Which supercollider will be built?
After CERN announced the plans for its new supercollider, I was surprised no one wanted to address the elephant in the room: the supercollider's similarity to one announced by China a few months a…
Science
363 posts
Compare ideas with ideas
Avi Loeb in his interview to the New Yorker: We don’t have as much data as I would like. Given the data that we have, I am putting this on the table, and it bothers people to even think about that, j…
ISRO's Project ADMIRE
A member of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has confirmed it has made progress on its plan to test a new class of reusable rockets. B.N. Suresh, an honorary distinguished professor at I…
A question for Modi
On December 18, Manmohan Singh took a jibe at Narendra Modi for not holding any press conferences in his term as PM. To get in on the action, 15 people at The Wire (including myself) pitched 15 questi…
On cosmology's scicomm disaster
Jamie Farnes, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, recently had a paper published that claimed the effects of dark matter and dark energy could be explained by replacing them with a fluid-lik…
Engineering a way out of global warming
After its licentious article about Earth having a second moon, I thought National Geographic had published another subpar piece when I saw this headline: Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warmin…
INO can keep env. ministry clearance
The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), a mega science project stranded in the regulatory boondocks since the Centre okayed it in 2012, received a small shot in the arm earlier this week. On Nove…
Doubts cast on LIGO results… again
A group of Danish physicists that doubted last year whether two American experiments to detect gravitational waves had actually confused noise for signal has reared its head once more. New Scientist r…
New anomaly at the LHC
Has new ghost particle manifested at the Large Hadron Collider?, The Guardian, October 31: The prospect of such a mysterious particle has baffled physicists as much as it has excited them. At the mom…
Does the neutrino sector violate CP symmetry?
The universe is supposed to contain equal quantities of matter and antimatter. But this isn’t the case: there is way more matter than antimatter around us today. Where did all the antimatter go? Physi…
What the Nobel Prizes are not
The winners of this year's Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prizes are an opportunity to discover new areas of research, and developments there that scientists consider particularly…
Proposed solution for Riemann hypothesis?
The hot news this week from the mathematical physics world is that the noted mathematician Michael Atiyah claimed to have solved the Riemann hypothesis, one of the most difficult unsolved problems kno…