Author: Matthew R. Francis
-
One blog fewer
I started the blog on Bowler Hat Science to cover the writing I do at other sites, but to simplify matters, I’m going to move all that content over to my primary blog Galileo’s Pendulum. (This post has more on my reasoning for doing so, as well as a great song.) So, this is the…
-
Using Black Holes to Measure Dark Energy, Like a BOSS
Far from being invisible, black holes are among some of the brightest objects in the Universe. The black holes themselves aren’t emitting light, but the matter they draw in heats up and much of it shoots back out in powerful jets. When that happens, the black hole is known as a quasar, and it can…
-
Four quarks for Muster Mark!
Today, researchers with the LHCb experiment at CERN announced the confirmation of a weird object that first appeared in detectors in 2008. This object is made up of four quarks, where other particles are made of two or three quarks (or zero, in the case of electrons, neutrinos, and the like). But what sort of…
-
All the single centaurs
Saturn’s magnificent rings have been known since Galileo observed the planet’s “ears” in his telescope. In the last few decades, researchers found rings (albeit less shiny ones) around the other giant planets — Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. And now the small asteroid Chariklo has joined the ring cycle: observations revealed it has two narrow rings,…
-
Supersymmetry in…superconductors?
Symmetry and elegance have proven to be a very successful way to think about the physical Universe. Arguably the greatest successes in 20th century particle physics came from translating mathematical symmetries into predictions about the results of particle collisions. However, not every symmetry thus far has led to a successful theory, and one of the…
-
The Daily Beast’s latest astronomy columnist is…me!
Now it can be told: I will be writing a weekly post for The Daily Beast (making me The Weekly Beast?), on space, astronomy, and such things. My first column is about inflation, and why it’s a big deal: If you compare any two points on the night sky, their temperature as measured in microwave…
-
Quantum droplets in an ocean of light
If you shine light on a barrier with two openings, it produces a distinct pattern of light on a distant screen. Measuring that pattern is standard in introductory physics laboratories. (You could even do it at home, but I recommend a very dark room and a bright laser pointer if you hope to see anything…
-
We are bound by symmetry
Physics is largely a matter of finding patterns in natural processes and translating that to mathematical expression. That’s a horribly oversimplified view, of course, but there’s no question that physics (and other branches of science) seeks to find symmetries. The huge successes of modern particle physics have largely arisen from identifying symmetries — and when…
-
New data offer a peek into the Universe’s first instants
Today was an exciting and stimulating day: the BICEP2 collaboration announced the first measurement of the cosmic microwave background that might tell us whether or not inflation happened. Inflation is the hypothetical rapid expansion of the Universe during its first instants, which explains a lot about why the cosmos appears the way it does. However,…
-
The mystery of the lopsided Universe
On the largest scales — far bigger than any galaxy or galaxy cluster — the Universe is remarkably smooth and regular. Tiny irregularities in the early cosmos are what gave rise to all the structures we see today, including us, but there’s another irregularity covering the whole sky. The Universe appears to be ever-so-slightly lopsided,…
Bowler Hat Science 