We beg to differ.
Do we really know who Stephen Hawking was? We know what he looks like and that he contributed much to science. But asking exactly what he contributed will likely leave people scratching their heads. The tributes may pour in and the text string that represents his name may “trend” on social media. There’s even this…
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General Relativity + Quantum Mechanics = Troubled Marriage in Short Distances One of the biggest scientific challenges today is the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics. Einstein’s baby or prima donna, his general theory of relativity, described the laws of the cosmos and the birth of the universe, the orbits of the heavenly bodies and…
I was an undergraduate astronomy major studying the physics of the “Schwarzschild Black Holes” when I decided to study the laws of the quantum field theory in a black hole’s curved spacetime to round up my education. I really like that it is trying to reconcile quantum theory with gravity which is one of the…
The thing with the traffic mess in Metro Manila is that it is easy to pontificate about the ideal long-term solutions — “consistent enforcement of traffic rules”, “construction of more roads”, “modernisation of public transport infrastructure”, etc. Indeed, all of those are the obvious solutions; solutions that should have been implemented a long time ago…
Read More “The Philippines’ traffic problems will never be solved. Here’s why…” »
Renowned popular-science writer and prizewinning author Timothy Ferris (Coming of Age in the Milky Way, The Mind’s Sky) opens his seminal book titled The Whole Shebang – A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (1997) with the statement “We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it,” and truer words were…
I finally got around to seeing Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. It’s alright, I guess. I liked the way they turned these complex relativity principles into visual eye candy, specially that part about how time (the fourth dimension in spacetime) was turned into a kind of a physical coordinate that Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) could navigate…
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I realise now after having read an amusing article recently published by one of the staunch apologists of President Benigno Simeon “BS” Aquino III that there is a fundamental assumption that needs to be questioned — the notion that Filipinos actually want a “better country”. Indeed; Can Filipinos be considered to be a people who…
Read More “Filipinos have to WANT a better Philippines badly enough to abolish the pork barrel” »
The momentous and much-praised (to the point of being overrated) victory of PNoy’s administration in ousting former Chief Justice Renato Corona from office was marred by the president’s blatant hypocrisy in refusing to fulfil his promise of waiving his bank secrecy rights for the sake of a new era of transparency and accountability. PNoy’s administration…
Read More “Looking beyond PNoy’s hypocrisy: the beauty of keeping your mouth shut” »