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Some people have called me a doomer. Others call me a pessimist. Personally, I think I’m a realist. If I look at the plans that most nations have made to limit their contribution to climate change, I think it just isn’t going to happen. The people making these plans are either ill-informed, delusional, or lying, or maybe all of the above.
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We have seen a few new headlines this week about the plans of particle physicists to build a huge new collider at CERN in Geneva. I’ve had a look.
Particle physicists have called their new dream machine the “future circular collider”, FCC for short. The FCC is supposed to be a ring collider like the Large Hadron Collider, which is currently the biggest collider in the world. The LHC primarily collides protons, has a circumference of about 2...
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Nuclear fusion is a great idea, in principle. In principle, it could solve the energy worries of the world beautifully. The problem is that whenever we’ve tried, getting nuclear fusion to work takes up more energy than it creates. But a team from Japan and the United States just got us a bit closer to our dream of clean energy. They recently succeeded in controlling nuclear plasma in a stellarator by creating a virtual twin. Wh...
2024-02-09 16:00:16 +0000 UTC View Post
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Electric vehicles are great, but let’s be honest, it’s more convenient to fill up a fuel tank with gasoline than sit around and wait until the battery is full. It takes so long that sometimes you even have to talk to other people at the charging place, uh. Well, this new battery from researchers at Cornell might solve the problem. Let’s have a look.
Lithium batteries or any batteries really have two poles, plus and ...
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I got a lot of questions last week about an article in Quanta Magazine about Dark Dimensions. And for a change this is a case where I think I’m actually the right person to ask. What’s this all about? Let’s have a look.
This recent work is based on string theory, an approach to a t...
2024-02-07 17:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post
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Last week, the US senate had a hearing on the dangers of social media in preparation of a legislation to improve child safety online. In this hearing, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that it has not been scientifically proved that social media causes mental health problems in adolescents.
This upset a lot of people who think that the link is obvious. But I am afraid Zuckerberg is right. Let’s have a look.
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This is a rare case in which I talk about some of my own work. It’s about the biggest current controversy in astrophysics, does dark matter exist or do we instead need to change the law of gravity.
If you’ve followed me for some while, then you’ll know that my opinion on this has switched back and forth a few times. In this most recent iteration,...
2024-02-05 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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We’ve seen a lot of headlines in the past year about how dangerous AI is and how overblown these fears are . I’ve found it hard to make sense of this discussion. If only someone could systematically interview experts and figure out what they’re worried about. Well, a group of researchers from the UK has done exactly that and just publish...
2024-02-04 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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This is the amazing story of the discovery of X-rays, the trouble that followed, and what we can learn from it.
It’s November and the year is 1885. Wilhem Conrad Röntgen is in his laboratory in Wuerzburg, Germany. For the past weeks he’s been studying the new cathode ray tubes from his colleague Phillip Lenard.
Cathode ray tubes are glass tubes with a negative and a positive electric pole, called the cathode and anode. ...
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Do you still write by hand? Anything besides shopping lists? A new study looked at what happens in our brain when we write by hand or type on the keyboard, and it makes a really strong case for handwriting. I personally quite like handwriting and I am totally convinced it’s good for, well, something, so ...
2024-02-02 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
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A new study by a group of British geologists suggests that a huge tsunami devastated the populations of Stone Age Britain, about 8200 years ago. Cool! Disaster! Extinction! Could it happen again? Let’s have a look.
This new research is about a fantastically destructive series of disasters know...
2024-02-01 16:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Ground-based nuclear fusion laser observatory tracks and fires at distant space debris targets. (Image Credit: Australian EOS).
EX-Fusion, a Japanese startup, is quite literally aiming at the sky. In cooperatio...
2024-02-01 01:09:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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One of the most disturbing ideas in physics, or maybe *the most disturbing idea, is that space can fall apart. That’s because it could be what’s called “false” vacuum. A false vacuum can remain in this innocent reliable looking form for billions of years, but eventually a quantum fluctuation could be enough to cause it to decay. This would release enormous amounts of energy and kill all of us. Yes, cheerful tho...
2024-01-31 16:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post
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Google has unveiled a new artificially intelligent system, AlphaGeometry, that can solve problems of mathematical geometry. It’s the first computer program to surpass the average performance of participants at the International Mathematical Olympiad. That might sound like an incremental improvement, just one more thing that AI is really good at, but mathematics isn’t just one more thing, it’s everywhere. This makes Google...
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What happened before the Big Bang? I got this question on twitter and thought, well, the answer is that we don’t know. Now, I’m quite fond of short videos, but that’s a little too short even for my taste. Then I saw...
2024-01-29 16:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
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Physicists say that 80 percent of the mass in the universe is dark matter, and not only this, dark matter is supposedly all around us, we just can’t see it. Sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it. Indeed, every time I mention dark matter, I get flooded with comments about how silly the idea is. “Fantasy folly.” “2024-01-28 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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YouTube has removed the dislike counter, but the numbers are still available backstage. And I can tell you that my most disliked videos, by far, are those on climate change. Doesn’t matter if it’s good news or bad news, some people it seems reflexively dislike anything about the topic. Every time.
And to be honest, I can kind of understand that. It’s a little tiresome, isn’t it? Climate change, extreme weather, he...
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I got a lot of questions this week about an article which said that physicists have designed “a Way to Detect Quantum Behaviour in Large Objects, Like Us”. Quantum Behaviour like what? Going through two doors at the same time? Tunnelling through a wall? Separating my grin from my fac...
2024-01-26 16:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post
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How do we know that climate change is caused by humans? I got this question on twitter and I thought, c’mon, Google can answer that.
Well, the first hit I got on Google is a quote from a NASA website “It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun's e...
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I don’t like places where hot stuff bubbles out of the ground, but Icelanders have no such issues. They’re now almost ready to start a new experiment that will drill right into a magma chamber. How do they know that this will not accidentally create a volcano? Let’s have a look.
Iceland is an island in the Northern Atlantic Ocean that sits right atop the Mid Atlantic Ridge. That’s where the North American and Eur...
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Floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, storm surges. Extreme weather events receive a lot of media coverage. In recent years, these events have frequently been attributed to climate change. This “extreme event attribution” how it’s called is a way to quantify how climate change supposedly increased the likelihood of a specific weather event by so and so much. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that these numbers are...
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The quantum Cheshire Cat is a famous experiment that’s attracted a lot of attention in the past decade. In this experiment, a particle is supposedly separated from one of its properties, for example its spin or polarization. It’s called the Cheshire cat because that particle is kind of like the cat and its disembodied property is kind of like the grin of the cat.
But maybe I should better say there was this famous exper...
2024-01-22 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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The Center for Countering Digital Hate put out a new report a few days ago, in which they warn that climate misinformation continuous to flourish on YouTube. They want YouTube to take more action. Let’s have a look
The Center for Countering Digital Hate is an American-British non-governmental non-profit organization. For their n...
Have you ever wondered where all that mass around you comes from? No, it’s not the sugar industry, it comes from the pion condensate. Let me explain.
The Higgs boson is one of the elementary particles of nature. Physicists collect all those particles in what’s somewhat unimaginatively called the standard model. It’s like the collector’s box of particle physics, basically. That the particles in the standard model are elementary means that for all we currently know they’re not m...
2024-01-20 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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A group of astrophysicists have found another megastructure in the universe. They’ve called it the “Big Ring” and it’s a whopping 1 point 3 billion light-years in diameter. The thing isn’t just huge, it’s also a huge problem for our understanding of how the universe works. Because it shouldn’t exist. I’m somewhat afraid that all other astrophysicists will try to ignore this, which is why I thought we should talk a...
2024-01-19 16:20:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Remember those companies that would charge you $19.99 to name a star after someone, but then nobody would actually use the name? Here’s a somewhat more substantial idea: You can send your name (or your friends’) on a trip to o...
2024-01-18 22:43:16 +0000 UTC View Post
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This is a video about digestive problems. It’s not what I normally talk about, and so I’ve hesitated to make this video. But then I thought. If it helps even one single person to avoid some of the pain and sleepless nights I’ve gone through, it’ll have been worth it. So here we go.
If you regularly suffer from abdominal pain, cramps, bloating, gas, nausea, or diarrhoea, all of this or some, about half an hour to an hour after meals, you d...
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We have talked a lot about particle accelerators that look for new physics. But sometimes you can teach new tricks to old physics. A great example of this is flash proton therapy for cancer treatment, that’s just out of the laboratory and now being tested on patients in the first trials. Let’s have a look.
First things first, what does particle physics have to do with cancer? Well, one of the most common ways to treat canc...
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A Chinese company has announced they’re planning to mass-produce tiny nuclear batteries that can last up to 50 years, possibly beating both a British and an American company who have tried to put those on the market for several years. What does that mean? Will we soon all power our phones with nuclear power? Let’s have a look.
We tend to think of radioactive material primarily as dangerous, and that’s for good reasons...
2024-01-16 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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The Dark Energy Survey has surveyed dark energy and found that our universe is unlikely to rip into pieces. I think that’s good news. Let’s have a look.
Dark Energy is the name that astrophysicists have given to a hypothetical ingredient of the universe that makes the expansion of the universe faster. So it’s not that dark energy causes the expansion itself, it makes it faster. Dark energy should not be confused wit...