Archive for the ‘Science & technology’ Category
Can one see the future in a glass of water?
January 29th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Sounds silly? Well, BBC2 television devoted 30 minutes this evening to the story of an Irish healer called Mary Malone who claims to be able to foretell anyone’s future simply by glancing at a glass of water. Clearly the presenter of the programme didn’t believe this, so why give her the oxygen of publicity? However, […]
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“The God Delusion” (1)
January 23rd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
My first book of 2007 is “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins which I’m enjoying enormously. You can read the first chapter here. When I’ve finished the work, I’ll be reviewing it for my web site and incorporating some of the ideas into my web page on “The Trouble With Religion”.
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Might we be Martians?
January 13th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
It is possible scientifically that the origins of life on Earth lie on another planet such as Mars. More evidence for this theorectical possibility emerged this week as explained here.
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How many fundamental particles are there?
January 2nd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
So far, we know of 16 elementary or fundamental particles – and they have wonderful names. There are 12 fermions: quarks — up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top; and leptons — electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino. Then there are 4 gauge bosons – gluon, W and Z bosons, photon. But there […]
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Understanding photons
December 7th, 2006 by Roger Darlington
This week, I took a phone call from a student at the University of Manchester to discuss how I might contribute to the university’s Alumni Fund. I was a student in Management Sciences at the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST) from 1967-1971 and UMIST has recently merged with the Victoria University […]
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Is cold fusion the real thing?
October 31st, 2006 by Roger Darlington
I’ve always been extremely sceptical about the notion of cold fusion: the idea that one could generate energy from a fusion of molecules near room temperature and pressure using relatively simple devices rather than in the extremely hot circumstances of a thermonuclear device. However, I was invited to revisit my doubts during a recent long […]
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Is string theory tying us in knots?
October 8th, 2006 by Roger Darlington
Is it possible to combine the theory of relativity (which explains the movement of large bodies) with quantum mechanics (which explain the action of sub-atomic particles) into a Grand Unification Theory (GUT) that would account for everything from the big bang to black holes? Ever since the 1980s, the best bet for such a GUT […]
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What’s the time at the North Pole?
October 2nd, 2006 by Roger Darlington
The answer is that it is always midnight. This information comes from a new book titled “Why Don’t Penguins Feet Freeze?” and the “Mirror” newspaper today features 20 questions from the work.
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What is a planet?
August 26th, 2006 by Roger Darlington
Amazingly, until this week, there was no scientific agreement on what constitutes a planet. So, since 1930, Pluto has been called one, even though there has been increasing challenges to this classification. At the Interneraional Astronomical Union meeting in Prague this week, a definition was finally agreeed: a planet is a body that orbits the […]
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What happened to the ozone hole?
August 26th, 2006 by Roger Darlington
For once, a piece of good news about the environment – the ozone hole has stopped growing. The announcement was made this week by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The discovery of the ozone hole over the Antartic was made in 1985 and, at its worst, it expanded to the size of North […]
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