The Ghosts That Could Change Everything
The first sign was astonishingly brief, just thirteen seconds long. It was so brief, in fact, that until much later nobody realised it had happened at all. But something unusual was indeed happening on that February afternoon, something that hadn’t happened for almost four centuries.
The next sign followed a few hours later, though for some time nobody noticed that one either. A photographer in Australia captured the event on camera, but wouldn’t realise what he had found until the next day. By the time night fell a few hours later in Chile, the sign was bright enough to be seen by the naked eye, if you knew what you were looking for.
Fortunately Ian Shelton did know and was familiar enough with that particular part of the night sky to notice something was off. Before long an army of telescopes and satellites confirmed what he was seeing: for the first time in four hundred years a new star had appeared in the night sky, a marker of one of the most violent events known to mankind.
Is This the Last Big Chance to Save Physics?
In 1899, on the brink of a new century, physicists felt sure they were almost done. Science had explained everything — from the motion of the planets to the workings of the steam engine. The fundamental laws, as one leading scholar put it, were all discovered. The only thing left was to tidy up a few remaining loose ends.
Of course, it was those loose ends that led to the unravelling of the whole edifice of the old physics. When physicists started tugging on them a whole load of unexpected things came spilling out — chief among them the two grand theories of quantum physics and relativity.
Those two theories changed everything, and utterly revolutionised our understanding of the natural world. They revealed ideas and concepts unimaginable even a few decades earlier, from the nuclear bomb to black holes. Above all it was unexpected. Physicists went from confident masters of the world to humble seekers of knowledge in barely a decade.
Best of the Rest…
The idea of space tourism is seductive, one that always appears to be just around the corner. Seventeen years ago, in 2004, an American group succeeded in making the first private spaceflight, reaching an altitude of 112km. In doing so they won the X Prize, a $10 million award for doing exactly that. At the time the winners confidently predicted tourist flights were just a few years away.
Today, almost two decades later, space tourism is still an elusive goal. Virgin Galactic now own the group that made that first flight, but despite years of effort and millions of dollars of funding, no tourists have yet made it into space. Will that change anytime soon? An interesting profile in the New Yorker, written back in 2018, casts light on the inner workings of Virgin Galactic and perhaps offers an answer.
Academia is a strange place at the best of time, at least in the natural sciences. Physicists who survive and become professors tend to look down on those who drop out, for whatever reason. But academia is not the only, or even the best, use of a physicist’s talents. In an old essay, dating from 2016, Bob Henderson writes about his PhD experience and considers the reasons for his failure to finish.
Since my own university days the idea of magnetic stars, in which immense magnetic forces are trapped in ultradense neutron stars, has fascinated me. I haven’t yet started writing the essay I’ve long been planning on the subject, but until I do Joshua Sokol has an excellent summary of the topic.
So much reporting around health, science and space exploration is unrealistic, hyperbolic and misleading. These are complicated topics, and there are often no easy or straight forward answers. Instead what is needed is analysis, discussion and an exploration of the possible ways forward.
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