56 | New Scientist | 5 February 2022
“do not touch” and inadvertently
increasing the strength
of gravity rather suddenly
about 100 million years ago.
Stuff happens. The point is, had
this increase actually occurred, it
might explain the Hubble crisis and
also, according to Perivolaropoulos’s
calculations, have discombobulated
the outer solar system sufficiently
to have sent a load more space
rocks careering towards Earth.
This might have included the
one that came steaming in flying
a dino skull and crossbones flag
some 66 million years ago.
We like this idea, on the basis
that no one is going to tell us it isn’t
true. And on the scale of cosmic
conspiracies, this is hardly the
largest. Everything is connected
to everything else, after all, which
is why we are going to go out on a
limb and say it was actually the big
bang that did for the dinosaurs.Quantum whipping
A hop, skip and a jump across
the Ionian Sea away, meanwhile,
Theodore Andronikos and
Michael Stefanidakis at the Ionian
University on Corfu consider how
a quantum parliament would
work, also on the arXiv server.
Why, you may ask. The way
things are going right now, we
might counter: why not? Yet
despite staring very hard at the
paper for some time, our answer
is somewhat indeterminate. The
premise is replacing a system in
which party loyalty dictates how
legislators vote with a “free will
radius” that can take any value
from 0, for total loyalty, to 1, for
total independence, running it
through a quantum voting system
and then seeing what happens.
Answer: it depends. But why
stop there? What if not just
quantum voting systems are
employed, the authors muse, but
voters, parties, politicians and bills
themselves become quantum?
“This is a fundamental question
of a rather philosophical nature
that is probably very hard to
answer and, in our view, it deserves
further consideration,” they write.
We add it to our pile of ones we
never thought to ask. Or not.Entangled thinking
The covid-jabbed may find out
sooner than we thought, if US
anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny is to be
believed, an assertion to which we
prophylactically assign a classical
truth value of 0. “Remember this
term, because you’re going to hear
a lot of it in the next year: quantum
entanglement,” she avers in a clip
circulating on Twitter. “From a
physics perspective, what happens
when you take that shot in? There’s
all this entangling that goes on,
and what the artificial intelligence
hooking you up to the Google credit
scores and all of the dematrix
and all of those things.”
Not only that, Sherri, it unleashes
the robot vacuum cleaners, too. If
this is the best we can come up with,
maybe that’s not such a bad thing. ❚Mind that gravity
“Is the Hubble crisis connected
with the extinction of dinosaurs?”
enquires physicist Leandros
Perivolaropoulos at the University
of Ioannina, Greece, in a paper
recently added to the arXiv preprint
server, meriting an immediate
induction into our pile of “questions
we had not thought to ask”.
To back up some 13.8 billion
years: the Hubble crisis (we
paraphrase, slightly) is the fact that
if you look at what the universe was
doing very far over there in the dim
and distant, and then work out what
it should be doing over here now,
what it is actually doing now is
different, meaning something
naughty must have happened
when our backs were turned.
Something like, we don’t know,
someone pressing a taped-over
button on a control panel sayingVa va vacuum
Like many people who have
difficulty distinguishing science fact
from fiction, Feedback is anticipating
with trepidation the rise of the
sentient machines. We see the
story recently reported by the BBC,
“Robot vacuum cleaner escapes
from Cambridge Travelodge”,
as a kind of low-budget prequel.
“The automated cleaner failed
to stop at the front door of the
hotel in Orchard Park in Cambridge
on Thursday, and was still on the
loose the following day,” the article
informs us, emphasising the point
made by observers, sensibly hiding
on social media, that robotic
vacuum cleaners have no natural
predators in the wild.
Nature also abhors a vacuum, of
course. Fortunately, the Cambridge
incident had a happy ending: the
errant sweeper was “found under
a hedge on Friday”. A mere test run,
we fear. As is traditional, we would
like to take this opportunity to state
that we, for one, welcome our new
robot vacuum cleaner overlords.Big. Very big.
“Asteroid bigger than
Carrauntoohil to soar past
Earth tonight,” boomed the
Irish Examiner on 18 January,
in a clipping sent by Stuart
Neilson. “Named 7482 (1994
PC1), the asteroid is more than
a kilometre wide at 1,052m and
is just about bigger than Ireland’s
highest peak, Carrauntoohil
which is 1,038m tall.”
For those still struggling with
just how big that is, never fear.
“Its size means it is also bigger
than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai
which, at 830m, is the world’s
tallest building,” we further read.
So pretty big, then. “Most
asteroids that whizz past the
Earth are about the size of a family
car. They’re not terribly big but
this one is not the size of a family
car, it’s the size of Carrauntoohil,”
space commentator Leo Enright
added helpfully. Our only open
question now is how big is
a family car in Burj Khalifas.Got a story for Feedback?
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