The classic case comes from the world of pulp fiction: Entombed, a kidnapped child is running out of air; arrested, the prime suspect will not say where. Do you tear his toenails out or calmly interrogate him? The question takes on practical significance with news anchors wondering what we can inflict on the accused Paris […]
Is Bassar al-Assad causing all those Syrian refugees to flee? Well, yes, in a way — but also no. Science now has something to say of this though few have noticed: Chances are that climate change led to the war the refugees are fleeing. They lived in a region that both climate modeling and weather […]
Albert Einstein is mostly known for physics theories. Or for E=mc2 (though he didn’t write it in that way). But his biggest contribution was the boldness, number, depth, diversity, originality and sometimes sheer courage of his ideas. Every one of these ideas was controversial at the time; now they underpin the world economy. What’s the […]
Janet Mary Rogge Dugle In memoriam Jan Dugle was an American botanist. Black-spruce ecosystems were her special thing. I met her and her first husband David (whose trailblazing work with DNA I have mentioned) when I first arrived in North America. She soon sussed out my chief deficiency and set out to fix it: She […]
The mystery of the missing WIMPs is heading for a crisis. It’s looking like the reason we can’t find them is they don’t exist. Most people never heard of them. What is a WIMP? It is Dark Matter by another name. It stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. They must be weakly interacting because no-one’s […]
It may be the top science story of this century so far (though I hope an even bigger one is coming): Physicists detected gravitational waves; you can hear them here. This discovery has profound implications for the future of cosmology. It will affect our lives in ways we cannot yet conceive. It was a long […]
In its search for new discoveries physics seeks extremes. Now an inconceivably vast explosion is in the news. What can it teach us? First let’s be clear about the extremes that physics seeks. They want information about the very small, smaller than atoms for example, and the very large, larger than our Sun and other […]
Breaking news: We are seeing a new Scientific Revolution. It will be the biggest ever. And I mean ever. Odds on it will be called “the Planck revolution”. Does German physicist Max Planck deserve this? I don’t think so. I think of it as the Riemann revolution. Readers know that more than 150 years ago […]
‘It is indeed an exacting requirement to have to ascribe physical reality to space in general, and especially to empty space.’ — Albert Einstein Most physicists work in a vacuum. That is, they tend to think in terms of particles in empty space. But both Albert Einstein and recent evidence say they are wrong: Far […]