Physics

The first really exciting thing from Run 2 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (at least for me) has finally appeared. A 2.9 TeV dielectron event was recorded by CMS on August 22. At this mass a new Z…

Back around 1960, at school I enjoyed a laboratory lecture on liquid nitrogen, watching a deep frozen squash ball being shattered at a temperature well below that at which it turns from a rubber into…

[Note: many of the images were upgraded to include more information about addition and multiplication, 10/25/2015] What is a quaternion? Mathematicians might claim it was the independent inventions…

Stephen Hawking said something! And again the international media is all a'buzz. The physics community is a little more muted, but after hearing the pronouncements of the famous theoretical physicist…

The fourth edition of the International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics has ended yesterday evening, and it is time for a summary. However, this year I must say that I am not in a good…

As a whistle-blower and interdisciplinary scientist who appreciates the strength of philosophical arguments (read: logic!), I receive idiotic rejections declining to publish my work, perusing…

One of the important things in life is to have a job you enjoy and which is a motivation for waking up in the morning. I can say I am lucky enough to be in that situation. Besides providing me with…

Nowadays Physics is a very big chunck of science, and although in our University courses we try to give our students a basic knowledge of all of it, it has become increasingly clear that it is very…

Twenty years have passed since the first observation of the top quark, the last of the collection of six that constitutes the matter of which atomic nuclei are made. And in these twenty years…

  So called "memristors" are an intriguing hot topic in electronics and nanotechnology, and highly controversial to boot. A certain type of memristor device was predicted to exist in 1971. Being…