Vivat Libertas

Despite the best efforts of science communicators everywhere, quantum woo is still prevalent, mostly peddled by annoying snake oil sellers and very much even on the fringes of pseudoscience. In that regard it's less harmful than, say, anti-vaccination propaganda or GMO scaremongering - which both have a far bigger platform. Unfortunately, its supporters are no less rabid. To them, quantum mechanics is a mystical tool which can allow you to do anything, and if you don't believe them, you're a fed. Yes, every practising physicist is now a fed. I was quite surprised by this as well. Quantum mechanics is actually fairly old and has its roots in the 19th century. Even what we think of as modern quantum mechanics was actually born in the 1920s and is at this point nearly a century old. Still, classical electromagnetism, which is about 150 years old, doesn't really have any accompanying woo (even if electricity and magnetism can be conceptually very difficult until you...

Before I start, I'd just like to state that unlike my favourite stories, quantum physics isn't fictitious. I draw the comparison because of what both mean to me, not what they are. I've been an avid reader since I was very, very young. Owing to the hundreds of books on my shelves (and my desk and my floor - I am not particularly organised), I don't really re-read books as much as I used to, but back when I was younger and didn't have the independence to buy every book I laid my eyes on, I would return over and over again to my favourite stories. Even though I knew the plot back to front and inside out, I still loved returning to it and discovering something new; I loved going on the emotional and intellectual journey I knew so well, and I loved deepening my understanding each time. I'm in my last but one year before I leave school (I'm not as stupid as I am young), and part of our course involves studying the very simplest of quantum physics. Having ...

Because equations are awesome. So, as most people might not know were it not for the Google Doodle, today's the 127th anniversary of Niels Bohr's birthday. I'm not going to talk about his life (mostly because I'm lazy, partly because the internet's got a wealth of information about him already), but I am  going to talk about the influence him and the other greats of physics have had on me. You might wonder how a bunch of dead white males from the first half of the twentieth century could possibly influence a sixteen-year-old girl - a sixteen-year-old girl, mind you, who hasn't even gone to university yet and whose knowledge of theoretical physics, and the maths behind it, is thus very limited. Moreover, that physics is relatively old - even the positron, the first evidence of antimatter, was discovered in 1932; the modern theory of antimatter itself originates in a 1928 paper by Paul Dirac . Even something as exotic as antimatter is ancient (not that it...