Archive for the ‘Science & technology’ Category
Does homeopathy work?
February 22nd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I first posed this question on this blog almost a year and a half ago and my posting attracted some interesting comments – all of which you can read here. Now today the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology has published a detailed report on the provision of homeopathy on the National […]
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We are but a speck …
January 21st, 2010 by Roger Darlington
… in time and space.
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Word of the day: hadron
December 31st, 2009 by Roger Darlington
You probably think that you’ve never come across the word ‘hadron’ but in fact you’ve possibly come across it in the context of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) without thinking what the word means. The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator, a machine some 27 km in circumference, located on the French/Swiss border near […]
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Word of the day: decoherence
December 29th, 2009 by Roger Darlington
It’s a word I came across – for the first time- in a book I’m currently reading: a popular work on physics called “You Are Here” and written by Christopher Potter. The book describes decoherence as “the passing from quantum reality to classical reality” – which is not very helpful. In more lay person’s terms, […]
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How old is the universe?
December 23rd, 2009 by Roger Darlington
I’m reading a fascinating book of cosmology called “You Are Here” and written by Christopher Potter. It raises some challenging topics. For instance, how old is the universe? Actually we have a reliable and precise answer to this question. It is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years.
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What is gravity?
December 23rd, 2009 by Roger Darlington
I’m reading a fascinating book of cosmology called “You Are Here” and written by Christopher Potter. It raises some challenging topics. For example, what is gravity? Potter quotes John Wheeler as explaining: “Matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move”. But he also quotes Michio Kaku as arguing: “In some […]
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How many stars are there?
December 21st, 2009 by Roger Darlington
At the moment, I’m reading a fascinating book of cosmology called “You Are Here” and written by Christopher Potter. It’s full of intriguing facts. Potter takes the reader on a tour of the universe in 26 degrees of separation starting with the range 1-10 metres (10 to the power of 0 to 10 to the […]
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How many satellites are there?
December 19th, 2009 by Roger Darlington
At the moment, I’m reading a fascinating book of cosmology called “You Are Here” and written by Christopher Potter. It’s full of intriguing facts. For instance, how many satellites do you think there are orbiting the Earth? According to Potter, there are 417 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites (160-2,000 kilometres above the earth), 47 Medium […]
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Have we found dark matter?
December 18th, 2009 by Roger Darlington
Dark matter is odd stuff – it may constitute some three-quarters of the universe but we’re not even sure if it exists. First postulated by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, according to this article we might have found some dark matter at last. But only two particles have been spotted and there’s a one […]
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Are there hidden messages in water?
December 17th, 2009 by Roger Darlington
I was chatting with a friend this week and she was telling me about the work of Japanese ‘scientist’ Dr Masaru Emoto and his book “The Hidden Messages In Water”. In brief – and quoting from the Wikipedia page on Emoto – he claims that “if human speech or thoughts are directed at water droplets […]
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