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Some people have called me a doomer. Others call me a pessimist. Personally, I think I’m a realist. If I look at the plans that most nations have made to limit their contribution to climate change, I think it just...
2024-02-11 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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We have seen a few new headlines this week about the plans of particle physicists to build a huge new collider at CERN in Geneva. I’ve had a look.
Particle physicists have called their new dream machine the “future circular collider”, FCC for s...
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Nuclear fusion is a great idea, in principle. In principle, it could solve the energy worries of the world beautifully. The problem is that whenever we’ve tried, getting nuclear fusion to work takes up more energy than it creates. ...
2024-02-09 16:00:16 +0000 UTC View Post
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Electric vehicles are great, but let’s be honest, it’s more convenient to fill up a fuel tank with gasoline than sit around and wait until the battery is full. It takes so long that sometimes you even have to talk to other people...
2024-02-08 16:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post
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I got a lot of questions last week about an article in Quanta Magazine about Dark Dimensions. ...
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Last week, the US senate had a hearing on the dangers of social media in preparation of a legislation to improve child safety online. In this hearing, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that it has not been scientifically p...
2024-02-06 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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This is a rare case in which I talk about some of my own work. It’s about the biggest current controversy in astrophysics, does dark matter exist or do we ins...
2024-02-05 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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We’ve seen a lot of headlines in the past year about how dangerous AI is and how overblown these fears are . I’ve found it hard to make sense of this discussion. If only someone could systematically interview experts and fi...
2024-02-04 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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This is the amazing story of the discovery of X-rays, the trouble that followed, and what we can learn from it.
It’s November and the year is 1885. Wilhem Conrad Röntgen is in his laboratory in Wuerzburg, Germany. For the past weeks ...
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Do you still write by hand? Anything besides shopping lists? A new study looked at what happens in our brain wh...
2024-02-02 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
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Ground-based nuclear fusion lase...
2024-02-01 01:09:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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One of the most disturbing ideas in physics, or maybe *the most disturbing idea, is that space can fall apart. That’s because it could be what’s called “false” vacuum. A false vacuum can remain in this innocent rel...
2024-01-31 16:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post
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Google has unveiled a new artificially intelligent system, AlphaGeometry, that can solve problems of mathematical geometry. It’s the first computer program to surpass the average performance of participants at the International Ma...
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What happened before the Big Bang? I got this question on twitter and thought, well, the answer is that we don’t know. Now, I’m quite fond ...
2024-01-29 16:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
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Physicists say that 80 percent of the mass in the universe is dark matter, and not only this, dark matter is supposedly all around us, we just can’t see it. Sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it. Indeed, every time I mention dark matter, I get flooded with com...
2024-01-28 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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YouTube has removed the dislike counter, but the numbers are still available backstage. And I can tell you that my most disliked videos, by far, are those on climate change. Doesn’t matter if it’s good news or bad news, some peop...
2024-01-27 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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I got a lot of questions this week about an article which said that physicists have designed...
2024-01-26 16:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post
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How do we know that climate change is caused by humans? I got this question on twitter and I thought, c’mon, Google can answer t...
2024-01-25 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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I don’t like places where hot stuff bubbles out of the ground, but Icelanders have no such issues. They’re now almost ready to start a new experiment that will drill right into a magma chamber. How do they know that this will not...
2024-01-24 17:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post
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Floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, storm surges. Extreme weather events receive a lot of media coverage. In recent years, these events have frequently been attributed to climate change. This “extreme event attribution” ho...
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The quantum Cheshire Cat is a famous experiment that’s attracted a lot of attention in the past decade. In this experiment, a particle is supposedly separated from one of its properties, for example its spin or polarization. It’s...
2024-01-22 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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The Center for Countering Digital Hate put out a new report a few days ago, in which they warn that climate misinformation continuous to flo...
2024-01-21 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Have you ever wondered where all that mass around you comes from? No, it’s not the sugar industry, it comes from the pion condensate. Let me explain.
The Higgs boson is one of the elementary particles of nature. Physicists collect all those particles in what’s somewhat unimaginatively c...
2024-01-20 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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A group of astrophysicists have found another megastructure in the universe. They’ve called it the “Big Ring” and it’s a whopping 1 point 3 billion light-years in diameter. The thing isn’t just huge, it’s also a huge prob...
2024-01-19 16:20:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Remember those companies that ...
2024-01-18 22:43:16 +0000 UTC View Post
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This is a video about digestive problems. It’s not what I normally talk about, and so I’ve hesitated to make this video. But then I thought. If it helps even one single person to avoid some of the pain and sleepless nights I’ve gone through, it’ll ha...
2024-01-18 17:00:18 +0000 UTC View Post
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We have talked a lot about particle accelerators that look for new physics. But sometimes you can teach new tricks to old physics. A great example of this is flash proton therapy for cancer treatment, that’s just out of the laboratory and now ...
2024-01-17 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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A Chinese company has announced they’re planning to mass-produce tiny nuclear batteries that can last up to 50 years, possibly beating both a British and an American company who have tried to put those on the market for several yea...
2024-01-16 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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The Dark Energy Survey has surveyed dark energy and found that our universe is unlikely to rip into pieces. I think that’s good news. Let’s have a look.
Dark Energy is the name that astrophysicists have given to a hypothe...