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Seen and heard

Physics World June 2020

Physics World

 
Quanta Physics World  June 2020

Seen and heard

(Imperial College London)

Quantum quizzer

“Using a commercial aircraft, the 1971 Hafele–Keating experiment was a test of which effect, a consequence of special and general relativity, abbreviated as TD?” It’s the kind of question you could probably guess the answer to, even if you’d never heard of the Hafele–Keating experiment. But getting it right as the captain of your team in the final of BBC TV quiz series University Challenge is a different matter altogether. Thankfully for Caleb Rich, a second-year PhD student in atom optics at Imperial College London (above, right), he correctly answered “time dilation”, bagging a further five points as Imperial went on to thrash Corpus Christi College Oxford by 275 to 105. Turns out Rich also enjoys setting quizzes himself for drinkers at his local pub in Lewisham so obviously Physics World had to ask him to do one for us too. You can take Rich’s quantum-physics trivia quiz online (bit.ly/qJZT50zzF84) and hear more from him in the 7 May episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast (bit.ly/fj9z50zzFd0).

Backgrounds to the fore

With video-conference services like Zoom all the rage during the COVID-19 lockdown, you might want to impress your friends and colleagues with a background from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Canada. As one of the world’s top centres for physics research, it’s released nine science-themed images for use as a backdrop when you don’t want colleagues seeing the dirty-laundry basket, rioting kids or peeling wallpaper behind you. The images include an artist’s impression of two colliding black holes, a dark-matter map of the cosmos as well as an exterior shot of the PI building in Waterloo, Ontario. Of course, PI isn’t alone – other Zoom backgrounds are available too, including images of the ATLAS detector at the CERN particle-physics lab and shots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The funniest we’ve seen though is of a user who had a Zoom background of himself accidentally walking in on himself in the meeting. That’s what we call owning up to your mistake.

Cruising into space

Space has long been the final frontier for the entertainment industry, but that might be changing thanks to discussions between Tom Cruise and NASA about shooting a movie on the International Space Station (ISS). NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine took to Twitter to announce the “exciting” news, insisting to the world that “We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineer and scientists to make NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.” NASA didn’t give any more details, but apparently the film will be an action-adventure and not part of the Mission Impossible series that Cruise has starred in since 1996. Yet there is a serious side to this, with NASA eager to open up the ISS for commercial use, which includes space tourism, and now perhaps, Hollywood studios. At least their space suits will mean the actors can fully respect the rules of social distancing when they’re on set.

 

(Glazier Design)

Stamps for key workers

The Isle of Man Post Office has released a set of eight stamps to honour the contribution of key workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The eight stamps feature words including care, compassion and community, along with the strapline “will carry us through”. One of the stamps highlights science and, as well as the strapline, features two of Stephen Hawking’s famous equations about Hawking radiation and black-hole entropy. The Stephen Hawking Foundation said that a copy of the stamp had been sent to every household on the Isle of Man as well as “leaders all around the world”. “Science leads in everything we do in relation to COVID-19,” the foundation notes. “It informs our decisions, our actions and our politics, it saves lives, it prevents harm and it will be the only way to return to anything resembling a normal life.”