I've seen a number of news reports over the last day talking about the newly announced detection of primordial gravity waves by the BICEP program at the South Pole. Most of them trumpet these results as proving the Big Bang. That's not what's going on here.
There's been a recent observational challenge. New images of a Large Quasar Group (LQG) show a structure much larger than should be allowed
Jobs are going away. Even cruddy, dehumanizing jobs of the sort that so many people decried during the height of the Industrial revolution. With no work, and no way to provide for a family's needs, it's no wonder that we're seeing a breakdown in the structures of community.
A truly lovely short film by a Rhode Islander – who studied physics at Brown and design and animation at RISD – both a few blocks from where I sit as I write this sentence. Why Do I Study Physics? (2013) from Xiangjun Shi on Vimeo. Take a few minutes to watch it and then look at the world around you with your new rational and irrational eyes…
Last week I gave a talk in Little Compton Rhode Island on the complexity involved in the conversation between the scientific and theological enterprises. There were two big take-aways I hoped people would leave with.
Do religious ideas and institutions impede the advancemen of scientific knowledge? Lucas Mix argues, and demonstrates, that they do not.
Chinese Physicists Measure Speed of “Spooky Action At a Distance” The group claims that they have measured that entangled photons interact with each other at speed that is at least ten thousand times the speed of light. This modifies a similar experiment done recently but which was criticized because the measurement couldn’t be guaranteed to depend solely on entanglement. Can the ansible be far behind?
Imagine my delight this morning when I came across a blog on Scientific American talking about a new book hand's on quantum physics experiments that could done at home. The title is "<em>Exploring Quantum Physics Through Hands-On Projects"</em> and it's written by David Prutchi and his daughter Shanni Prutchi.
The New York Times reports this week on the rising rates of papers appearing in peer-refereed journals that are being withdrawn. You withdraw a paper for two reasons generally. You either made a mistake in your scientific reasoning or someone caught you lying. It appears that it’s the latter reason and not the former that is on the rise. Why is this happening? According to one expert: “Several factors are at play here, scientists say. […]
Quantum Entanglement should be an incredibly useful tool for communications. Though it won’t ever become an ansible, or even the basis for subspace radio, the ability to communicate through entangled pairs of quantum particles would, in theory, create a situation where no third party could intercept the message. Which means that we’d finally have unbreakable secure communications. In theory at least. There are a number of practical problems. One of the problems is that it’s […]
