Strange goings on at CERN, string theory with cats, Isaac Asimov on generating new ideas and more

Bygone era: when 3D visualization really was 3D. (Courtesy: CERN)

By Hamish Johnston

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” is probably the only famous sentence written by the English novelist L P Hartley. It also sums up nicely a collection of photographs of CERN in the 1960s and early 1970s showing among other things a jolly worker wearing a beret, scientists wearing white lab coats and ties, and a strange religious-like procession. There are also lots of photos of vintage kit, including one of those huge vacuum-valve-powered oscilloscopes (probably from Tektronix) that would be familiar to physicists of a certain age. My favourite photo is shown above. It was taken in 1965, when 3D data visualization was actually done in 3D! I believe that the collection was put together by CERN’s Alex Brown and you can enjoy looking at all 55 images in the collection here.

Everyone knows that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN so physicists could share videos of their cats doing crazy things. Here is a selection from BuzzFeed called “A 34-step guide to string theory, as explained by cats”. I struggled to make any connection between what the cats are doing and the physics-related captions – but then again, I’m more of a dog person.

In 1959 the renowned science-fiction writer (and scientist) Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called “On creativity” for his friend Arthur Obermayer, who was working for a technology spin-off from the Massachusetts of Technology. The company was trying to work out how nuclear blasts would affect the structure of aircraft and the US government was encouraging it and other contractors to “think out of the box”.

Asimov begins the essay by asking how Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection independently. He then ponders whether it is better for creators to work alone or in groups, and whether brainstorming sessions should be free-form or guided affairs. The essay was never published until this week when it made its debut on the MIT Technology Review.

To round off this week’s Red Folder, we have some health news from the world of physics including a paper in the journal Physical Biology that answers the question “why do ingrown nails always happen in the big toes?”. And if you drink beer and work with tritium (hopefully not at the same time), you’ll find this article very reassuring: “Drinking a beer can save you from radiation poisoning”.