Hi there, gentle reader! There’s been toss-all of note here this last week except link-dumps, and for that I should apologise - frightfully busy at the moment, you know how it goes.

By way of apology, I offer unto you a piece at Teh Grauniad where Chris Morris reports on his visit to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider:

Then someone hits you with the seething vacuum. You think a vacuum is empty space. Quantum theory says yes - but it is also full of spontaneous eruptions of energy. This virtual energy comes from nowhere. It does and doesn’t exist. You can use the bit that does, so long as you pay it back. This beats sub-prime. A physicist called Polkinghorne says the quantum vacuum is the nearest analogy to God in the physical world. Then again, the physicist who is brainwashing me in the CMS says quantum theory is “probably bollocks”.

I can’t tell whether he thinks it’s awesome or silly or both. I think this is probably the effect he was aiming for. [LOL-collider courtesy willc2]

So - how’s the weather in your part of the world, hmm?

Tuesday night saw the return of Cafe Scientifique to Portsmouth, with a presentation title that predictably stirred up the science fiction reader in me - “Is time travel possible?” Continue reading “Cafe Scientifique: Is time travel possible?”

Last night I attended my first Cafe Scientifique, the second to be held here in Velcro City, put on in a combined effort by the University and the Council. Continue reading “Cafe Scientifique!”

As a teenager protesting to my mother that there was no need to tidy my room, I would often fall back on utterly fictional theories (made up on the fly by myself) that mess created its own unique form of filing system. Eventually she gave up asking, and told me that in exchange I’d be responsible for sorting out my own laundry. Seemed a good deal at the time. But what I didn’t know then is that the arguments I was using may actually have had some basis in science.

Continue reading “And from the chaos came order”

NewScientist.com has a story about scientists at Toshiba Research Europe Ltd and the University of Cambridge who have created a semiconductor device that produces quantum-entangled photons. Continue reading “Semiconductor device produces quantum entanglement”

Nature.com reports on Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is once again courting controversy with his claims for the efficacy of ultrasound to induce fusion in the form of collapsing bubbles in deuterium enriched acetone. Continue reading “Tabletop Fusion gets another crack of the whip”