As a kind of homage to the recent post of my colleague, I too am writing from a conference set in the mountains. I’m in the Rila Mountains in Bulgaria. The name apparently comes from Thracian and refers to the abundance of glacial lakes that the mountains contain. So far, I’m a day and a […]
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Today is the centenary of Alan Turing‘s birth. He was born in London on 23rd June 1912. If you look at the Google homepage, the doodle is a Turing machine. Turing was one of the most brilliant people the Britain produced in the last century. He is one of the fathers of the computer you are using […]
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Some satellite images of Earth from space are not only beautiful, but make you think. They give a new perspective on the planet whose surface we spend our lives scurrying around on. Earth is very big of course. Its circumference is more than 10 million times the height of a human being. The image to […]
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The first half of this week I am at a conference at Monte Verità (Italian for Mountain of Truth). This in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. The conference kicked off, rather unusually, with a short video on the history of the conference centre. The centre started off as sort of arts and vegetarianism commune, was […]
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Of course I cannot predict the future and so have no more idea what the future of physics will be than you do. But I have been reading some interesting blog posts and newspaper articles. I will give links and some comments, and you can make up your mind about the future of physics.
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I am looking at my laptop screen and keyboard through glasses with high index lenses. I am very short sighted so without lenses made from high-refractive-index plastic, my glasses would look a bit like bottle tops. There is a list of lens materials here. The index is a measure of how much the light is bent […]
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