When I write about physics in words instead of equations, the criticism I get from ‘real physicists’ is not about the accuracy of my use of words, it is about the use of words at all. &… | Continue reading
In 1987 a Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of materials that could behave as superconductors at a temperature which is far above absolute zero. Typically, superconductivty only occurs when… | Continue reading
For diagnostic scans using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), the contrast agent Gadolinuim is a heavy metal. It is a poison and patients are assured that it will be quicky excreted through a proces… | Continue reading
The planets of our solar system orbit the sun in a flat disc shape and when we see distant galaxies, we see disc shapes with a spiral form. The standard explanation for why solar systems and galaxi… | Continue reading
During a long, dark night of the soul, what would you say if I told you that the stars are just atoms in the quantum vacuum written large across the sky as a result of our vibrational motion relati… | Continue reading
LIGO is a multibillion dollar gravitational wave observatory and it recently won its project leaders a Nobel Prize. Most people reacted with approval, but there was a tiny, vocal minority that comp… | Continue reading
Warning: this post is going to unashamedly go into free-wheeling, crazy speculation territory. It is not scientific in the least – it is just what happens when I let my mind flow freely. Why … | Continue reading
[trigger warning: this is about traumatic medical treatments] The first Naomi wrote Shock Doctrine, a book that showed how US shock and awe military strategy was influenced by CIA brainwashing stud… | Continue reading
If you want to change the opinion of a hostile audience that sees you as ‘other’, actively attempting to persuade them can actually cause them to grow more entrenched in their undesirea… | Continue reading
When I was a kid, the concept of being on a spinning Earth bothered me because it seemed like something I should be able to feel. Yet, when I laid down on a merry go round with my head on the outer… | Continue reading
Socrates reasoned with analogies and was a critic of reasoning from first principles. He spent all of his time showing how reasoning from first principles leads to self-contradiction. Modern physic… | Continue reading
Supposedly, only a few percent of the population have aphantasia, but I think there is a lot of evidence that the condition exists in degrees. For example, there are two, very different sorts … | Continue reading
I often feel like my blind spots are different from other people’s and I wonder if this might be due to a difference in our brain structures. Consider this comparison between an autistic brain and … | Continue reading
Why do we find truth beautiful? This question gets to the heart of how people give meaning to their lives. We see a complex world and try to reduce it to simple, symmetrical, geometrical principles… | Continue reading
Call me crazy, but I’m skeptical of the existence of something as massive as the sun but with all of the mass inside a 20 km diameter. Neutron stars are supposedly so dense that a single teaspoon w… | Continue reading
When someone else has a better idea of how you will react to something than you do, does that mean that your mind exists in their mind and not in your own? A very literal minded person, like a math… | Continue reading
How you decide on the centre of your coordinate system depends on whether you reason abductively or deductively. Abductive reasoning is like Occam’s razor. You have a bunch of observations and… | Continue reading
You can picture an atom as empty space filled with an invisible cloud of probability which, when disturbed, instantaneously becomes a point-like electron, or you can imagine an atom as a moving, st… | Continue reading
When you are always bored with anything you understand, you will gravitate towards ideas which are impossible to understand – aka nonsense! Thought experiments provide a wealth of nonsense like Epi… | Continue reading
The conflict between intuition and mathematical rigor is best expressed through the relationship between the British physics of Maxwell, Kelvin, and Heaviside and the French physics of Poincare, La… | Continue reading
First of all, kids today are tone-deaf. I just listened to a choir of 3rd graders and only one out of a hundred could carry a tune. Second of all, their rites of passage are hollow. They are forced… | Continue reading
In medicine and law, the percentages of women in the graduating classes have risen to 50%, yet women did not go into engineering, math, and physics in similar proportions. The STEM pipeline in Germ… | Continue reading
When someone asks if it would kill you to take out the trash, sometimes the answer is ‘yes.’ This was what led me to the meditation retreat.vs.I am going to a meditation retreat because I am depres… | Continue reading
I am going to explain how gravity is related to the quantum uncertainty principle, but to motivate this expanation, I first need to provide some historical background. In 300 BC, young Archime… | Continue reading
In classrooms, we learn that the sky is blue because blue is a short wavelength and air molecules scatter short wavelengths of light better than long wavelengths. Violet has a shorter wavelength th… | Continue reading
I wonder if becoming more conscious of our aggression makes it less or more dangerous. In art, we give consciousness physical form and this can lead to the expression of aggression in the name of a… | Continue reading
If you are looking for real-life magic, check out a chain fountain. When a lightweight chain or string of beads falls out of a jar, the chain begins to lift up into the air, seemingly defying gravi… | Continue reading
The internet says that diamonds were formed in the Earth’s mantle between 1 and 3 billion years ago and volcanic eruptions brought the diamonds up to the surface. In this scenario, diamo… | Continue reading
I love the idea of creating a little sun in my microwave oven and that is why I’m going to take the time to explain why fusion experiments are unlikely to ever create a usable power sou… | Continue reading
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “The trouble with dumb bastards is that they can’t imagine such a thing as being smart.” That is why only dumb authors say that originality is an illusion. Smarter authors m… | Continue reading
One morning I woke up to see the front page of every newspaper across the world covered with pictures of what looked like a big orange doughnut. What could this represent? I learned that the doughn… | Continue reading
After spending 20 years within the physics communitee, there are three things I know to be true. Bad apples don’t fall far from the tree and if the guy at the top of a scientific heirarchy is… | Continue reading
When I quit my job as an accelerator physicist, I did so largely because I didn’t think it served a social good. I felt that the work was pointless and that it made me into a social parasite.… | Continue reading
As an apostate, I view government laboratories as state-funded monasteries or Oz-like sandboxes in which the creative power of a few minds trained to worship abstraction is imposed on armies of low… | Continue reading