Non-fossil / Quantum sentence / Unrelax music / Slime mold watch

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 […]

A Black Hole in a Bathtub, More or Less [research study]

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, […]

Black holes and their possible wigs

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 […]