theory – The Orbital

One of the most commonly used phrases in the news about physics is: “the discovery that could rewrite physics”, or at least words to that effect and this got me wondering; does it take a discovery to rewrite physics? Can we only think again if we find what we were looking for? Or do we truly have to think of something new if we don’t make this discovery? What happens if what we were looking for wasn’t there, does this mean that the Universe is more boring than we thought, or is it just vastly more complex than we could even imagine? In this article I shall endeavour to convince you that the fun really starts when we get everything wrong. Our Universe is governed by some unique set of laws that are more wacky, more ridiculous than you could ever intuitively think of. The fact is, not a s...

Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most famous living scientist in the world, was born on the 8th of January 1942. After a first degree in natural science at University College Oxford, he moved to Cambridge in 1962 where he completed his PhD studies. By 1963 he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given two years to live. He’s now 75 years old, communicates using a single cheek muscle attached to a speech-generating device, and he continues to work and lecture internationally. His doctoral thesis “Properties of expanding universes” was published in 1966 and was released online on October 23rd. Whilst it is now available online for everyone to read, it might not be your preferred bedtime story. “By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at...

Tag: theory

Rewriting Physics

Step into the mind of young Stephen Hawking