Category Archives: science

Violet Club

violet_club_trident

If you follow UK news at all you’ll know that recently there was a bit of a brouhaha over the Royal Navy’s failed Trident II missile test just off the coast of Florida. Some of the more hysterical accounts of the incident have the missile veering towards the US mainland before self-destructing; these sound a little dubious, but there’s at least a sense of irony to the idea as Trident is a US-developed weapons system. The UK abandoned its own nuclear weapons development program back in 1958 in favour of simply buying the technology from the Americans, and there are some very good reasons why this is so. One of them is Violet Club.

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Interstellar: A Rant

int_cooper

While I was on holiday I decided to watch Interstellar. This was a terrible, terrible mistake, but at least you’re getting what is hopefully a reasonably entertaining blog post out of it. Needless to say, though, this post is going to spoil the hell out of the film, so don’t read if you haven’t seen it yet.

Interstellar is the worst science fiction film I’ve seen since Prometheus.

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Rods From God

kinetic_loki

It’s been over a year since the last science post, so I had probably better either a) make another science post or b) rename the site. What I’m about to talk about is more science fiction than proper science, but I was wondering about it and did the research and it’s close enough to the real thing to pass for it if you squint a bit, and most importantly it ends the science drought.

The hokum military fantasy plotline of Call of Duty: Ghosts is kicked off when the baddies hijack a US space station to drop a number of very heavy objects onto the continental United States, devastating the country and providing the developers with an excuse for one of the more mediocre first person shooters I’ve played in recent years. As with most concepts explored in Call of Duty, while the way its portrayed in the game is complete nonsense the idea of launching weapons into space that can bombard targets below is a legitimate one that’s been around for a very long time –since before we actually got into space in the first place,  in fact — and Ghosts even references a specific one: its Loki satellite has an obvious link to Project Thor, a proposal originating from the 1950s but which was being mentioned in news reports as recently as four years ago under its sexier nickname: Rods from God.

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With This Ringworld I… Do What, Exactly?

halo

Taz asks

 Can you do a rundown of Halo from a scientific perspective? I’ve really enjoyed your writing about Armageddon and would like to hear your thoughts on the game that has (since its début in 2002) become a phenomenon. Tanks in advance!

My answer to this one isn’t particularly scientific in any rigorous sense of the word, nor does it have much to do with the Halo universe itself, but I’m going to do it anyway because it’s still kind of fun. Or at least I think so, anyway.

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The Hubble Bubble.

universe

Janek asks

I would be interested in a further post detailing roughly how we’ve calculated the size of the observable universe.

Okay. Actually I’m more than happy to answer this because the answer is relatively short and it’ll let me bunk off science posts for a week.

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Inflation Theory.

edge

In which I tackle one of the things that for a long time seemed like a colossal fudge to me, but which has an ever-increasing weight of evidence supporting it: inflation theory.

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Fundamental Forces.

purple

Two years before the outbreak of World War Two the Japanese introduced a new high-level diplomatic cypher that the US named Purple. Purple was a cutting-edge cryptosystem that proved fiendishly difficult to break, using machine-generated cyphertext with a similar level of complexity to the Enigma devices — but unlike Enigma the US were unable to capture any working Purple devices to give them clues as to the design of the system. All they had to go on was underlying patterns in the cyphertext and the cribs (or operational errors) that represented the few chinks in Purple’s armour. Nevertheless, by 1941 the SIS had constructed an analogous device that successfully decoded Purple messages based on just this information, in effect making a perfect working replica of the Purple device without ever having seen one themselves.

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