not understanding quantum mechanics

As a chemist, I have of course used quantum mechanics in various ways and learned the essential textbook equations, but like everybody else on the planet I don't really understand it. I find comfort in the wise words of Richard Feynman that went something like "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

After a few decades of not using my non-understanding of quantum mechanics on a regular basis any more, I found the book Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics by Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert a welcome refreshment of nearly lost memories.

My review of the book is now out in the February issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Quantum understanding

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 2, February 2026, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

To sell books about quantum mechanics, you have to have Schrödinger's cat on the cover. It's the law.

flapping pterosaurs

Today's issue of Current Biology is a special theme issue on physics and biology, so there's lots of exciting stuff there from this particular interdisciplinary intersection. My contribution looks at the biomechanics of animals of the deep past, including one of the first species to crawl around on the sea floor as well as the very impressive pterosaurs, which were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. As some pterosaurs grew to sizes much larger than today's biggest flying birds, researchers have some explaining to do here.

Modelling moves

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 20, 21 October 2024, Pages R947-R950

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Investigations of the bone structure of different pterosaur species suggest some evolved to meet the mechanical demands of soaring flight, whereas others were optimised for flapping. (Image: © Terryl Whitlatch.)

Heisenberg's cubes

It was great fun and slightly scary to learn about uranium cubes left behind by Nazi Germany's research programme into nuclear fission. Some of these cubes are being investigated in US labs right now and are still yielding information about the events that happened more than 80 years ago.

I combined this with other developments happening in nuclear forensics for a feature that is out now in C & I:

Nuclear legacy

Chemistry & Industry Volume 86, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 30-33 DOI:10.1002/cind.861_11.x

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (members only)

This is one of the 664 uranium cubes from the failed nuclear reactor that German scientists tried to build in Haigerloch during World War II.

Credit: John T. Consoli/University of Maryland

In the same issue, on the very next page, you'll also find my review of the book Great adaptations, by Morgan Phillips.

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

I'm also starting a twitter thread with this year's C&I features here.

fresh fusion

I really should go out more and explore more of the exciting science going on all around me, so it was a great opportunity when I was asked to write about new approaches to fusion energy, as there is a start-up company doing that up the road in Yarnton, called First Light Fusion.

So I visited them and marvelled at their huge supply of gunpowder (some seriously old technology used to facilitate the new ones) and at the workshops where they are building what could become a revolution in energy technology. We'll see.

The feature is out now:

A new dawn for fusion energy

Chemistry & Industry 2018, vol 82, no 4, pp 30-33

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (members only)

I can send the PDF file, just drop me a line.

and here's a sneaky preview of the first page:

time interrupted

review of

Hora zulú
by Santiago Lopo
Editorial Galaxia 2016 (in Galician)
Mar Maior 2016 (Spanish)

In January 2000, a man is washed up on the coast of Galicia and is referred to a psychiatric hospital, as he appears to have lost his memory. Known as “the professor”, he is going to spend the rest of his life there although we are increasingly suspecting that he isn’t quite as mad as we thought, and maybe he hasn’t lost his memory either.

After his death, Ana, who was one of the psychiatrists at the hospital at the time of his referral, pieces together the mysteries of the professor’s previous life from a set of five stories that he had written and hidden in different places. Ana reports the progress of her quest in emails to a former colleague and love interest, but we don’t know whether he ever reads her emails – she never refers to anything he might have said in reply, so it’s a strong possibility that the ex, now living in New York and married to somebody else, deletes her messages unread.

The novel intersperses these emails with the professor’s writings and the psychiatrists’ case notes to create a jigsaw puzzle that remains mysterious to the last. We begin to suspect that the mad professor may have been a sane man in a mad world, as becomes clear from the questionnaire he designs to test the sanity of his doctors. He is thinking about the mysteries of time in a quest to stop the man-made destruction of the environment. (Hora Zulú (Zulu Time), by the way, which occurs at the end of each of his texts, is just a navy / aviation code for Greenwich Mean Time.)

Meanwhile, Ana has her own problem with time. She wants to wind back the clock to be back with her ex (or was he just an almost lover?). As the personality of the patient is gradually beginning to make more sense, that of the psychiatrist is becoming a shade crazier, although her voice, emailing into the void with the mixture of exciting discoveries and the mourning for lost love, (to me) really was the main attraction of the book. I’d happily read more of her emails any time.

The whole tackles some big questions, including:
* what is the nature of time, and can it be stopped or reversed? and:
* am I crazy or is the world around me going crazy? speaking of which:
* can dogs read our minds?
The answers, however, remain a mystery.



(cover of the Galician edition, although Amazon Spain seems to think it is in Spanish).

twisted light

Lenses in your cameras, spectacles, or other optical devices are still exactly the same as those used by Galilei and van Leeuwenhoek, a surviving example of analogue technology in a digital world. Physicists have come up with various alternative technologies that can shape light in other ways, independent of the limitations of traditional optics.

In a rare excursion into the scary world of physics, I have written a short feature about these alternative approaches, which is out now in Chemistry & Industry:

Light without lenses

Chemistry & Industry Volume 82, Issue 01, pages 34-35


open access to full (HTML) text via SCI website

restricted access to full text and PDF file via Wiley Online Library

And my story also made the lovely cover:




Oh, and no page 42 of the same issue there is my long essay review of the book:


Astrochemistry
by Claire Vallance
World Scientific Press 2017

is thorium the answer?

My long essay review of the book:

Superfuel – Thorium, the green energy source for the future.
by Richard Martin
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-230-11647-4

is out in Chemistry & Industry, December issue, pp 46-47.

I didn't know anything about thorium reactors before reading this book, but thought the author made a convincing case. Most intriguing, however, is the unravelling of the history of nuclear technology and the reasons why the reactor type predominant today was chosen. I think it's a fair summary to say that all of them were bad reasons, and a lot of them had to do with military considerations.

A snippet from my review: "It is always interesting to trace back the evolution of technology and work out why one route was taken rather than another. Why did petrol knock out ethanol fuel, when today we’re going back to ethanol? Why did planes that are heavier than air take off and leave the zeppelins behind? In the case of thorium liquid fuel reactors versus pressurized water reactors with solid uranium rods, Martin argues convincingly that the decisions favouring the latter type of technology were made for all the wrong reasons and that they blocked a technology that would today come in very handy as a green solution to the challenges of climate change and energy security."

For balance, note also that Stephen Ashley et al. say in the current issue of Nature that the arms proliferation risk of the thorium technology isn't as small as its proponents claim (Nature 2012, 492, 31).

SCI members can access the full text of my review here. If anybody would like a pdf reprint, leave a comment here or drop me a tweet.

paradox lost

My review of the book Paradox: the nine greatest enigmas in science, by Jim Al-Khalili is out in Chemistry World online:

FREE ACCESS

It also appears in the print issue on page 69 (together with lots of other book reviews, worth checking if you're hunting for presents ...).

heart of matter

My review of the book

Nucleus: A trip into the heart of matter
Ray Mackintosh, Jim Al-Khalili, Björn Jonson, Teresa Peña
Dundee University Press. Second edition. 2011

is out in the September issue of Chemistry & Industry, page 49. The online version is premium content, but here's a little snippet for you:

"The authors of Nucleus attempt to make this big picture - how the atomic nucleus connects to everything and influences virtually every aspect of our world - accessible to a lay readership. With just over 130 pages, colour illustrations throughout, and a total absence of formulas, the book has the right kind of look for it."

amazon

the dark energy of William Shakespeare

Literary types around here are falling over themselves to assert that the guy from Stratford really did write those plays. There is a new book out that ridicules all other theories, and it's got glowing reviews everywhere.

Not knowing much about this whole debate (or non-debate, as the Stratfordians hasten to call it), I am getting the impression that they do protest too much. The fact is that we know far too little about the biography of the Stratford man to be sure about how the plays came into being. And as with scientific problems, where there is an embarrassing lack of information, the field is open to wild speculation. Someone on "The Review Show" compared the Shakespeare "non-debate" to the evolution debates in the US. This comparison is outrageous, as we have tons of data confirming evolution, but virtually no data about Shakespeare's intellectual life.

If we're looking for an analogy in science, I would suggest the dark matter / dark energy conundrum. Current knowledge very clearly tells us (via several independent lines of evidence) that we know nothing about some 97 % of the mass-energy content of the Universe, and scientists have come up with a whole zoo of hypothetical exotic particles and other tweaks to the known laws of physics (eg modified versions of Newton's laws) to address this problem. All are speculative, but they can guide research that may one day find the missing bits.

Similarly, we have a > 90% knowledge vacuum concerning the inner life of Shakespeare and where he may have found inspiration for his works. So I, as a literary-minded scientist find it quite natural that this vacuum gives rise to wild speculation, which may inspire research that may one day resolve some of the mysteries surrounding the bard.

large human collider

I love the news feature by Zeeya Merali in the current issue of Nature, The Large Human Collider (even though I thought of this title first, used it for our home-built ice rink, back in January!).

The author describes how, at the Large Hadron Collider, "sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet, and sometimes explode." One of the social social scientists interviewed said she went there to observe "the language, taboos, and rituals of this exotic community."

The basic idea is that at just under 3000 participating scientists for the ATLAS detector alone, the community seems to have passed a critical size to qualify as a culture in its own right (though social scientists have also looked at the previous, smaller collaborations). Also, considering the cost of the LHC operation, the 20 or so social scientists that observe the physicists are practically free (and funded by different research councils, anyway).

Now that makes me think, what if the whole thing isn't really about the physics, and someone has just tricked the physicists into it, in order to conduct an experiment analysing the collision of human minds? I'm sure there is a viable plot for a Dr Who episode in there somewhere.

physical mystery

Here comes a physics question. I constructed the kinetic toy shown below from "GeoMag" magnets and steel balls, it's suspended from the ceiling and has two joints that move freely, i.e. the places where two steel balls touch directly. So there are three parts that are independent of each other. If I spin the bottom part quite fast, the middle part will rotate too (but not as fast, I think), will then stop, rotate for a while again, etc.



Any clues ?

I'm thinking the magnetic field of the dumbbell in the middle should be symmetrical with respect to the rotation axis, so I can't think of a magnetic reason for this "behaviour". Maybe it's just random small differences in the friction depending on how the balls touch. But in any case it's fascinating to watch and procrastinate over ...