This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Fossil or beehive? — … And the snideness? That isn’t unusual, either. Nor is it new. In 1934, the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences printed a report called “The supposed fossil ear of maize from Cuzco, Peru”. Quantum […]
One can find dense, dark understanding in a bathtub, if one is a physicist. This new study provides an example: “Black Hole Quasibound States from a Draining Bathtub Vortex Flow,” Sam Patrick, Antonin Coutant, Maurício Richartz, and Silke Weinfurtner, Physical Review Letters, vol. 121, nos. 6-10, 2018, 061101. The authors, at the University of Nottingham, […]
It was somewhere around 1973 that the high-end theoretical physicist and H-bomb co-developer (the late) professor emeritus John Archibald Wheeler announced that “A black hole has no hair.” [in: Gravitation, Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler] The concept, which was later consolidated as the ‘No-hair theorem’ has since been updated with […]
Professor Eric E. Johnson of the University of North Dakota School of Law tries to solve the legal conundrum of the Swiss black hole. In “The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World” (Tennessee Law Review, no. 819, 2009, arXiv:0912.5480v2) he writes: “What should a court do with a preliminary-injunction request […]
In the September 19, 2007 episode of his weekly broadcast, Dr. Jack Van Impe explains the technological history of the automobile: the basic engineering design, he reveals, was published in the Bible. In 2001, Dr. Van Impe and his wife, Rexella, were awarded the Ig Nobel Astrophysics prize, for their discovery that black holes fulfill […]