The Festival of Physics was organised by the Institute of Physics in Scotland from 26 to 28 October at Dynamic Earth, and is one of the featured events for the UK- wide festival, Museums at Night 2018. This year, the theme of the festival is time, and it provides a culturally diverse range of events […]
The book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini has an imposing title. Declaring its intentions from the front cover, the book eloquently presents, explains then dismantles many of the ideologies ingrained in science and society that underpin the perceived differences between the sexes. Saini […]
On March 14 ,the world received the news that the legendary physicist Professor Stephen Hawking had died at the age of 76. Paying tribute to their father, his three children – Lucy, Robert and Tim – said “he once said, ‘it would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people […]
Nerds read physics books; geeks read comics. Right? Well, not entirely. Clifford V Johnson, Professor of Physics at the University of Southern California, is attempting to bridge the gap between the scientist and the layperson through a more creative medium: the graphic novel. Drawing inspiration from Plato’s own use of dialogues as a vehicle for […]
Physics Prize: Weiss, Barish, and Thorne’s gravitational waves Over a billion years ago, two black holes collided. After a long, drawn-out approach in which they gradually orbited each other more and more closely, the two gargantuan bodies crashed. The impact sent ripples through the universe at the speed of light, stretching and squashing spacetime itself […]
This week, two research groups at different universities in the US have created a new type of matter: Time Crystals. Normal crystals, such as salt and snowflakes, have an ‘asymmetrical ground state’ which means that when they have no energy (are in their ground state), the structure may look different from different angles (asymmetrical). The […]
On a grisly grey day, with the haar looming over Edinburgh, Helen Sedgwick brought a beam of light to the city during the launch of her debut novel, The Comet Seekers, at Waterstones on Princes Street. Presenting a novel that boasts romance, history and scientific accuracy (well, ghosts excluded), Sedgwick had us all enticed from […]