In this episode, I talk to the Deputy Director for the Australian Collaboration for Accelerator Science. We talked about some of the work that has been done at the Australian Synchrotron since Dr Boland's last appearance on the show.- How will measurements take place at the LHC?- What is a Linear Collider?- What kind
Posted by Brains Matter
... don't know why, but last week was my most popular week ever, at least in terms of blog hits! I was going to follow up with a foray into the role of spin in quantum mechanics, but decided instead to settle for a less ambitious project for this evening. Yesterday I walked past the
Posted by In The Dark
The blogosphere, even the tiny little bit of it that I know anything about, has a habit of summoning up strange coincidences between things so, following EM Forster's maxim “only connect”, I thought I'd spend a lazy saturday lunchtime trying to draw a couple of them together. A few days ago I posted what was
Posted by In The Dark
... woke up this morning to the news that, according to Stephen Hawking, God did not create the Universe but it was instead an “inevitable consequence of the Law of Physics”. By sheer coincidence this daft pronouncement has come out at the same time as the publication of Professor Hawking's new book, an extract of
Posted by In The Dark
The idea of the Theory of Everything is enticing that we could somehow explain all that is. String theory has been proposed since the 1960´s as a way to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity into such an explanation. However, the biggest criticism of String Theory is that it isn't testable. But now, a
Posted by Universe Today
I've been busy in August, and one of the things I've been working on has been out for a couple of weeks and I forgot to blog it. I've published a book. I haven't written a book, or edited it or anything requiring any academic input. I just worked on the publishing. The book is
Posted by AlunSalt: Ancient Science and the Science of Ancient Things
... unlike the classical physics I had learned about up to that point. The difference or so I was informed was that classical systems were predictable, but quantum systems were not. For
Posted by In The Dark
As I predicted last week, the A-level results announced on Thursday showed another increase in pass rates and in the number of top grades awarded, although I had forgotten that this year saw the introduction of the new A* grade. Overall, about 27% of students got an A or an A*, although the number getting
Posted by In The Dark
This week in August 2010 has taken on quite a melancholy mood. Only a few days ago there was the death of physicist Nicola Cabibbo. Yesterday I heard that the great Russian mathematician Vladimir Igorevich Arnold, who did a lot of work of interest to physicists, had also passed away aged 72. And then this
Posted by In The Dark
Physicists are planning to create a laser so powerful that it will tear apart spacetime, well, it won't destroy spacetime, but it will tear particles out of the vacuum with dire consequences for the laser. I first made the statement that 'lasers will tear apart spacetime' when referring to future ambitious projects planned by the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) when I was writing for Lindau Nature on 50 Years of Lasers. It is a bold claim, perhaps a colorful interpretation of the ph
Posted by The Astronomist
Still too busy to post anything too substantial, but since this year's A-level results are out next week – with the consequent scramble for University places – I thought I'd take a few minutes to share this graph which shows the steady dumbing-down improvement of educational standards student performance over the last few decades. Nowadays,
Posted by In The Dark
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