I remember very well my physics professor during my first year at university. She stressed the importance of having clear intuitions of what physical terms mean before any mathematics was invoked. ‘Imagine someone drops an 100-gram apple 1 metre above your head’, she would say; ‘the pain you feel is the equivalent of a joule […]
It is commonly said that Astronomy is an observational science. We cannot create and study stars or galaxies in our laboratories and, thus all the information we have from the Universe comes from observations. However, there is another approach: simulations. Astronomers use complex algorithms and computational techniques, in combination with the laws of physics, to […]
Our universe is not stable according to the currently measured values of the top quark and Higgs particle masses. There is a non-null probability that at any instant in the next billions of years the present “false vacuum” will change to a “true vacuum” by quantum tunneling, destroying all matter, energy and spacetime without any […]
Superconductors are a particularly strange kind of metal. What makes them different is their behavior at very low temperatures – extremely low, that is, close to absolute zero. Basic thermodynamics dictates that in this regime we should expect all motion to cease, the constituents of the material being frozen at fixed positions. And with no […]
Black holes are not only gravitationally attractive: they also capture people’s attention. Just mention these two words in a course of elementary astronomy or in a public conference and you will find most eyes wide open. Even though they are common in observational astronomy, their singular physics and their fantastic dimensions makes them earn a […]
During the last year, a longtime forgotten controversy was reactivated by a very interesting paper written by J. Polchinski and his collaborators, in which they questioned whether the so called black hole complementarity principle is a good solution to the apparent information paradox of quantum gravity. This is a question that attracted a lot of […]
NGC1365 is a beatiful galaxy. It is big and bright enough to be observed with a medium-sized amateur telescope. Sometimes mis-located at the southern constellation of Eridanus, it is indeed located in the smaller Fornax constellation and it is one of the most notable peers in a famous galaxy cluster. Being one third of the […]
Author: Enrique Gaztañaga, Professor at Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (University of Portsmouth) Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time — shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. In 1935, while studying the behaviour of particles in regions of […]
A lot of ink has been wasted in the last decades discussing whether string theory is a good description of nature or merely a mathematica construct with no connection at all with reality. However, the answer to this question actually lays at least in the middle of both options and for sure not any close […]
Author: Steven Gillespie, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, University of Liverpool Psychopaths might account for only about 1% of the general population, but they account for a disproportionate share of violent crime. Distinct from other conditions like sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder, psychopaths tend to show traits such as an absence of remorse or guilt […]