Consciousness; it’s a science thing

Posted on 26/05/2013 by Jon Butterworth

At the Guardian.

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Scientific research and the European Union

Posted on 20/05/2013 by Jon Butterworth

What effect does European Union membership have on science and research? And what would it mean if the UK left?

Read more at the Guardian. This also features the pear-shaped nuclei which I wrote about in Nature.

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Is there any such thing as “nothing”?

Posted on 12/05/2013 by Jon Butterworth

That’s a question I got on twitter just now after the Feynman gig from @elainepixie.

I said (broken down into 140 character chunks):

One definition of “nothing” is “vacuum”, by which physicists mean “lowest energy state”. That exists. But in quantum mechanics it’s not really empty. It is permeated by quantum fields (e.g. the photon field) and it fluctuates. Particles pop in and out of brief existence, even in the lowest energy state of space-time. And in fact the field of the Higgs boson doesn’t even fluctuate around the value of zero, but around 246 GeV. So I guess really to have “nothing” means no physical laws, no time, no space. In that sense not sure what it means to say such a thing “exists”. You can speak about it, but surely it’s the opposite of “existence”?

Hmm. Anyone got a better answer?

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Feynman: his birthday, his diagrams and his lectures

Posted on 12/05/2013 by Jon Butterworth

Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. An excuse for an unusual party

At the Guardian.

See also Chapter 8.3 of Smashing Physics.

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