Physics & Chemistry Archives

Science & Medicine /
Physics & Chemistry

Free will and quantum conspiracy

By Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner
Why do some claim free will is an illusion? The easy answer: free will does not fit within a scientific worldview. Any choice you make is presumably determined by your brain’s electrochemistry at the time. That electrochemistry, a physical thing, was uniquely determined by your heredity, your previous experiences, and your present environment. Your choice was therefore predetermined by prior physical events. It was not “free.” Therefore no free will.

What is ‘the brain supremacy’?

Q: What is the brain supremacy? A: I use the phrase ‘the brain supremacy’ to describe the increasing relevance of neuroscience. It foresees an era – whose birth is already well underway – when the balance of power within the sciences will shift from the natural to the life sciences, from physics and chemistry to the fast-moving sciences of the mind and brain.

Celebrating Newton, 325 years after Principia

By Robyn Arianrhod
This year, 2012, marks the 325th anniversary of the first publication of the legendary Principia (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), the 500-page book in which Sir Isaac Newton presented the world with his theory of gravity. It was the first comprehensive scientific theory in history, and it’s withstood the test of time over the past three centuries.

How Nazi Germany lost the nuclear plot

By Gordon Fraser
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, neither the Atomic Bomb nor the Holocaust were on anybody’s agenda. Instead, the Nazi’s top aim was to rid German culture of perceived pollution. A priority was science, where paradoxically Germany already led the world. To safeguard this position, loud Nazi voices, such as Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, complained about a ‘massive infiltration of the Jews into universities’.

In memoriam: Patrick Moore

By David Rothery
There’s a Patrick Moore-sized hole in the world of astronomy and planetary science that is unlikely ever to be exactly filled. He presented “The Sky at Night,” a monthly BBC TV astronomy programme, from 1957 until his death. This brought him celebrity, and the books that he wrote for the amateur enthusiast were bought or borrowed in vast numbers from public libraries for half a century — including by myself as a schoolboy.

What sort of science do we want?

By Robyn Arianrhod
29 November 2012 is the 140th anniversary of the death of mathematician Mary Somerville, the nineteenth century’s “Queen of Science”. Several years after her death, Oxford University’s Somerville College was named in her honor — a poignant tribute because Mary Somerville had been completely self-taught. In 1868, when she was 87, she had signed J. S. Mill’s (unsuccessful) petition for female suffrage, but I think she’d be astonished that we’re still debating “the woman question” in science.

The Brain Supremacy

By Kathleen Taylor
Ours is a world full of science. Much of that technology and knowledge, from mobile phones to the understanding of gravity, currently comes from what we call ‘the natural sciences’: those which study the material universe. In school, we learn to distinguish physics, chemistry, geology, and their natural kin from life sciences like biology and psychology. Our ideas of what science is, and indeed what we are, have been shaped accordingly. The brain supremacy, that coming era in which neuroscience will challenge physics for cultural dominance, is about to reshape those ideas as never before.

Drugs in the Internet era

By Les Iversen
When Drugs: A Very Short Introduction was published in 2001, drugs were relatively hard to obtain. Recreational users could buy illegal drugs from back-street dealers, while prescription medicines required a trip to the doctor to obtain a script. The Internet has changed all that. Nowadays in Western Europe and in North America there are dozens of website dealers offering novel psychoactive drugs (“legal highs”) and prescription medicines at modest prices. The market for designer drugs has grown hugely.

Stone Age dentistry discovery

By Claudio Tuniz
Advanced analytical methods, based on radioactivity and radiation, have recently revealed that therapeutic dental filling was in use during the Stone Age. As part of the team that performed the study, I worked with experts in radiocarbon dating, synchrotron radiation imaging, dentistry, palaeo-anthropology and archaeology. Our discovery was based on the identification of an extraneous substance on the surface of a canine from a Neolithic human mandible.

Nucleic Acids Research and Open Access

By Richard Roberts
In 2004, when the internet was pervading every aspect of science, the Executive Editors of Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) made the momentous decision to convert the journal from a traditional subscription based journal to one in which the content was freely available to everyone, with the costs of publication paid by the authors. There was great trepidation, by the editors and Oxford University Press, that authors would refuse to do this and instead would choose to publish elsewhere.

The literary and scientific Galileo

By John L. Heilbron
Galileo is not a fresh subject for a biography. Why then another? The character of the man, his discovery of new worlds, his fight with the Roman Catholic Church, and his scientific legacy have inspired many good books, thousands of articles, plays, pictures, exhibits, statues, a colossal tomb, and an entire museum. In all this, however, there was a chink.

What happens next in the search for the Higgs boson?

By Jim Baggott
The 4 July discovery announcement makes it clear that the new particle is consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. The next step is therefore reasonably obvious. Physicists involved in the ATLAS and CMS detector collaborations at the LHC will be keen to push ahead and fully characterize the new particle. They will want to know if this is indeed the Higgs boson. How can they tell?

How does the Higgs mechanism create mass?

By Jim Baggott
Through thousands of years of speculative philosophy and hundreds of years of hard empirical science, we have tended to think of mass as an innate property (a ‘primary quality’) of material substance. We figured that, whatever they might be, the basic building blocks of matter would surely consist of microscopic lumps of some kind of ‘stuff’.

Is the particle recently discovered at CERN’s LHC the Higgs boson?

By Jim Baggott
Experimental physicists are by nature very cautious people, often reluctant to speculate beyond the boundaries defined by the evidence at hand. Although the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the acquisition of mass, the theory does not give a precise prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson itself.

Why is the Higgs boson called the ‘god particle’?

By Jim Baggott
The Higgs field was invented to explain how otherwise massless force particles could acquire mass, and was used by Weinberg and Salam to develop a theory of the combined ‘electro-weak’ force and predict the masses of the W and Z bosons. However, it soon became apparent that something very similar is responsible for the masses of the matter particles, too.

What is the Higgs boson?

By Jim Baggott
We know that the physical universe is constructed from elementary matter particles (such as electrons and quarks) and the particles that transmit forces between them (such as photons). Matter particles have physical characteristics that we classify as fermions. Force particles are bosons.