Sad as it may be, every star must die. At some point during its life it stops burning nuclear elements to sustain itself via radiation pressure, and collapses. Its ultimate fate depends on its mass; most of them are not massive enough to produce a supernova by themselves, but they die in an equally spectacular […]
Although pretty much unknown for the public audience, Supergravity theories play an important role in modern Theoretical Physics, specially for the particle physics and (Super)String Theory communities . Loosely speaking, Supergravity is a theory that describes gravity along with other fundamental particles and interactions in such a way that the whole structure is symmetric under […]
Author: Jaume Navarro received his PhD in history of science from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1998). He has been a researcher at the universities of Cambridge, Imperial College (London) and the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin). Currently he is an Ikerbasque Research Professor and a member of the Praxis Group at the Faculty […]
Author: Katy Price is a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London. ‘ We must live before we can attain to either intelligence or control at all. We must sleep if we are not to find ourselves, at death, helplessly strange to the new conditions. And we must die before […]
Author: Shaul Katzir is a Marie Curie senior research fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation (M4HUMAN programme), at the Minerva Centre for Humanities – Tel Aviv University World War One was the first military confrontation to which scientists and engineers were mobilized for research and development in a wide scale. Earlier, science and scientists were […]
Is the intelligence test an “objective”, scientific device or just a way to “execute” social discrimination? This article (based on ) presents the latest steps to trace the history of one of the most problematic chapters in psychology’s history: the application of intelligence testing. By informing about the history of the IQ debate I want […]
I am concerned here with the ways science and the future were interpreted during the interwar years. I argue that we need to come to deal not just with “the view of science”, but rather with sharply contrasting and competing narratives vigourously expressed in a new media-rich world after the First World War. Our vision […]
Jon Agar is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. He writes on contemporary technologies (such as mobile phones, ID cards) and the history of modern science and technology. He is the author of Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond published by Polity Press. He is also editor of the […]
What is a radiation dosimeter? Why do we need one? To give you an interesting and short response I will remind you what the Japanese government officials offered to Fukushima evacuees after the 2011 nuclear disaster. Having failed to reach their original radiation decontamination target, the government proposed that evacuees could return to their homes […]
For many centuries, the passage of light through matter was regarded as that of a wave in a fixed medium characterized by a refractive index (n), which may depend on the frequency. This description is consistent with plenty of phenomena, including diffraction, interference, refraction, dispersion or polarization, associated to distinguished names of the history of […]