Sep 06, 2011 Leibniz’ beloved adage that natura non facit saltus or ‘nature does not make leaps’ has had to endure a fair amount of comeuppances since it gained currency. An arresting example today of our unpredictable world is the rapid wandering of the north geomagnetic pole in recent years…
September 05, 2011 By Jeremy Dunning-Davies, Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Hull and member of the Royal Astronomical Society and Natural Philosophy Alliance. In a posting on the Thunderbolts web site on June 6th, Mel Acheson commented on the recent claims of finding a spiral galaxy in…
Sep 05, 2011 The so-called “god particle” is most likely an illusion. The idea of a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was originally proposed early in the 1980s. Since the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) was at the end of its life, and a machine capable of generating more power…
1.1 Distances to Stars When we look up into the night sky and see all the stars, many of which are suns similar to our own, they look fairly close together. But they’re not really close at all. The extent of space between them is huge. Distance is an important…
The New Picture of Space Now more than ever, the exploration of our starry Universe excites the imagination. Never before has space presented so many pathways for research and discovery. New observational tools enable us to “see” formerly-invisible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the view is spectacular. Telescope images…
