The gravitational constant was first measured by Lord Cavendish in 1798, who used a torsion-balance to measure the force between a pair of lead spheres. Cavendish measured G to be 6.754 x 10-11 metres cubed per kilogram per second squared. Although this technique has been refined many times, it is still subject to a number […]
Donald Umstadter and co-workers used a neodymium-glass laser to illuminate helium gas in a vacuum chamber. The team were able to focus 4 trillion watts of power on the gas. The electric field of the laser pulses ionizes the gas and causes the free electrons to oscillate back-and-forth in a straight line. The magnetic field […]
In the early 1960s Lloyd Richardson had developed a dynamic model to foresee the outbreak of war. He believed that there were three processes that a nation responds to: the external threat (the enemy), the fatigue factor (how much the military costs the public), and the grievance factor (hostility and justifications for going to war). […]
Geologists have known for some time that ice sheets existed at the equator between 2, 400 and 2, 200 million years ago and then again between 820 and 550 million years ago. Their favourite theory to explain these observations is the ‘snowball’ effect, which says that glaciers crept towards the equator from the poles. However, […]
“The idea of using white noise to mimic zero-point fluctuations is clever, ” said Steve Lamoreaux of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. “The fundamentals are quite different from the electrodynamical Casimir effect, but the calculational techniques are quite similar.” The conventional Casimir effect can be understood in terms of the radiation pressure exerted […]
Faulkes was educated at Hinckley Grammar School and at an early age specialised in science. He obtained a degree from Hull University and then went to London University to do a PhD in general relativity and cosmology. Afterwards he spent three years doing post-doctoral research before moving into the computer industry. He sees this latest […]
Every year we pump 60 million tons of nitrogen oxides, 100 million tons of sulphur dioxide and 20 000 million tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Surely nuclear power, which emits almost negligible amounts of these gases, is beyond reproach? However, as the nuclear industry knows well, the public […]
There is a spectre haunting this book – the spectre of John Horgan, the journalist whose successful book The End of Science tweaked the collective nose of the scientific community when it was published in 1996. Horgan claimed that everything of fundamental importance that can be known to science is already known, or soon will […]
Read article: John Bell and the most profound discovery of science
Andrew Whitaker on how John Bell investigated quantum theory in the greatest depth and established what it can tell us about the fundamental nature of the physical world
Everyday experience tells us that it is impossible to travel backwards in time, no matter what science-fiction writers and movie directors tell us. However, this seemingly natural impossibility is actually one of the greatest mysteries in physics. Currently most physicists associate the irreversibility of time with the production of entropy in the warm macroscopic […]
