Viewing the Big Bang Through Sunglasses

March 23, 2014

In 1929 Edwin Hubble revealed that distant galaxies are receding from us and that the more distant the galaxy the faster it is racing away. Running the universe backwards, this means that the galaxies must have been much closer together in the past. It would appear that the universe and everything in it were compressed […]

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Nobel Prize for Higgs and Englert

October 8, 2013

The Ultimate Prize The Nobel Prize committee has awarded the 2013 Prize in Physics to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for their work almost 50 years ago which led to the discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider. Just over a year ago on 4 July 2012 the world awaited a momentous […]

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Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster!

August 21, 2013

Neutron stars are the incredibly compact and bizarre remnants of very massive stars. They have greater mass than the Sun compressed into a ball with a diameter of around 20-30 kilometres. They are as dense as an atomic nucleus. (See my article Fermions, Atoms and Neutron Stars) Cosmic Lighthouses Neutron stars spin at an unbelievable rate typically completing […]

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Apocalypse Now!

August 16, 2013

Stars are huge balls of hydrogen and helium. But despite their almost identical composition their ultimate fates can be remarkably different. The real action within a star takes place in its core where conditions are so intense that atomic nuclei merge to form heavier nuclei. These nuclear fusion reactions release vast amounts of energy that […]

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Building a Higgs Factory!

June 13, 2013

The Large Hadron Collider is currently undergoing a major upgrade that will enable it to reach its full design energy when restarted towards the end of next year. Meanwhile physicists have released plans for the next generation collider that will take over from the LHC in around a decade’s time. The Alpha Male of Nuclear […]

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Forces of the World Unite!

June 3, 2013

The aim of physicists is to provide a concise, but accurate description of the universe around us. At first glance, our world seems to be composed of a wealth of different materials controlled by a multitude of different forces. But one of the great triumphs of modern physics is the realization that these forces are […]

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Animated Atom Boy!

May 9, 2013

The idea of atoms dates back to antiquity. In ancient times philosophers argued about the existence of these fundamental components of matter. They had little idea about the structure of atoms except that they were thought to be indivisible, and this was the origin of the word atom. Ironically, the modern understanding of what we […]

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Cosmic Antimatter Rays!

April 11, 2013

In 1912 the Austrian physicist Victor Hess conclusively demonstrated the existence of cosmic rays when he took an electrometer to an altitude of over 5000 metres in a hot-air balloon. At this altitude Hess detected four times as much radiation as at ground level. We now know that the Earth is continually bombarded by high energy particles […]

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Strings, Surfaces and Physics

March 25, 2013

Last year I was asked to produce three animations for an exhibition at the Royal Society in London. The exhibition was called Intersections: Henry Moore and Stringed Surfaces and was staged as a partnership between the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Science Museum in London and the Royal Society. It was […]

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The Universe Just Got A Bit Older!

March 25, 2013

The universe just got a little bit older – a mere 80 million years older. More precisely, a much improved estimate of the age of the universe has just been published. Astrophysicists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have released the most accurate map of the cosmic microwave background radiation yet compiled. This is the […]

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