Category: Fightin’
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The number of fundamental dimensional constants reduced to two
Yer only have to go back to Plank to find a pretty detailed argument that there are three fundamental dimensional constants from which all others can be derived. They are length, time and mass. Plank argues that as long as you got a tape measure, a clock and set of scales you can measure anything…
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The hunt for a repulsive Casimir force
Place a couple of infinite metal plates just a few micrometers apart and ya can measure the so-called Casimir force pushing them together. The thinkin is that virtual particles are constantly a-popping and a-peaking in and outta existence. When the particles bang into the plate, they exert a force which is normally balanced out by…
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Crime ‘n’ punishment
Social physics is a cool new science in which the eggheads use mathematical models to simulate the behaviour of large numbers of people. What these guys are finding is that very simple assumptions can reproduce hugely complex behaviours and they is using it to study everything from trading on the money markets to the spread…
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How mathematics identifies urban ghettos
Ya’ll know how the distribution of crime is closely correlated to the space in which it occurs. Nobody gets mugged on a busy high street. But ya wander down a darkened, deadend alley at ya peril. Right? In recent years a number of eggheads have been a-speculatin’ and a-wondrin’ about the nature of urban space…
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The horrible truth behind quantum games
If ya follow quantum game theory, you could be forgiven for thinking that quantum players always trounce their classical counterparts like T Rex versus the cavemen. But it ain’t so. After some egg scratchin’ physicists have realised that quantum games are actually entirely different from classical games and so it ain’t fair to compare them.…
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Halting the horrible kilogram shrink
The kilogram is a-shrinkin’ and ain’t nobody sure why. The problem is the way it is defined: the mass of a lump o’ metal stored in a vault in Paris. That’s no good cos a few atoms rub off each time it is picked up and others seem to fall off even when it ain’t…
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Galactic rings: the smoking gun for modified gravity
For a while now, them star gazers have been banging heads over the nature o’ gravity. Here’s the problem: when you look at the way galaxies are a-spinnin and a-spiralin, there just ain’t enough gravity to hold em together. So either there is some hidden mass putting its gravitational shoulder to the wheel: the so-called…
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Public transport: the cities most vulnerable to attack
Public transport networks are easy targets for terrorist attacks: anybody in London, Tokyo or Madrid will tell ya that. So Christian “Furbie” von Ferber at Coventry University in the UK and his buddies have decided to model a few of ’em from the point of view of network theory and find out how vulnerable they…
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The world’s first visible light invisibility cloak
Last year, the world went bonkers when scientists at Duke University in North Carolina unveiled the world’s first invisibility cloak. There weren’t no let up in the wall-to-wall media coverage it generate. And impressive though it was, what many reporters forgot to mention was that the cloak works only for microwaves at a single frequency…
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Einstein’s revenge over spooky action at a distance
One o’ the most bewilderin’ parts of quantum mechanics is its spooky action at a distance. Einstein couldn’t fathom it and other physicists have been a-puzzlin on it for decades. Today they gotta lil more to fret ‘n’ fuss about. Alexandre “Napkin” Matzkin at the Universite Joseph-Fourier in Grenoble has found a serious problem with…