Niels Bohr once remarked that those who aren’t shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. This didn’t stop the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics asserting that until the certain characteristics of an object, such as its speed and it’s position in space, are measured, those characteristics don’t meaningfully exist. […]
Category Archives: episode guide
Newts on the Moon
Last week, US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich declared that if he were elected president, he would build a manned base on the Moon by 2020. Does this make him a visionary or a fantasist? And what happened to the dream of manned space exploration? Why aren’t there people living on the Moon already? We […]
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Tagged manned space-flight, Mars, Mike Lockwood, moon, NASA, Newt Gingrich
Have we found the Higgs, yet?
The Large Hadron Collider is working better than expected. And it has collected oodles of data. But have they found the Higgs, yet? We asked Scientific American’s Davide Castelvecchi, who flew to Geneva to find out.
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, ATLAS, Big Science, CERN, CMS, Davide Castelvecchi, Ed Gerstner, Higgs boson, Higgs field, Large Hadron Collider, leptons, LHC, mass, particle physics, physics, quarks, Resonance FM, science
The Trouble With Neutrinos
In September, a group of particle physicists working in Italy made a dramatic announcement. They announced results — and not just one or two outlier results but a metric truckload of results — that suggested that beams of particles known as neutrinos created at CERN in Switzerland were violating the laws of physics established by […]
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Tagged Albert Einstein, Big Science, CERN, Chrissie Giles, Ed Gerstner, faster than light, Fermi, Gran Sasso, leptons, MINOS, neutrinos, OPERA, particle physics, Pauli, physics, Resonance FM, Ryan Nichol, science, special relativity
How to build a brain
In a recent lecture at Imperial College London, Stuart Parkin — research fellow at IBM’s Almaden Research centre, and the guy who perfected the spin-valves that make modern computer hard disks work — discussed some of the challenges faced in trying to build artificial an brain. He quoted some amazing things about the differences in […]
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, central nervous system, Chrissie Giles, Ed Gerstner, neuroscience, Oliver Sacks, proprioception, Resonance FM, Richard Wingate, science
It’s a Small World after all
In 1929, Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story suggesting that everyone is connected to everyone else by six or seven degrees of separation. In 1967, the Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram, inspired by the story, set out to test the idea. He sent packages with folders of instructions to 160 random people living in Omaha, […]
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Tagged Big Science, Chrissie Giles, Duncan Watts, Ed Gerstner, Kevin Bacon, László Barabási, mathematics, Paul Erd?s, Resonance FM, Samuel Hansen, science, six degrees of separation, small world networks, social networks, Stanley Milgram, Steve Strogatz
Multiverses and the Big Bang
Earlier this year, a paper appeared in the journal Physical Review D, entitled “First observational tests of eternal inflation: Analysis methods and WMAP 7-year results” describing analysis of 7 year long survey of the Cosmic Microwave Background — which is the afterglow of the big bang — that attempted to identify signatures of a picture […]
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Tagged Big Bang, Big Science, bubble collision hypothesis, CMB anisotropy, cosmic acceleration, cosmic inflation, Cosmic Microwave Background, cosmology, Ed Gerstner, Hiranya Peiris, Matt Johnson, multiverse, physics, Resonance FM, science, WMAP
Understanding the Cosmos, Part 1
2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Special In 1917, Albert Einstein added a constant — a sort of ‘fudge factor’ — to his Theory of General Relativity to counteract the force of gravity and keep his Universe static — that is, not expanding, not contracting. A few years later, Edwin Hubble proved the Universe wasn’t, in […]
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Tagged Adam G. Riess, Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Brian P. Schmidt, Chrissie Giles, cosmological constant, cosmology, dark energy, Ed Gerstner, Einstein, Hubble, Nobel Prize, Ofer Lahav, physics, Resonance FM, Saul Perlmutter, science, supernova
History of an Ancient Sponge
Geological evidence suggests that around 650 million years ago, the Earth was covered in ice. It was believed only single-celled organisms could have survived ‘Snowball Earth’. Until Princeton professor, Adam Maloof, found a fossilized sponge predating this by millions of years. The find inspired Lola Perrin and Alexis Kirke to compose an evening of film, […]
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Tagged Adam Maloof, Alexis Kirke, Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Chrissie Giles, Ed Gerstner, fossils, geology, ice age, Lola Perrin, origin of life, palaeontology, Resonance FM, science, Snowball Earth, sponges
Higgs update
Particle Physics, or more accurately High Energy Particle Physics, is arguably the most elegant, the most poetic, the most beautiful branches of the physical sciences. In 1969, Robert Wilson – the man responsible for the construction of Fermilab, the National Accelerator Facility in Illinois, was called to justify the multimillion-dollar machine to the Congressional Joint […]
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, ATLAS, Big Science, CERN, CMS, Ed Gerstner, Fermilab, Higgs boson, Higgs field, Jonathan Butterworth, Large Hadron Collider, leptons, LHC, mass, particle physics, physics, quarks, Resonance FM, science, UCL
