.
Today's topic is known by many names, but is usually referred to as "The ... Continue reading ...
The results have been announced, and the recipients of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics are Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura. Congratulations to these three fine scientists for this major accomplishment.
As I predicted yesterday, the Nobel Prize has been awarded for a simple and well confirmed advance in technology rather than the higher profile but more speculative and uncertain candidates. The three winners were the leaders of the group of academics and engineers who successfu... Continue reading ...
As I am writing this, we are just hours away from the announcement of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, the biggest event on the physicists calendar. It truly is the academic equivalent of the Oscars, the Emmys, the BAFTAs, and the Grammys. And as with all awards ceremonies, there is a lot of speculation and prediction on the subject of who the recipient will be. So I thought I would add a few of my own predictions to the discussion.
First off, many people have been suggesting that the develope... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, October 3, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
I was asked recently by a reader to explain the hot Jupiter problem in astronomy, and while it is not my specialist subject I do believe that it is an interesting topic and as such I will explain it as best as I can.
For most of human history, philosophers and scientists have wondered whether there are other planets in the galaxy aside from our own solar system. Even the ancient cultures throughout the world knew about the inner planets like Venus and Mars, and the gas giants like Saturn and J... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, September 25, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
As some readers may recall, back in March I wrote about the excitement in the physics community regarding new results that were published on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. (see the original article here). By analyzing how the photons that were created in the early Universe were aligned, it appeared that the existence of the inflaton and inflationary theory had been proven after three decades. The new data also promised to have an impact on quantum gravity models, as some... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 23, 2014,
In :
Fundraising
It is hard to believe that over twenty years have passed since I first starting writing the Grandiloquent Dictionary. Most of my readers already know the story but for those who do not, it started when I was still in high school. I had plans to go away to University and I knew I wouldn't be able to take my unabridged dictionaries with me due to a lack of dorm space. And so I started writing down a list on my computer of the most interesting words so I would have at least a minimal dictionary ... Continue reading ...
I do not normally venture into the corporate world with my blog articles, but today I feel I must make an exception. And the reason is that the global titan known as General Electric has made a clear statement today that it supports the maker movement. And when a giant such as GE shows this kind of spirit of support and co-operation with the Maker community, it is worth writing about.
With that headline, I suppose I should begin this article with a definitive and categorical NO!
So then why is this question even being asked? Because Stephen Hawking likes selling books and is mischievous enough to give doomsday scenarios that the media revels in. He knows that making a wild statements about how the world will end will get his new book a lot of publicity, and perhaps if the publicity leads to people learning about modern particle physics and discussing the latest theories, it... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 9, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
Tonight was the third and final supermoon of the summer. There isn't much more to say about it, but I finally got a decent photo with my 1000mm lens (regrettably my 2000mm lens malfunctioned in the field) so I thought I would add it here. This is as shot, with no post-processing.
This past week saw the start of an experiment to test the holographic principle, which has lead to several request for a simple explanation of what the holographic principle is. Although it is not my specialty, I will try to provide a basic overview.
This idea starts with work in the 1970s on black holes. A black hole is an object in space that is so dense, not even light can escape from it. Nothing can ever escape from it (except possibly for thermal energy through Hawking radiation). Which l... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 2, 2014,
In :
Administrative
With the arrival of September, students around the world will be returning to classes this week. And for those who are starting out at college or university, one of the most important considerations is how to live on a budget. These are the years when one has little or no income, but must bear the expenses of living independently for the first time. While giving advice on living on a budget is far too expansive to cover in this blog, I can tackle one small aspect of student life by providing ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 2, 2014,
In :
Administrative
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last two years. I have had requests from some of my readers to repeat it again this year, and so I must once again acquiesce to the masses...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
Following the articles I wrote a few months ago on what is possible and impossible in modern physics, a reader wrote to ask me about the possibility of getting useful work out of zero-point energy or vacuum energy. In theory, the Universe contains a limitless source of energy which could be tapped into to power our civilization until the end of time. But can this be done in practice?
Let me begin with a very simple explanation of zero-point energy (there are numerous websites that give the mat... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, August 8, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
A reminder to those of you interested in astronomy and astrophotography that over the next few days we will be seeing the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. The actual peak is expected to be on Tuesday, but they are still impressive in the days leading up to it. Unfortunately this week is also the supermoon, which will cause extra light pollution of the sky but hopefully won't completely obscure the meteor shower.
I am fortunate this year to be spending the week at a private dark site f... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, August 5, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
For those who have not heard the news already, or who have forgotten, today is the day when the Rosette probe will make contact with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a ten year journey, and begin collecting data and transmitting it back to Earth.
Rosetta was built by the European Space Agency, and launched back in 2004 aboard the Ariane 5 rocket as part of the ESA Horizon program. It is composed of both an orbiter and a lander, with a combined total of 21 sensors and probes which will be ... Continue reading ...
I would like to start by thanking those people who praised the series of articles that I wrote about what is impossible and what is not in the world of modern physics. Those articles were great fun to write, and I am pleased that others enjoyed them as well. This sort of excitement about scientific research is important for the future of our society.
Now on to today's commentary, regarding how the conservation of energy could be compatible with the big bang model of cosmology. A few people hav... Continue reading ...
Happy Canada Day to all who are proud to be Canadian, and all those who wish they were Canadian. This truly is the greatest country to live in, and we should all be proud of the society we have built together though the past two centuries or so.
Last week I was inspired by a poorly presented popular physics lecture to review a couple of concepts in modern physics which people tend to think are impossible, but are not. Most laws of physics have loopholes in them - nothing can travel faster than light unless it carries no information or causes spacetime itself to move, time travel seems paradoxical but there are quantum mechanical solutions, energy must be conserved unless the laws of physics themselves can evolve over time, etc.
As I wrote in yesterday's article, I was recently disappointed in a public lecture given by a supposed college physics instructor in which he spoke of ideas which are impossible according to the laws of physics. However speaking as a trained theorist who does keep up to date with the latest research, I must say that his list of impossibilities only served to show how little he himself knew of modern physics. As such I have written a series of articles explaining loopholes in the laws of physi... Continue reading ...
A few days ago some friends and I were watching a lecture on modern physics, presented by a college physics instructor and intended to educate the general public on what is possible and impossible according to the laws of nature. I won't embarrass the speaker by naming him, but I will say that most of what he said was wrong. As a theoretical physicist, it quickly became clear to me that he did not have a solid understanding of the topics he was trying to present. As such, I was inspired to wr... Continue reading ...
There is interesting news from Switzerland as the LHCb experiment team has announced evidence of a violation of lepton universality, which would be the first experimental evidence of a difference in the interactions of different leptons.
Let me begin with a quick review of leptons and their properties. At the start of the twentieth century, it was discovered that electricity was carried by sub-atomic particles known as electrons. In the following decades, it was proven that these electrons are... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, June 3, 2014,
In :
Mathematics
Due to the positive comments I have
received from my last two articles on mathematical and statistical
paradoxes, I have written another one. However where the first two
were interesting mathematical puzzles with minimal real world
applications, this one is nastier because many people have suffered
from its results. It is commonly known as the Rare Test Paradox
Suppose that you have an excellent
medical test for some rare disease. Just for the sake of argument,
suppose that this test is so ac...
This week our society got a little closer to the world of Star Wars, as a result of the DEKA project and inventor Dean Kamen. After eight years of development and testing, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. (and presumably soon other regulators around the world) have approved the first prosthetic arm that can be controlled entirely by signals from the brain.
This project was funded by DARPA (and therefore the Pentagon) as a means of aiding veterans and other amputees to regain usage... Continue reading ...
A few weeks ago I wrote about the interesting discoveries by the Kepler probe and by ground based telescopes of planets outside of our own solar system that seem to be similar to the Earth. They are interesting places to explore, as they could quite possibly support life similar to the diversity found on our own world.
Now a team of astronomers from the University of Montreal have announced a truly extreme exoplanet at the other end of the spectrum. They have just announced the discovery of a ...
Posted by on Tuesday, May 20, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
Let me begin by stating that this article will be quite different from the usual content. Instead of reporting on some major news item, or some interesting piece of mathematics, or explaining some theory from modern physics, today's entry is the result of a simple experiment that I performed last night, which has very little importance but may help to answer a question that appears to be unanswered on the internet.
As I have written in the past, I like to indulge in some very simple astrophot... Continue reading ...
For anyone looking for something fun to do over the summer months, while classes are out and many research projects are stalled for a variety of reasons, the people at Kaggle are hosting an interesting competition this summer.
The Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge is a contest to develop better methods of using machine learning methods, such as decision trees and neural networks, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of particle physics experiments. Competitors will be provided with simula... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, April 25, 2014,
In :
Philosophy
After writing about Simpson's paradox a few weeks ago, and receiving such positive responses to it, I have been asked to write another article on a mathematical paradox. This time the topic of discussion is Newcomb's paradox.
Suppose that there is a game show in which you, the player, are shown two boxes labelled A and B. Box A will always contain $1000. Box B may contain a million dollars or it may contain absolutely nothing, which is decided before the game begins. The player is given a choi...
Posted by on Tuesday, April 15, 2014,
In :
Administrative
A few people have been asking me about the Heartbleed Bug in the internet, so I will pass along what I have been told so far.
This is a security flaw in the OpenSSL software used by many websites to secure their systems against unauthorized entry. The OpenSSL is basically software that is used by webservers to maintain security with transmitted information. It encodes any private information so that anyone snooping on the website won't be able to access information such as banking records or ... Continue reading ...
There is interesting news for the particle physics community today, courtesy of the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) experiment. They are now claiming that the hint of a new particle that they saw a few years ago has now been confirmed as existing, and the interesting part of the story is that it is not a traditional quark-based particle. This is the first piece of matter to be produced in the lab that is neither a meson nor a baryon, but something completely different. (The original annou... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Wednesday, April 9, 2014,
In :
Mathematics
With tax season here once again, I thought it would be a good time to present an interesting mathematical problem that could be worth one million dollars to whoever solves it. It is simple to present, but has stumped mathematicians for decades.
Let me begin with a review of logic circuits (although it can also be considered as mathematical operations with no connection to electronics). You begin with a set of "inputs" that can have a value of true or false. You can have as many or as few as yo... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, April 4, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
The team behind the Cassini mission have made another fascinating discovery, and announced it today. They seem to have discovered a large lake of warm water on the surface of the moon Enceladus.
Enceladus is one of the moons of Saturn, and is actually relatively small being only the sixth largest of the moons. It was first discovered by Herschel in 1789, but due to its size and distance it was not well studied until the 1980s. Then the two Voyager probes passed close enough to photograph and e... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, April 1, 2014,
In :
Administrative
It would appear that over the last two or three days several people have been receiving spam e-mails from an account that I used to own but no longer use. I feel that I owe it to the public to explain this situation.
Most people happily use their email accounts and never question how they work. And although I won't give a long exposition on the SMT protocol or POP services, I can give a simple explanation. When you send an email message, the application that you are using adds header informati... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, March 18, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
The physics community is buzzing with exciting news from a team of Harvard scientists today. They are claiming to have detected gravitational waves produced by the inflationary period that occurred in the first second of the Universe's existence.
Specifically they claim to have detected B-mode polarization of photons caused by inflationary gravitation waves resulting from the Big Bang.
Over the past century, there has been growing evidence that the Universe began in a sudden 'explosion' known ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, March 18, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
An interesting proposal has been made in the last few days for a method of detecting life on exoplanets. It isn't yet a definitive test, which would be the holy grail of astrobiology, but it is an interesting new approach.
As I have written in past articles, over the past two decades scientists have managed to discover approximately 2000 planets outside of our own solar system, and many of these are believed to have the correct size and orbital radius to be habitable for life. Unfortunately be... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Friday, March 7, 2014,
In :
Mathematics
During an online tutoring session I was hosting recently, the subject of Simpson's Paradox came up, and I realized that this beautiful example of counter intuitive statistics is not that well known yet, and even those who have heard of it have great trouble understanding it and resolving it in their own minds. And so I thought I would write a simple explanation that helped my students in the past to visualize how it works.
First an explanation of Simpson's Paradox. In general, this refers to a... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, February 27, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
In an amazing announcement today, NASA's Kepler mission has now more than tripled the number of exoplanets they have discovered, and nearly doubled the total number of known planets. Twenty years ago, no planets were known to exist outside of our own solar system, while this latest result brings the total up past 1700 exoplanets, with over 900 coming from this one space telescope (A complete list of the Kepler planets can be viewed here).
Posted by on Wednesday, February 19, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
A quick reminder to all of my readers that these are the last few days to observe supernova SN2014J, the closest supernova of this type in over a century. As I wrote when it was first discovered, this event is rare in that it should be visible to amateur astronomers as well as the big observatories. (It is actually so bright that many of the automated supernovae searches missed it, because they are programmed to search for faint signals)
The supernova is located in M82, and although it is a ma... Continue reading ...
In the previous article, I discussed the claim by the ASACUSA experiment at CERN that they had produced the first man-made beam of anti-hydrogren atoms. Now comes the question of what to do with the beam...
Antimatter, first predicted to exist in the 1928 in a research paper by Paul Dirac and experimentally verified in 1932 by Carl Anderson, is in a sense a mirror image of ordinary matter. Antiparticles have the same mass, but opposite electric charge of their ordinary partners. And fundamenta... Continue reading ...
Exciting new results have been announced by the ASACUSA Experiment at CERN today. The team has been reviewing data they collected in 2012 in the Antiproton Decelerator facility, and have confirmed that they had produced a beam of antihydrogen. If this holds up under peer review and academic scrutiny, it will be the first anti-matter beam of atoms ever produced by mankind.
In the late 1920s, work by Paul Dirac to understand relativistic quantum mechanics lead to an odd result - his equations p... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, January 23, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
More amazing news from the astronomy community this morning - a new supernova (dubbed PSN J09554214+6940260) has just been discovered. Normally this would be a non-issue, since they are discovered constantly at big observatories, however this one is in the M82 galaxy which is in our cosmic neighbourhood at a mere 12 million light years from Earth. That means that this supernova should be visible to backyard astronomers using binoculars, and will allow the professional scientists to gather hug... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Monday, January 20, 2014,
In :
Astronomy
There is great news from the European Space Agency for the astronomy/astrophysics community this morning as their Rosetta space probe has successfully awoken from its long hibernation and is ready to do some science!
The goal of the Rosetta mission is to be the first man-made device to orbit a comet - in this case Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. If everything goes as planned, the orbiter will then deploy a lander that will park itself on the comet's nucleus, and ride it as it travels into the... Continue reading ...
As 2013 comes to a close, it is a time to reflect on the past year. This has been another amazing year for the scientific community, and one that has seen many discoveries and breakthroughs.
The year started out with new data coming out of the Large Hadron Collider on the properties of the particle believed to be the Higgs boson, with a formal announcement in February of more evidence for a single scalar Higgs. As there are many variations on the Higgs mechanism, further evidence of a minimal... Continue reading ...
Merry Christmas to all of my friends
and family, and all of the wonderful people who I have met online
through my various ventures. May you have a great holiday season, and
a prosperous new year!
And so another year is passing into history, and it is time to rest and enjoy the holidays with friends and family. For me, that also includes all of my wonderful online friends who I have come to know through my science blog, my physics and mathematics projects, my robotics work and of course the Grandiloquent Dictionary website and spin-offs. I may not express my gratitude often, but I want all of you to know how much I appreciate your support and correspondences. I have met so many amazing... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, December 14, 2013,
In :
Astronomy
Just a quick reminder that tonight is the peak of the annual Geminids meteor showers, arguably the best meteor shower viewing of the year. In most areas it will be visible around 1am - 2am, although they should be visible all through the night. As with all astronomical events, it is best to get as far away from the city lights as possible, and to stay in darkness for as long as possible to allow your eyes to reach maximum sensitivity. Unfortunately, I won't be able to travel this year (and th... Continue reading ...
New data on the Higgs has just been released, and so I thought I would take a moment on this snowy Monday morning to give a few updates. (I realize by now some of you are growing tired of hearing about the Higgs boson, so I will try to make this update brief.) The original announcements by CMS and ATLAS can be found here and here.
The latest results from the LHC indicate that the Higgs boson they have been observing can decay into tau leptons. Tau leptons are identical to electrons, but have m... Continue reading ...
By now most tech-nerds like me have heard of the announcements of Jeff Bezos, regarding the future of parcel delivery. In case anyone hasn't, the founder of Amazon has claimed in quite grandiose manner that within five years Amazon will be delivering packages within 30 minutes using automated aerial drones. In theory, when a customer places an order, the warehouse attaches the package to a quad-copter with onboard GPS, and sends it out. The drone automatically flies to the destination, deposi... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Saturday, November 23, 2013,
In :
Astronomy
A quick reminder that this weekend should be decent viewing of comet ISON. It will appear just before dawn, and can be seen between the planets Saturn and Mercury. Later next week it will pass the Sun, and if it survives that encounter should be viewable again next week as begins its journey out again.
For those who are not aware, Comet ISON (also known as Comet Nevski–Novichonok) is a comet discovered in September 2012 which will graze the Sun sometime in the next week (predicted to be at... Continue reading ...
Remember to be cautious when driving tonight, as there will be many excited children flying on a sugar buzz and not always paying attention to their own safety. We want to keep the night fun for families, and devoid of accidents and injuries.
Posted by on Thursday, October 31, 2013,
In :
Astronomy
Just in time for Halloween, a team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a planet very similar to Earth, but much hotter. New studies of an Earth-sized planet circling the sun-like star Kepler-78 have shown that it has quantities of iron and rock comparable to those in Earth, and it is the first world of this size for which astrophysicists are able to calculate both its density and diameter. (Kepler-78 is located about 400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus.)
Posted by on Thursday, October 31, 2013,
In :
Astronomy
Today is a bit of sad day for the astrophysics community. The European Space Agency's space telescope, named Planck, was finally shut down after a little more than four years of collecting data.
The goal of Planck when it was launched back in 2009 was to provide higher quality data on the Cosmic Microwave Background. When the Universe was a mere 380,000 years old, the atoms that would form all matter cooled down to the point where they were no longer absorbing and emitting large numbers of pho... Continue reading ...
There has been a lot of news coverage over the last few years of the Large Hadron Collider, and discussions about how it is setting records for the highest energy accelerator, the high costs and the engineering advances. However last week a team of scientists from Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching published results of experiments on a more affordable and compact method of accelerating subatomic particles. If successful, future accelerators could be made an order of magnitude ... Continue reading ...
In a surprise to no one, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Peter Higgs and Robert Engelert for the development of the Higgs model and prediction of the Higgs boson. Physicists searched for it for nearly five decades before the LHC confirmed its existence in 2012. Congratulations to them both, (and to the all of the other Higgs pioneers who can bask in reflected glories)!
There is a great video circulating the internet (viewable here along with a transcript) of a convocation address given by Tim Minchin at the University of Western Australia. I have attended a few such ceremonies, but this is one the best and most inspirational speeches I have heard in a while, and I wanted to share it here.
“In darker days, I did a corporate gig at a conference for this big company who made and sold accounting software. In a bid, I presume, to inspire their salespeople to gr...
Posted by on Monday, September 30, 2013,
In :
Medical
This past week the New England Journal of Medicine reported an interesting advance in prosthetic limbs - the development of nerve controlled robotic limbs. The original article can be accessed here.
Although robotic hands and arms*, and even a few experimental legs have been built before in robotics labs around the world, this new result incorporates the patient's original nerves in a new way. Specialized surgeons redirect the severed nerves into part of the thigh muscle, resulting in small mu... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, September 24, 2013,
In :
Astronomy
Last week NASA reported with pride that Voyageur 1 was still going strong after more than thirty years in space, and became the first man made object to leave the solar system. This week comes less joyful news that the Deep Impact probe has been formally declared to be dead.
Deep Impact was launched on a Delta II rocket on January 12, 2005 with the goal of performing several fly-bys of nearby comets. The first target was Comet Tempel 1, which was extensively photographed in July 2005, before t...
Posted by on Monday, September 16, 2013,
In :
Astronomy
Some readers may remember back in July that some scientists at NASA believed that the Voyager 1 probe had left the solar system, but there was still some debate about the issue. Now, just over two months later, there is more evidence that it not only is beyond the edge of our solar system, but that it may have left as early as August 2012. (The official news release can be found here.)
Unfortunately there is no clear delineation of the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. ... Continue reading ...
Since I mentioned the live webcast of the 22nd first annual Ig Nobel prizes, I suppose I should reveal the winners to those who were unable (or dare I say uninterested) in watching the results.
The prize for medicine has gone to a team of Japanese researchers for their study of the effect of opera music on mice who have had heart transplants. It may sound strange, but if successful, their results could produce better methods of helping humans with heart transplants to recover quicker and healt... Continue reading ...
There is great news today for physics students around the world - the legendary Feynman Lectures on Physics are now available online in glorious HTML & LaTeX. They can be accessed through the website: http://feynmanlectures.info/flp.html
For those not familiar with the story, long ago (the early 1960s) the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was working at CalTech when someone brought up the idea of an introductory physics course for first year students, which would present many of t... Continue reading ...
OK, so the title is just a tad over-dramatic. However there is an interesting new software tool being developed for tracking the time and date of phone calls or wiretaps, and it requires no special hidden devices or spyware on the targets phone or home. It is simply a matter of listening to the background hum of electrical appliances.
People generally assume that electricity is constant and unchanging. But it isn't. The electrical current that runs all of your household appliances from the ran... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last two years. I have had requests from some of my readers to repeat it again this year, and so I must once again acquiesce to the masses...
To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
This is a completely trivial posting, but some friends requested this information and I thought others may benefit from it. Apparently some parents are having financial problems due to purchasing software for their children's school needs. So here are a few links to free (and legal) alternatives which are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts.
Office Software: OpenOffice (replaces Microsoft Office or the Corel Packages)
Mathematics Software: SageMath (basic alternative to Math...
Posted by on Sunday, August 11, 2013,
In :
Astronomy
This weekend skywatchers in areas with clear weather and minimal light pollution will have the opportunity to watch the Perseid meteor showers again. I am lucky this year to be spending some time at a remote private dark site which has unobstructed views of most of the sky, and absolutely no light pollution. Now I just need to hope for no cloud cover...
The Perseid meteor showers happen quite regularly every August. They are caused by debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle which passed by the Earth lo...
Frequent readers of my blogs may recall back in February I wrote about a contest to name the two newly discovered moons of the planet Pluto (I don't care what the IAU says, Pluto deserves to be a planet). The results are in, but not without a measure of controversy.
The two moons have been named Kerberos and Styx. As the planet furthest from the Sun, Pluto was named for the Roman god of the underworld. The first three moons that were discovered were named Charon (the boatman who ferried the sp... Continue reading ...
By now most of the sort of people who read my blogs are aware of the rise of 3D printing. These are the new machines that use molten plastic (or other substances) to print objects layer-by-layer. They are already being used to produce everything from cable clips, to replacement parts, to toys, to sculptures, and as the prices are now dropping below the $1000 range they can be expected to be a common household item over the coming decade.
However researchers at Princeton University have found...
Posted by on Sunday, July 7, 2013,
In :
Philosophy
For those who are interested in serious science news, you may want to skip today's article. It is a fascinating paradox in science, but it is more than a bit philosophical as well. This is actually a well known paradox that has been discussed and debated for a long time, but it is still worth pondering.
The experimental method in science is very straightforward. A scientist develops a hypothesis, and then goes out into the world collecting data. That data might come from observing plants or an... Continue reading ...
This week the space sciences community
has also announced new results from the Voyager 1 space probe, first
launched more than 35 years ago and still a valuable scientific tool.
The NASA probe has entered a new region on the edge of the solar
system, right as it prepares to move through interstellar space.
It has been now revealed that Voyager
sensors have detected a sudden drop in particles flowing from our own
sun (in fact it is a drop of about 99.9%), and a 10% increase in
galactic cosmic ...
It isn't very often that Canadians get a chance to celebrate a Canadian space experiment. Maybe it is a lack of science funding, or the smaller population compared with our southern neighbours, or maybe we are just too content to join in with other projects at the expense of our own. In any case, the day before Canada Day we get the chance to celebrate a full decade of data from the MOST experiment.
The Microvariability and Oscillation of STars (MOST) was launched on June 30, 2003 as part of ... Continue reading ...
There is a disturbing trend in the
world today in which common society and the scientific community are
growing apart, not just in beliefs and knowledge but in even the
language used to communicate. This problem has gotten so bad, that
there are now courses and textbooks being offered to scientists on
how to give public lectures, write popular books, and perhaps most
disturbingly on how to properly testify in courts as an expert
witness. The language of science and technology is precise, and
...
Today marks the official launch of the University of Victoria's new advanced microscopy facility. It was actually installed in March, and tested out by imaging gold flecks, but it has taken several months to complete all of the installation and calibration.
The new device is actually a 4.5 meter tall microscope, called a scanning transmission electron holography microscope (STEHM). It uses quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons, whose flux depends on the material it is passing through, and...
There was an interesting announcement at the International Astronomical Union conference yesterday (which I must mention was held in Victoria, BC, my home town). A team of astronomer from France have photographed a planet orbiting a distant star. Usually only indirect evidence of such planets is found, and in fact only about a dozen photos have ever been made of extrasolar planets. Until twenty years ago, it wasn't even known if there were any extrasolar planets!
It was on this day, June 1, 1983, that physicists at the CERN facility in Switzerland first confirmed the existence of the Z-boson and provided full confirmation of the GWS model of weak nuclear forces (also known as electroweak theory) first predicted twenty years earlier. Although it had been inferred from other experiments in the 1970s, this was the first direct observations of its existence. (The CERN press release can be viewed here.)
There has been a lot of commentary in the media lately about the value of fundamental science. The current government of Canada has suggested that the federal funding agencies should shift their focus toward applied science and engineering and research that benefits the business community, and reduce the funding for pure science. Of course there has been a lot written already about the short sightedness of this edict, (and I certainly have my own bias being trained as a theoretical physicist ... Continue reading ...
Today would have been the 95th birthday of the great American theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman. Not only a brilliant researcher, but also an amazing teacher who inspired generations of young minds to dream of science and knowledge, and to view the world in a unique way. Here is an example of Feynman discussing the beauty of a flower.
For those few who are reading this and don't know who he is, here are a few highlights of his life and career:
There is news this morning from the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN that they have observed CP-violation in the decays of one of the neutral B-mesons known as B0s. In less technical terms, this means that they have observed one of only four known particles in which matter and antimatter versions decay differently. ( Their formal paper announcing it can be viewed here. )
While this may seem rather academic in nature, it does have a potentially important role in understandin... Continue reading ...
Astrophysicists have just released the most advanced data yet on the early Universe - in essence they have produced a baby picture of the Universe. The results are from the European Space Agency's PLANCK satellite, and measured microwave photons that were produced over 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 370,000 years old.
Although background radiation such as this appears to be just noise and static to most electronics, it actually contains quite a lot of information on the early... Continue reading ...
I am certain that by now the general public is tiring of physicists and science nerds rambling on about the amazing discovery last summer of the Higgs boson, but that will never stop us! This week there have been more news stories about this particle (which serious scientists will never, ever refer to as the 'God Particle'), and I have had a few inquiries as to why it is in the media yet again.
The reason that it is in the news again is that earlier this week, the LHC teams studying the Higgs... Continue reading ...
The team working with the NASA Curiosity rover has released an interesting new result today. The robotic rover has drilled into rocks on the surface of Mars, and its Sample Analysis at Mars and Chemistry and Mineralogy instruments have determined that at some point in history the surface could have supported microbial life.
In the ground up sample, the scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon - all of which are considered chemical ingredients for life. Th...
A couple of days ago I posted a comment about the one year anniversary of the official launch of the Raspberry Pi project, and the replies from some associates made me realize that not everyone is aware of this fascinating device. And so, for those who are curious but too lazy to check Wikipedia, here is a brief summary.
The Raspberry Pi is a basic computer system that fits on a single circuit board about the size of a credit card. It was developed in Britain as a means of promoting the teachi...
As some of you may already be aware, astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope over the past two years have discovered two new moons of the planet Pluto. (Yes, I said planet!) So far, the best they can do for names for these two is P4 and P5, which are not really catchy names for astronomical objects residing in our own solar system.
And so they have now opened it up to the general public to suggest names and vote on them. For reference, the existing moons are Charon (the largest moo... Continue reading ...
This post will be slightly different than most on this blog. Normally we focus only on science and technology advances and interesting research or theories. However these two gentlemen who died this week had such an impact on the world of technology that they deserve mention.
The first is internet activist and pioneer, Aaron Swartz. As a child he learned computer programming and software development from his father, who operated a software company. By age 14 he was part of the working group th... Continue reading ...
One of the leading fields of research in theoretical physics at present is the search for a quantum theory gravity. I have written before in this blog about this unsolved problem, but here is a brief recap: Of the four fundamental forces of nature, all but gravity are explained by quantum theories. We know that gravity must also be compatible with quantum theory at high energies and small scales, but every attempt to combine the two most successful theories in science have met with either tec... Continue reading ...
Here we are at the start of a new year and the end of an old one,
and what an amazing year it has been for the scientific community.
I suppose that, as I am a particle
physicist by training, the top story of the year must be the
discovery of the decade, the Higgs Boson which was finally found last
July. I have already written a dozen reviews and summaries of this
event and the theory behind it, so I won't write too much now, but I
will say that this finishes off the Standard Model as predic...
To all of my friends, colleagues, fellow scientists both amateur and professional, and my readers in general, may you all have a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year! Continue reading ...
As some of you are already aware, there have been rumors for the past month that NASA was preparing to announce something big. Much of the rumor focused on the Curiosity probe on Mars, with speculation that it had discovered organic molecules or some form of life on the red planet. Meanwhile NASA kept the information to themselves, as they wanted to confirm it before releasing any results.
Today the results were released, and it wasn't what anyone was expecting. It wasn't the Curiosity probe, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Tuesday, November 13, 2012,
In :
Medical
There is an interesting new research study in the field of neuroscience that I thought deserved a comment. (I must admit as well that I haven't read all the details yet, so I could be incorrect or inaccurate - anyone who is seriously interested in this subject should read the original work instead of relying on my summary)
Scientists have finally been able to communicate indirectly with patients who are in a vegetative state. The method involves placing patients inside of an fMRI machine, whi... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, October 25, 2012,
In :
Medical
For those who would like to help with the search for a cure for cancer, but lack the PhD and million-dollar laboratory, there is a new project online called ClicktoCure. After a brief tutorial online, users look at microscope images of tumor samples and identify different types of cells. Then the scientists running the project can compile the data to analyze trends and hopefully find improved methods of treating cancers. Continue reading ...
At the request of a few viewers, today
I am going to be writing about the phenomena of zero-point energy. I
have always found this effect to be fascinating, because it seems
like paranormal alternative science, but has not only got a solid
explanation in quantum mechanics but has also been experimentally
verified!
Consider a region of space which is
completely empty. No air, no particles, not even light. It would be
expected that this region has no energy in it, and in classical
physics that ...
A few weeks ago I
was asked by some friends to explain the uncertainty principle, and
in particular whether it could be violated. The reason for their
inquiry was more interesting though – a group of experimentalists
claimed that they had violated Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle,
but in their press release failed to give any explanation or details
of where the law fails.
Let me begin by
stating clearly that the Uncertainty Principle is not going to fail
without a major revolution in physi...
NB: This article was written on October 4, 2012 but due to a technical glitch with the blogging software it was not posted until October 10, 2012.
The awards season is here once again - at least for scientists. Next week the Nobel Prizes will get awarded, including the Nobel Prize in physics. It is considered the greatest prize in science, with a history dating back over a century and recipients join a virtual hall of fame of legendary minds.
As I have written before, I don't usually use my blog to promote businesses - it is meant rather to discuss new theories and discoveries in science, medicine and technology. However today I am making an exception because of some good news for those in the robotics field either as professionals or as serious hobbyists.
The news is that RobotShop, one of the top merchants of robotics parts and equipment, has bought the manufacturer LynxMotion. There had been rumors for a while that LynxMotion wa... Continue reading ...
Some loyal readers will recognize this
entry as a repeat from last year. I had requests from some of my
readers to repeat it, so I acquiesced to the masses...
To all the students starting
University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a
prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you
get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is
entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.
I know from my own experience that the
first day...
This is a completely trivial posting, but some friends requested this information and I thought others may benefit from it. Apparently some parents are having financial problems due to purchasing software for their children's school needs. So here are a few links to free (and legal) alternatives which are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts.
Office Software: OpenOffice (replaces Microsoft Office or the Corel Packages)
Mathematics Software: SageMath (basic alternative to Math...
As promised, here are a few of the astrophotographs that I took on my recent camping trip. They were taken at Sandpiper Beach, on Hornby Island, British Columbia - which happens to be my favorite place for observing because there is almost no light pollution at all at this site. You really cannot appreciate how bad cities are for observing until you have had a chance to spend a few nights in the wilderness and really see what the night sky should look like.
In the last post, I introduced the now complete Standard Model of particle physics and the three fundamental forces it contains. In this post, we move on to the actual matter.
The matter in the Standard Model is divided up into three generations of two classes of particles, each with two sub-classes. To date no one has been able to provide a concrete explanation of why there are exactly three generations, but it will likely be discovered in the coming decades.
Now that the Standard Model has been completed with the Higgs
discovery, I have had several requests to explain the Standard Model
of physics in laymen's terms, for those who are interested in the
current state of particle physics. I have written about this in the
past, but since some people are still asking I will re-post it here.
The Standard Model of physics describes all of the known particles
and forces, but we also know that it is incomplete as 95% of the
energy in the Universe is still...
I just heard that the newest and most lucrative prize in physics has been awarded to eight noted theorist. Each of them will receive $3 million for their lifetime of contributions to the fundamentals of physics. And unlike the Nobel prize, this one doesn't get divided (and it is focused more on the theorists than experimentalists).
For those who haven't heard of this prize, it was set up by a Russian theoretical physicist and Internet entrepreneur who wanted to encourage research in fundamenta... Continue reading ...
As most of you are aware by now, two weeks ago the Large Hadron Collider detected signs of the elusive Higgs boson and confirmed its existence. Yesterday I answered some of the technical questions around the Higgs mechanism, and so today I will try to answer some of the more general questions that readers have been asking.
What use is it to the average person?
This question has been asked of
every scientific discovery since the dawn of time. Unfortunately the
answer often involves technology ... Continue reading ...
As most of you are aware by now, two weeks ago the elusive Higgs boson was detected at the Large Hadron Collider. Since that time I have been sent several questions about this great discovery, which I will try to answer in this and subsequent blog entries.
What is the Higgs mechanism/field/particle/boson?
I have written about this in several previous entries, so I won't repeat the details here. Suffice it to say, that the Standard Model of particle physics only works if all matter started ou... Continue reading ...
Posted by on Thursday, July 12, 2012,
In :
Medical
There is an interesting result from the cancer research community today, which could be a major breakthrough in treatment methods (although it is admittedly very unscientific).
An oncology researcher in the U.S. had been diagnosed with leukemia several years back, and had undergone several rounds of chemotherapy. Unfortunately each time his cancer would go into remission and then return again later. The latest rounds of treatment were not having any significant effect at all.
What a tiring yet exciting night for
the physics community. After fifty years of searching for the elusive
Higgs boson and completion of the Standard Model of particle physics,
the two teams at the Large Hadron Collider announced that they had in
fact discovered the Higgs. It is fairly certain now that they team
leaders (and probably the theorists who developed the model) will be
getting a Nobel Prize for this discovery very soon.
As I just wrote a review of the Higgs
mechanism yesterday, I w...
Today is a big day for the physics
community, and possibly a day that will be remembered forever in
history by scientists in general. Sometime today (around midnight
locally) there will be a lecture by the two teams of particle
physicists who are searching for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron
Collider. With the LHC running at full power now and the search in
full gear, the rumors are that they have indeed discovered the
elusive Higgs.
I have written about the Higgs
mechanism and Higgs boso...
As I wrote yesterday, the transit of Venus happened today and will not repeat for 105 years. It is among the rarest of astronomical events, and one not to be missed by science geeks like me. Unfortunately the skies were cloudy and dark for the whole day, so it looked hopeless - but just as the transit started the clouds parted and we had good viewing for the entire event.
Here is one of the better photographs that I took of the event. For those who are interest...
Another astronomical event will be occurring today - and this one is considered among the most rare. During the day, the planet Venus will pass between the Earth and the Sun, resulting in the chance to view Venus during the day. More accurately, with the right equipment you will be able to see a dark spot move slowly past the surface of the Sun. If you do not have the right equipment, NASA is providing a webcam view here.
Many universities and observatories will be setting up public viewings... Continue reading ...
For those who are interested and not
already aware, today there is going to be an annular eclipse. In
British Columbia, Canada (where I live) it will start sometime around
5:00pm and run to sometime before 7:00pm. (Check the exact times on
various websites, or with a quick Google search, but since it depends
on your exact location I haven't bothered giving precise times).
Most people probably already know what
a total eclipse is. When the moon is directly between our location on
Earth and the...
A slight departure from my usual science and technology ramblings today - this entry is just to remind readers that my older articles are still available on this site at my old science blog page.
For those who are not aware of the story, last fall my website got hacked into and several blog entries were vandalized. I am confident that I corrected and repaired the damage, but I still decided to start fresh with a brand new blog. So feel free to look at the old blog, and re-read your favourite a... Continue reading ...
In honour of April Fool's Day, I offer my readers this semi-short summary of some interesting yet alternative ideas in physics that seem to attract a lot attention but very little serious research from academia (sometimes with good reason, sometimes not). In each case, they have been proven impossible or nearly impossible, and yet still generate mountains of literature.
Perpetual Motion: This idea goes back to the dawn of science, and is simply the idea of building a device which moves foreve...
Most of you probably remember the big
online protest a few months back when the internet temporarily shut
down to protest draconian cyber-spying laws. Well, being a community
of engineers and hackers, a new project is being launched, dubbed
the darknetplan in which individuals and organizations are
building an alternate internet which should be better protected
against government interference.
Part of the plan will include users
building their own servers and networks that will form a mesh...
For those of you
who are completely ignorant of the significance of March 14, today is
Pi-Einstein Day (sometimes shortened to just Pi Day by the luddites
and laymen). It is a big holiday among the geek world, and even the
U.S. Government has recognized its importance.
First off, today
is Albert Einstein's birthday. That alone makes it worth celebrating,
as the great man not only developed the theory of relativity that he
is famous for, but also provided proof of the existence of atoms with
a...
Most science
fiction fans are aware of the problems with time travel (or at least
with travelling backwards through time). One of the most commonly
quoted paradoxes is the grandfather paradox, in which a person
travels backwards in time and murders an ancestor, causing themselves
to not be born and therefore not be able to commit the murder.
There are possible
several solutions to this. It could be that backwards travelling is
completely excluded by the laws of physics – although at prese...
Posted by Chris Bird on Friday, March 9, 2012,
In :
Philosophy
I came across an interesting
argument a few days regarding the nature of reality. However since
this entry is pure philosophy, some of my serious science devotees
may want to skip this one :)
Now that I have the
disclaimer out of the way, here is the argument. Assume for a moment
that we live in the real world (that may seem obvious, but you will
see why this assumption is necessary in a moment). We have one
Universe and one reality. But on a single uninteresting little planet
in a single uni...
There has been an interesting announcement from one of the teams at the TRIUMF national laboratory on the subject of medical isotope production. They are claiming that they have been able to produce a radioactive isotope known as Technetium-99m in a particle accelerator / cyclotron instead of a nuclear reactor. If there results hold up to scrutiny (which they should) and if it is economical, this could have a major impact on medical physics and on government policies on nuclear reactors.
Posted by on Wednesday, February 29, 2012,
In :
Administrative
Today marks a new beginning for my science and technology blog.
As most loyal readers are aware, I have maintained a blog on my website for the past four years, and another one before that for about three or four years, in which I pass on and explain interesting news stories or current theories in the fields of mathematics, physics, medicine, and technology (although primarily particle physics and astrophysics).
As many of you also are aware, in the Fall of 2011 my website was hacked into and s... Continue reading ...
I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.
