Recently by Matin Durrani

By Matin Durrani

Far from being an arcane concept in theoretical physics, the idea of “parallel worlds” and “parallel universes” has for many years served as a source of inspiration for numerous artists, movie-makers and writers, as the Stony Brook University philosopher and historian Robert P Crease discussed in his column for Physics World last December.

The latest – and probably not the last – example of multiple universes in popular culture comes with a new German film released earlier this month entitled Schilf, which means “Reeds” in English.

The film’s based on the bestselling book of the same name by German author Juli Zeh, the English translation of which, rather confusingly, was entitled Dark Matter in the UK and In Free Fall in the US.

Reviewing the book for Physics World in 2010, US science writer Jennifer Ouellette called it “a compelling intellectual thriller”, which she commended for its “meticulous plotting…and lyrical turns of phrase”. You can read her review here.

Anyway, the film version, like the book, features – unusually in the movie world – not one, but two bona fide physicists, in the form of a professor at the University of Jena called Sebastian Wittich (played by Mark Waschke) and an old pal from his student days called Oskar Hoyer (Stipe Erceg), who’s now based at CERN.

According to Ouellette’s review of the book, Sebastian and Oskar are passionate rivals when it comes to physics, and the story begins with the pair discussing the philosophical implications of the possibility of parallel worlds, before quickly veering off to include a kidnapping, a ransom, a grisly death and the unravelling of Sebastian’s life.

“Eventually, an unorthodox detective with a love of physics and an inoperable brain tumour steps in to solve his final case by connecting these seemingly random events,” Ouellette writes.

I’ve only watched the trailer for the film – directed by Claudia Lehmann – so I can’t comment on how closely it follows the novel or if the movie is worth watching.

But the trailer itself looks okay, with realistic-looking shots of a physics lecture hall and a scene inside Sebastian’s home, where his son starts going on about Schrödinger’s cat. Then the cheery (cheesy?) accordion music turns predictably sinister, various mobile phones go off, assorted trains/cars/bikes come and go, an old, beardy guy with dark glasses and a scarf stumbles into view, before a character, with his back to us, admits “I’ve killed someone – but not in this world.” There’s also a glimpse of a place that might, or might not, be CERN.

By the way, a gripe of mine: why is it that mobile phones in movies never have silly ring tones?

More details of the film can be found at IMDb.com.

By Matin Durrani

Quantum physics is notoriously counter-intuitive and difficult to grasp, which is perhaps why the subject is often invoked to explain other seemingly counter-intuitive and difficult-to-grasp areas of life.

But that doesn’t mean that wheeling out the subject necessarily makes any sense.

So here’s to the former Bishop of Southwark, Thomas Frederick ‘Tom’ Butler, whose comments on the Thought for the Day slot on BBC Radio 4 this morning (at about 1.47) are a classic of the genre.

The bishop begins, for some reason, by talking about the search for the Higgs boson (or Higgs “bos’un” as he irritatingly puts it) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which, he reveals to the world, “will shortly be reactivated”. (I presume he means restarted after the scheduled winter shut-down as the scientists on the machine have happily been taking data for more than two years now.)

Having brought up the LHC, Butler then jumps suddenly into quantum physics, bemoaning his lack of understanding of the subject. But that’s okay, we’re told, because Niels Bohr once said that “those who aren’t shocked when they first come across quantum theory can’t possibly have understood it”. (Quote a heavyweight from science – that’ll impress the listeners.)

And so to the heart of the matter: fundamental entities can be both particles and waves, which is, er, a bit like religion really. “Paradoxically it [quantum mechanics] has made some of the traditional problems of the nature of God easier to understand,” says the bishop, pointing out, for example, that Jesus is both human and divine.

Butler admits he found it hard, when he was younger, to come to terms with this paradox. “I found this both/and faith world difficult to grasp,” he says. “Surely this paradox couldn’t be right?”

Ah, but all’s well now, thanks to quantum physics. “It tells us the world is paradox. The fundamental nature of existence is both/and.”

But if you have any lingering doubts over the validity of quantum physics, don’t worry. “Hopefully we’ll soon have the Higgs boson to give the theory the stamp of approval.”

You can relive the whole item here – jump to about 1.47 minutes.

The artwork The 5th Dimensional Camera, which explores the theme of parallel worlds. (Courtesy: EPSRC Press Office)

By Matin Durrani

I’m sure we’ve all go our own personal wishes for a parallel universe – perhaps it’s a world where physicists are flush with cash, the Superconducting Super Collider had never been cancelled and CERN press conferences discussing the search for the Higgs had a bit more oomph about them.

But writing in the December issue of Physics World magazine, Stony Brook University philosopher and historian Robert P Crease examines how the idea of parallel universes and parallel worlds also appear frequently in art and literature.

We’ve all heard of Lewis Carroll’s beloved story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, of course, but did you know that Jorge Luis Borges described the concept of a “multiverse” in his 1941 anthology The Garden of Forking Paths? Or that Alan Ayckbourn wrote a series of plays called “Intimate Exchanges”, in which a single opening scene branches out into 16 different endings?

As Crease points out, the idea that parallel worlds should attract novelists is “perhaps not surprising” – after all, as he puts it, they deal with “events shaped by contingencies that unfold over time”.

But the theme of alternative worlds that are similar (but not identical) to our own, branching off from each other, has featured in films as well, including last year’s Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman, which was based on the celebrated 2005 play of the same name by David Lindsay-Abaire.

It also crops up in the new film Another Earth, which was released earlier this year. Examining the consequences of a promising student who causes a fatal car crash, the film has unfortunately received a bit of a panning, being dubbed by the Daily Mail as “pretentious twaddle” and by the Guardian as “ponderous and contrived”.

Still, let’s not forget that multiple worlds have even inspired some sculptors, including Jon Ardern and Anab Jain of the Superflux studio in London, who created an interesting work called The 5th Dimensional Camera, pictured above, which appeared last year in an exhibition called “Talk to Me” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Members of the Institute of Physics (IOP) can read the article “Other-worldly tales” online free of charge via the digital version of the magazine by following this link or by downloading the Physics World app onto your iPhone or iPad or Android device, available from the Apple store and Android Marketplace, respectively.

If you’re not yet a member, you can join the IOP as an imember for just £15, €20 or $25 a year via this link. Being an imember gives you access to a digital version of Physics World both online and through the apps.

By Hamish Johnston

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has unveiled the proposed names for elements 114 and 116. Named after Georgi Flerov, founder of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, element 114 will, if approved, be called flerovium and have the symbol Fl. Element 116, meanwhile, will be named livermorium after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and given the atomic symbol Lv.

The elements were created by researchers at the JINR back in 2004 and were both confirmed by scientists at the LLNL in California and the Centre for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany.

Commenting on the suggested names has now opened to anyone for a five-month period, which will end in April. So what do you think? In this week’s Facebook poll, we want you to answer the following question.

Do you like the element names livermorium and flerovium?

I like both of them
I like livermorium but not flerovium
I like flerovium but not livermorium
They’re both boring and unimaginative

To cast your vote, please visit our Facebook page; you are also free to suggest your own names by posting a comment.

In last week’s Facebook poll we asked you when you thought we will see the first working nuclear-fusion reactor supplying electricity to a grid? Nearly half of you (49%) chose the most optimistic option, saying that we could be running our toasters on fusion within 30 years. Some 21% foresee fusion reactors in 30–60 years and 7% think they will be a reality within 60–90 years. However, 23% of you believe that it’s unlikely ever to happen.

Commenting on a related Facebook posting about an article on the Canadian company General Fusion, Michael Simmons wrote “In high-school physics in 1968, I was told practical fusion power was 20 years away. In 1971, in college-modern physics, it was 20 years away. As a high-school physics teacher, I attended a conference on the energy future in 1985 and fusion was 20 years away. In 2005, at a local conference on future energy sources, fusion was mentioned as being 20 years from becoming economically feasible. I don’t believe it is never, but I have come to believe it won’t be in my lifetime.”

By Matin Durrani

There’s nothing better in physics than a bit of a ding-dong, and you can, of course, rely on string theory to supply the ammunition for it.

String theory, after all, polarizes opinion seemingly like nothing else: its proponents deem it a rigorous framework that could unify the fundamental forces, while its critics dub it preposterous guff that makes no testable predictions of the world.

One of string theory’s masterminds – Michael Duff of Imperial College London – has now hit back at his critics with a paper in a special issue of the journal Foundations of Physics published to mark 40 years of the theory. You can read Duff’s 19-page paper either in Foundations of Physics, which is open to all until 31 December 2011, or as a preprint on arXiv.

Duff reckons that “much of the criticism has been misguided or misinformed” and goes on to outline why string theory is valid, before taking a pop at various critics – not only other researchers, notably Lee Smolin and Peter Woit (who he calls “a single-issue protest group”), but also the media, including Physics World.

Duff’s complaints about the media are a little confused in my eyes, stemming in part from the fact that journalists paid too much attention, in Duff’s eyes, to the work of Garret Lisi, who in 2007 published a (non-peer-reviewed) paper entitled “An exceptionally simple theory of everything” that controversially claimed to unify “all fields of the standard model and gravity”.

Although Duff says Lisi is “by no means a crackpot”, he complains that “journalists love [crackpots]” and seems to suggest it was for that reason that so much coverage was given to Lisi’s work, even though the latter does not have much to do with string theory. All I can say is that we at Physics World are no fan of crackpots either.

Duff’s paper has, not surprisingly, drawn a vigorous response from Woit himself, whose blog post can be read here. Woit thinks that attempts by Duff and other string theorists to respond to their critics has “damaged not just the credibility of string theory, but of mathematically sophisticated work on particle theory in general”.

If this little spat leaves you none the wiser, my advice is to read this Physics World feature on string theory by Matthew Chalmers.

By Matin Durrani

With all those rumours flying around of possible sightings of the Higgs boson in among the proton–proton collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, you might find this video of a very different type of collision interesting.

It involves not protons but pool balls, as performed by Philadelphia-based “professional pool trick-shot artist” Steve Markle.

“The trick shots I do are an excellent showing of defining the laws of physics,” Markle claims.

And if you think pool balls behave in a pretty predictable way according to the rules of classical physics, well yes they do, but it’s still surprising to see what some good old-fashioned spin can do. Take a look, for example, at 3.46 min, when Markle manages to bend a pool ball in a curve through an entire 90° angle.

And if you want to see Markle in action for real, he’s due to be performing at the Artistic Pool World Championship (yes, there is such a thing) in Oaks, Oaklahoma next March.

As for whether the Higgs is going to show up at CERN, you’ve now got just a week to wait. In the meantime, these pool-ball collisions are sure to keep you amused.

The CMS collaboration has so far seen no evidence of sparticles. (Courtesy: CERN/Michael Hoch)

By Matin Durrani

The first full year of data-taking at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is now drawing to a close, has been a wake-up call for supersymmetry (SUSY) – a theory that has captivated physicists (or at least some of them) for the last 40 years.

SUSY’s central prediction – that for each of the Standard Model particles there exists a heavier “sparticle” sibling – remains firmly in the realm of imagination.

Quite simply, no firm evidence for SUSY has yet emerged, despite its aficionados claiming it’s been round the corner for the last 20 years.

But SUSY’s supporters remain undeterred.

In article in the December issue of Physics World magazine by science writer Matthew Chalmers, Savas Dimopolous of Stanford University insists “it’s very early to draw conclusions”, with Nobel laureate David Gross of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara saying supersymmetry’s “alive and well”.

Whether evidence for SUSY emerges at the LHC partly depends on if – and where – the Higgs boson shows. If the Higgs weighs in at about 120 GeV, then “it really smells like SUSY”, according to Oliver Buchmuller of the CMS experiment at the LHC. A Higgs heavier than about 135 GeV could see SUSY running into trouble.

As Chalmers points out, for most physicists, the discovery of SUSY would be more remarkable than that of the Higgs. After all, the Standard Model of particle physics has withstood 35 years of tests at six or more decimal places, suggesting that the Higgs or something like it pretty much has to turn up at the LHC. “SUSY, by contrast, is more a well-founded hope”, writes Chalmers, and “the non-discovery of SUSY or something like it would just leave thousands of physicists felling gutted…and weaken the case for another multi-billion dollar collider”.

All eyes are now on an upcoming meeting at CERN on 12 and 13 December, at which results from the full 2011 dataset are due to be presented and discussed. The key sessions on the Higgs searches are set to take place at 2 p.m. local time on 13 December, featuring talks by Fabiola Gianotti of ATLAS and Guido Tonelli of CMS.

Members of the Institute of Physics (IOP) can read the article “Searching for SUSY” online through the digital version of the magazine by following this link or by downloading the Physics World app onto your iPhone or iPad or Android device, available from the Apple store and Android Marketplace respectively.

If you’re not yet a member, you can join the IOP as an imember for just £15, €20 or $25 a year via this link. Being an imember gives you a year’s free access to Physics World, both online and through the apps.

By Matin Durrani

One of the big advantages of a physics degree is that it opens the door to a wide range of different careers.

In fact, relatively few physicists stay within the confines of academic research, with plenty heading off into IT, finance, industry and teaching.

And, of course, there are lots of other unusual jobs that physicists end up doing, from opera singing to beach-animal sculpture-making, some of which appear in our regular “Once a physicist” column, a selection of which can be read via this link.

Plenty of physicists also end up working in the environmental sector and it was pleasing to see that the new head of the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is a physicist too.

Appointed today by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the new NERC boss is Duncan Wingham, who graduated with a BSc in physics from the University of Leeds in 1979 and obtained a PhD from the University of Bath, also in physics, in 1984.

Most of Wingham’s career since then has been at University College London (UCL), where he was chair of space and climate physics and later head of Earth sciences from 2005 to 2010.

Wingham was also founding director of the NERC’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling from 2000 to 2005, which, among other things, discovered the widespread mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its origin in accelerated ocean melting.

He is also currently chairman of the NERC’s science and innovation board and has been lead investigator of the European Space Agency’s CryoSat and CryoSat-2 satellite missions.

Wingham replaces Alan Thorpe, who was also a physicist.

We’ll be publishiing a special issue of Physics World magazine next March on Earth sciences and we’re filming some videos at the American Geophysical Union’s meeting next month – so stay tuned for more Earth-sciences coverage.

By Matin Durrani

The guys who in 2008 came up with the annoyingly catchy “There’s no-one as Irish as Barack O’Bama” – more than a million hits on YouTube and counting – have re-recorded their song with new lyrics describing the latest mystery in particle physics.

Jumping on the huge interest in claims that neutrinos may travel faster than light, the musicians, known as the Corrigan Brothers and featuring someone called Pete Creighton, have called their new version simply “The neutrino song”.

The song’s not bad if cheesy synths and breezy pop are your thing, although it does that awful thing of going up a key near the end, which is a pet hate of mine.

But as I’ve learned to expect from a string of recent physics-meets-pop disasters, it’s the lyrics that will make your toes curl up.

I won’t spoil the lyrics by reprinting them here in full except to warn you of what is possibly the worst rhyme ever in the history of physics:

Now physics for ever may not be the same
And boffins are gonna be driven insane
If light’s not the fastest
What can this mean-o
And is something faster than the neutrino.

By Matin Durrani

Quiz question: name a scientist who has appeared on a banknote.

Thanks to the powers of Google (other search engines exist) and this informative but possibly out-of-date webpage from University of Maryland physicist Edward Redish, I see that those who have graced various currencies include Bohr (Danish 500 kroner), Marie and Pierre Curie (French 500 franc), Einstein (Israeli five pound note), Kelvin (Scottish pound), Marconi (Italian 2000 lira), Rutherford (100 New Zealand dollar), Schrödinger (Austrian 1000 schilling), Tesla (er, 10 billion Yugoslav dinar) and Volta (Italian 10,000 lira).

Now, a decade after Michael Faraday was ditched in favour of Edward Elgar on the Bank of England’s £20 note, science makes a reappearance in England with James Watt set to appear alongside his Birmingham-based business partner Matthew Boulton on the bank’s new £50 note, which is to enter circulation on 2 November 2011 (see above).

Born in Scotland in 1736, you don’t need me to remind you that Watt made his name by designing a new kind of more efficient and powerful steam engine, which he commercialized with Boulton (1728–1809). Their invention pretty much kick-started the industrial revolution, offering as it did cheap quantities of power. Watt, of course, is also honoured through the SI “derived unit” of power.

Boulton and Watt were both fellows of the Royal Society, prompting current president Sir Paul Nurse to call it “wonderful” that they were being celebrated in this way. “Science and engineering have long driven improvements in our knowledge and in our day to day lives,” he added. “At a time when the UK is trying to rebalance its economy, Watt and Boulton are also a reminder of how science and engineering can be the basis of economic growth for the UK.”

Sadly I haven’t actually got one of the lovely new notes to describe in glowing detail what it looks like, so if anyone from the Bank of England would care to supply one, I’d be delighted.