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 […]
All of the other research councils will get increases of at least 3%, with the Medical Research Council receiving a rise of 6.8%. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will get an extra £86m, representing a real-terms rise of 3.5%, but £60m of this will have to underpin work in the life sciences. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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). […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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
Read article: John Bell and the most profound discovery of science
