Marcus Chown

Sep 30, 2024 | newhumanist.org.uk | Marcus Chown

This year is the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics for “aperture synthesis”. This is the technique of using several radio dishes in concert to mimic, or “synthesise”, the capability of a much larger radio dish. To understand why anyone would want to do this, it is necessary to know a little background. The fine detail that a telescope can “see” in the sky depends on two things. The first is the wavelength of the light it is collecting.

Sep 11, 2024 | sciencefocus.com | Marcus Chown

"Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt,” remarked the Russian Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau. Perhaps he had a point. Perhaps cosmologists should have a little more humility. After all, in their investigations of the Universe, they’ve missed some pretty enormous things.    Dark energy, for example.

Sep 4, 2024 | sciencefocus.com | Marcus Chown

Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces that glue the stuff of the Universe together. Because the three non-gravitational forces (electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces) have been successfully described as arising from the exchange of force-carrying subatomic particles, theorists suspect a similar ‘quantum’ description also exists for gravity. The force carrier of the electromagnetic force that binds together the atoms in your body is the photon.

Aug 8, 2024 | skyatnightmagazine.com | Marcus Chown

There's an old story that during the Cold War Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union, NASA spent millions of dollars producing a pen that would work in zero gravity so astronauts would have a means of keeping notes and writing on paper during their missions. The punchline is that the Soviet astronauts got around the problem by using a pencil instead. Is there any truth to this story, and would a regular fountain pen work in the zero gravity of space anyway?

Jul 28, 2024 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Marcus Chown

Last year, on 5th December, an 89-year-old New Zealander dropped a scientific bombshell. Roy Kerr submitted a paper asserting there is no proof that the catastrophic shrinkage of a massive star to form a black hole results in a point of infinity density. This contradicts the claim that such a “singularity” is inevitable, made by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking in the 1960s. “They did not prove what they thought they proved,” Kerr tells me.