Individual snowflakes have unique, intricate patterns, but the complicated way in which they fall appears to be universal.
Normally, when an object falls to the ground it picks up speed until the forces of gravity and air resistance balance out. At this point, the object stops accelerating, reaching its terminal velocity. However, light and delicately shaped snowflakes get caught in turbulent air flows on their way down, which turns their descent into a more complicated sequence of floating and twirling. This makes the path they…
Proteins come together to make the foam in a gin fizz
Alex Overhiser
YOU may think that complex equations and alcohol don’t, or perhaps shouldn’t, mix. But make your favourite cocktail and you will unknowingly encounter some of the most complex processes in fluid dynamics, the study of how liquids flow.
When researchers try to predict how a fluid will move, bubble or create waves, they often run into complicated equations. The starting point for solving almost any of these problems is the Navier-Stokes equations, named after Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes. The pair devised them in the 1800s, which also happens to have been the golden age of mixology.
What better way, then, to learn about fluid dynamics than by indulging in some cocktails? Whether it is how foams are made, the formation of unusual clouds or liquids spurting at supersonic speeds, some wonderful surprises can hide in a drink. Roll up your sleeves and dig out your cocktail shaker!
GIN FIZZ
Experience the miniature marvel of foams
First up, something fizzy. Made from two parts gin, one part lemon juice, a dash of syrup and a splash of soda water, the gin fizz would be simple were it not for its layer of foam.
Foams challenge physicists. At times, they behave like solids; at other times, they act like liquids. Soapy bubbles flow like water when you wash your dishes, but the stiff head of a beer can be sliced off in one.
This difference comes down to the bubbles. When bubbles crowd together, they make a foam. But how…
THEY call it the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”. Physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase in the 1960s to encapsulate the curious fact that merely by manipulating numbers we can describe and predict all manner of natural phenomena with astonishing clarity, from the movements of planets and the strange behaviour of fundamental particles to the consequences of a collision between two black holes billions of light years away. Now, some are wondering if maths can succeed where all else has failed, unravelling whatever it is that allows us to contemplate the laws of nature in the first place.
It is a big ask. The question of how matter gives rise to felt experience is one of the most vexing problems we know of. And sure enough, the first fleshed-out mathematical model of consciousness has generated huge debate about whether it can tell us anything sensible. But as mathematicians work to hone and extend their tools for peering deep inside ourselves, they are confronting some eye-popping conclusions.
Not least, what they are uncovering seems to suggest that if we are to achieve a precise description of consciousness, we may have to ditch our intuitions and accept that all kinds of inanimate matter could be conscious – maybe even the universe as a whole. “This could be the beginning of a scientific revolution,” says Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany.
If so, it has been a long time coming. Philosophers have pondered the nature of consciousness for a couple of thousand years, largely to no avail. Then, half a century ago, biologists got involved. They have discovered …
Article amended on 4 May 2020
Correction: We have updated the campus of Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences at which Hedda Hassel Mørch is based, and changed the attribution of work on the effects of sleep or sedation on phi.
IN THE Antarctic, things happen at a glacial pace. Just ask Peter Gorham. For a month at a time, he and his colleagues would watch a giant balloon carrying a collection of antennas float high above the ice, scanning over a million square kilometres of the frozen landscape for evidence of high-energy particles arriving from space.
When the experiment returned to the ground after its first flight, it had nothing to show for itself, bar the odd flash of background noise. It was the same story after the second flight more than a year later.
While the balloon was in the sky for the third time, the researchers decided to go over the past data again, particularly those signals dismissed as noise. It was lucky they did. Examined more carefully, one signal seemed to be the signature of a high-energy particle. But it wasn’t what they were looking for. Moreover, it seemed impossible. Rather than bearing down from above, this particle was exploding out of the ground.
That strange finding was made in 2016. Since then, all sorts of suggestions rooted in known physics have been put forward to account for the perplexing signal, and all have been ruled out. What’s left is shocking in its implications. Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it. In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards. It is perhaps the most mind-melting idea ever to have emerged from the Antarctic ice – but it might just be true.
