Einstein

Analysis and Comment (12)

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Remember the Theory of Relativity sceptics? As with the Einstein debate, the modern climate debate is based on politics and strawmen, not facts and details. Flick/beautyredefined

Nature v technology: climate ‘belief’ is politics, not science

By Clive Hamilton

It is hard to imagine a scientific breakthrough more abstract and less politically contentious than Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Yet in Weimar Germany in the 1920s it attracted fierce controversy…
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When you’re celebrating the New Year, be sure to spare a thought for Vesto Slipher and the birth of cosmology. Nuwandalice

Expand into 2013 by toasting 100 years of modern cosmology

By Glen Mackie, Swinburne University of Technology

As 2012 comes to a close and you toast the New Year, be sure to also raise a glass to one Vesto Melvin Slipher. My intent is to describe what Slipher did 100 years ago in Flagstaff, Arizona and why this…
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We’re underestimating what primary school students can understand in science. Formula image from www.shutterstock.com

Testing the theory: taking Einstein to primary schools

By David Blair, University of Western Australia

School students today are taught physics based on obsolete theories and outmoded ways of thinking. Instead of the truth, most learn a naive simplification – the 300 year-old Newtonian physics, itself based…
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The global push to detect gravitational waves could provide an enormous return for science. Wikimedia Commons

Rippling space-time: how to catch Einstein’s gravitational waves

By Paul Lasky, University of Melbourne

Albert Einstein made an executive decision to revolutionise our understanding of gravity in a paper published in 1916. Nearly 100 years on, a key prediction of Einstein’s theory has eluded direct detection…
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There’s more to gravity than apples falling from trees. Cea

Explainer: gravity

By David Blair, University of Western Australia

I have spent almost 40 years trying to detect gravity waves. When I started there were just a few of us working away in university labs. Today 1,000 physicists working with billion-dollar observatories…
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If the signs are right, fundamental equations of cosmology may need altering. waljoris

Is life on Earth due to a quirk in the laws of physics?

By John K. Webb

A radical discovery by my colleagues and I – reported this week in Physical Review Letters – could help explain why it was possible for life (at least as we know it) to develop on Earth, but not in other…
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We know they’re out there, and now we’re closer than ever to finding gravity waves. NASA

Gravity waves, scientists wave back: squeezing light beyond quantum limit

By David Blair, University of Western Australia

Detecting gravity waves is a major goal for astrophysicists. We know they should be there, but we haven’t found them yet. But today we are one step closer. By literally squeezing light on a quantum level…
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The universe teems with energy and matter we don’t understand. stuant63/Flickr

Adventures in the dark side of cosmology

By Geraint Lewis

In questioning the fundamental nature of the universe, cosmology regularly grabs the public’s attention. But in an era in which we are observing deeper and more widely than ever before, our knowledge…

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