Two generations ago, people in Europe fought for survival, an endeavour which is almost impossible when not followed together with other people. War-induced famine necessitated sharing food with everyone, bombs falling from the sky sheltering in cellars of other people, destroyed houses led to sharing of private living space with…
As the start of our new series on humans in physics, I would like to give a personal opinion on the lack of (gender) diversity in the natural sciences and its connection to the very human phenomenon of “unconscious bias”. I wrote this article for celebrating “Diversity Day” in the…
It’s a sociable creature, seeking the attention of others, always in the quest to climb up the ladders of a social group, only to move on to the next when the top is reached. By getting to know many different paradigms of social interaction they learn the essential tools of…
Transporting renewable energy to where it’s needed lies at the heart of the human endeavour to get rid of the need for fossil fuels. Superconductors can do so without loosing any of the precious electricity on the way, seemingly defying physical intuition. Find out in this article why many body…
In our modern computer world, being able to encrypt messages is not only necessary to keep some information secret from others, but is a key part of technologies such as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Furthermore, the scandals around widespread eavesdropping of intelligence agencies has shown the world that in fact none…
We all know the quantum world is weird, but in no place does it become as weird as in the protocol allowing almost instant transportation of information from one place to the other termed “quantum teleportation”. That may sound like it’s impossible — but what if I tell you that…
How changes in life only come through positive self-motivation.
In the past year, I put a lot of effort into constraining myself, watching my habits to then find the ones which stand in the way of me becoming a more happy and balanced person. The second step was to trying…
Time only moves forward — this is what we experience in our everyday lives. Often, people connect this to the fact that there are clearly processes in nature which cannot be undone: when you boil an egg you can not make the egg-white transparent again, your coffee is very unlikely…
Most people know that the concept of a “particle” is a pretty important in quantum physics (the latest success being the discovery of the “Higgs” particle in 2012) — but have you ever heard of QUASIparticles before?
If you haven’t, that’s okay, because you are in the right place to…
Science can be sometimes daunting for the unexperienced. Have you ever seen a scientific talk, or read a paper? There tends to be a lot of jargon flying around, circling the speaker to then buzz aggressively around the audience before it goes out the windows into the oblivion of the…
