What, did Cloverfield start a trend of probably-meaningless-but-vaguely-cool-sounding movie titles? The new James Bond movie will supposedly be titled "The Quantum of Solace." One wonders what was left on the cutting room floor-- "007 in The Double Slit Experiment"?
Continue reading 'Either James Bond really likes science, or... I don't know what.' >
If you’re a “His Dark Materials” geek like me, you already know that the movie adaptation of Philip Pullman’s sci-fi novel The Golden Compass is opening in theaters across the country today. And even if you’re not a fan, you probably know this because its negative spin, shall we say, on Catholicism has been hyped and debated ad nauseum.
What appears to have been lost in all this, but was the original draw for many readers, is Pullman’s play with science, especially dark matter and quantum mechanics.
Continue reading 'The Golden Compass gets the physics all wrong. Let's throw a fit.' >
The world's first 28-qubit quantum computer was demonstrated this week at the Supercomputering 2007 Conference. Just a day earlier, Scientific American received a press release for Qubits™, an educational toy "giving a child the satisfaction of Building Strong Structures just like Mother Nature." Unfortunately for the computing wonks, each Qubits™ package comes with a whopping 60 Qubits™. Also, the company has trademarked "Qubits™." Looks like physicists everywhere need a new unit of measurement.
Continue reading 'Toy company trademarks quantum physics; Supercomputers implode in confusion' >
In the world of very, very, very small objects, there's a line. This line marks the threshold between comfort and discomfort, certainty and uncertainty, determinism and probability.
Physicists know about it; philosophers know about it. It's a size-line. Big things, like bowling balls and people and cells, are on one side of the line. This is the side that is governed by classical physics. Here, the laws of Newton and determinism and predictability reign supreme. You can throw a baseball and figure out where it's going. It's a comfortable side.
The other side is less comfortable.
Continue reading 'When to be a wave, when to be a particle.' >
