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Posts by: Hamish Johnston
BBC radio celebrates 101 years of cosmic rays
By Hamish Johnston
AMS is a modern version version of Hess’s balloon experiments. (Courtesy: NASA)
The BBC’s Melvyn Bragg has lots to talk about. Over the past few months he has chatted about the Icelandic sagas, water, Gnosticism, and much more on his Radio 4 programme In Our Time. So he can be forgiven for missing a centenary and celebrating cosmic rays 101 years after they were discovered by the Austrian physicist Victor Hess.
Do you try to pronounce physics terms as they sound in their language of origin?
By Hamish Johnston
German words in the physicist’s lexicon. (Image by Mathew Ward)
Like many disciplines, physics incorporates words from a number of different languages – and this can often leave a physicist tongue-tied.
How should a native English speaker pronounce Einstein, for example? Should it be the Germanic “Ein-shtein” or the anglicized “Ein-stein”? How should one say De Broglie, Raman or Bernoulli? Should a native English speaker even attempt zitterbewegung, or translate it to “trembling motion”?
I’m sure that some physics terms of English origin are tricky for native speakers of other languages, and their pronunciations are sometimes adjusted accordingly.
Some believe that making an effort to use the original pronunciation shows respect and knowledge of the origin of a word. Others are happy to use the pronunciation they are most comfortable with.
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Google and NASA acquire a D-Wave quantum computer
D-Wave’s Geordie Rose with one of the firm’s quantum computers. (Courtesy: D-Wave)
By Hamish Johnston
Canada’s D-Wave Systems is installing one of its quantum computers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. The new 512-qubit system – dubbed D-Wave Two – will be used by NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to investigate how quantum computers could be used to solve a range of different problems. According to Vancouver-based D-Wave, the computer will be available for use in the third quarter of this year.
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Is Canada giving up on science?
By Hamish Johnston
The good old days: Nobel laureate Bert Brockhouse won his prize for work done at this federally funded research reactor. (Courtesy: CNA)
I am Canadian by birth and lived in that country for more than 30 years until the mid-1990s. For the past decade I have noticed a disturbing trend in the Canadian government of turning away from the outside world and becoming increasingly parochial in its outlook on important issues. I find this sad because I think the country is a thoroughly decent place that, despite its shortcomings, could provide inspiration for those living under less salubrious social and political systems.
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The Fantastic Mr Feynman
By Hamish Johnston
Fantastic Feynman at Fermilab. (Courtesy: Fermilab)
If you can’t get enough of Richard Feynman, the BBC has released the second part of its television tribute to the late Nobel laureate.
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Magnet matters at the LHC
Hard at work at the LHC (Courtesy: CERN/Samuel Morier-Genoud)
By Hamish Johnston
Recently I had the pleasure of speaking to CERN’s Steve Myers who is supervising the herculean task of upgrading the superconducting magnets that guide protons around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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Supersymmetry revisited
By Hamish Johnston
Courtesy: Basic Books
I think it’s safe to say that Peter Woit was never going to like Gordon Kane’s latest book about string theory. Woit, who is at Columbia University, is a prolific anti-string-theory blogger and author of Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics, whereas Kane is a leading string theorist who is based at the University of Michigan.
Kane’s latest tome is called Supersymmetry and Beyond: From the Higgs Boson to the New Physics and it will be published later this month by Basic Books. On his blog – also called Not Even Wrong – Woit compares the new book with Kane’s previous effort Supersymmetry: Unveiling The Ultimate Laws Of Nature, which was published in 2000.
Woit makes the controversial claim that about 75% of Supersymmetry and Beyond is a simply a rehash of the 2000 book. To make his point, Woit focuses on several examples of how Kane has updated the text to paper over the fact that little experimental evidence for supersymmetry has been found over the past 13 years.
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Animated film made with single atoms
By Hamish Johnston
Billed as the world’s smallest movie, an animated film made using single atoms has been released by scientists working at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in the US. Called A Boy and his Atom, the production was made using a scanning tunnelling microscope tip to push individual atoms around on a surface – a technology that was invented at IBM in 1981.
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Physics Lives scoops video prize
The IOP’s Phil Diamond and director Kevin Hull with the Learning on Screen Award.
By Hamish Johnston
Congratulations to our colleagues at the Institute of Physics (IOP), who have won a British Universities Film and Video Council Learning on Screen Award for the second year running.
Are CDMS and XENON both right about dark matter?
Part of the XENON100 experiment: does it agree with CDMS? (Courtesy: XENON)
By Hamish Johnston
A week or so ago the CDMS experiment in the US reported the detection of three possible dark-matter particles. While that might not sound like much, it is the best evidence yet that dark matter – mysterious stuff that appears to make up one quarter of the mass/energy of the universe – can be detected directly.
But as I said in an earlier blog entry, the detection further muddies the waters in terms of our understanding of exactly what dark matter is. Different experiments say very different things about its possible properties, and now a team of physicists in Denmark, the UK and Switzerland have uploaded a preprint on the arXiv server that tries to make sense of some of this speculation and contradiction.
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