Robert Matthews FRAS CPhys | |
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Born | Robert A. J. Matthews 23 September 1959 Carshalton, United Kingdom |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Corpus Christi College |
Occupation(s) | Physicist and science writer |
Robert A. J. Matthews (born 23 September 1959), is a British physicist and science writer.
After graduating in physics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, in 1981, Matthews took up a dual career in science writing and academic research. He is currently science consultant and columnist for the science magazine BBC Focus , a freelance columnist for The National in Abu Dhabi and visiting professor in the Department of Mathematics, Aston University. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Chartered Physicist and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Matthews has held various specialist posts on national newspapers in the UK, including technology correspondent for The Times and science correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph . In addition, he has written on a freelance basis for, among others, New Scientist , The Economist , The Financial Times , Reader's Digest and The Spectator . [1] His professional awards include Feature Writer of the Year in 2000, by the Association of British Science Writers.
Matthews has published research in refereed journals on a wide variety of subjects ranging from Bayesian inference and probability to astronomy, cryptology and neural computing. [2] He has also won awards for his research, including an Ig Nobel Prize, awarded in 1996 for his paper Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the fundamental constants. [3] [4]
Matthews is the author of several popular science books, 25 Big Ideas in Science (2005), [5] Q&A: Cosmic Conundrums and Everyday Mysteries of Science (2005) [6] and Unravelling the Mind of God: Mysteries at the Frontiers of Science (London: Virgin 1992). [7]
In 2016, he published Chancing It: The laws of chance and what they can do for you (London: Profile Books). [8]
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word ignoble.
Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." In some formulations, it is extended to "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time."
Max Born was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".
Robert Hofstadter was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons".
Corentin Louis Kervran was a French scientist. Kervran was born in Quimper, Finistère (Brittany), and received a degree as an engineer in 1925. In World War II he was part of the French Resistance.
Arno Allan Penzias was an American physicist and radio astronomer. Along with Robert Woodrow Wilson, he discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.
Sir Michael Victor Berry, is a British mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, England.
Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, Baron Blackett,, was a British experimental physicist known for his work on cloud chambers, cosmic rays, and paleomagnetism, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948. In 1925 he became the first person to prove that radioactivity could cause the nuclear transmutation of one chemical element to another. He also made a major contribution in World War II advising on military strategy and developing operational research. His views saw an outlet in third world development and in influencing policy in the Labour government of the 1960s.
Victor Franz Hess was an Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays.
Cecil Frank Powell, FRS was a British physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for heading the team that developed the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of the pion (pi-meson), a subatomic particle.
Arthur Holly Compton was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his 1923 discovery of the Compton effect, which demonstrated the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation. It was a sensational discovery at the time: the wave nature of light had been well-demonstrated, but the idea that light had both wave and particle properties was not easily accepted. He is also known for his leadership over the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project, and served as chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1945 to 1953.
Nicholas Redfern is a British best-selling author, journalist, cryptozoologist and ufologist.
Quantum mysticism, sometimes referred pejoratively to as quantum quackery or quantum woo, is a set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, spirituality, or mystical worldviews to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered pseudoscience and quackery by quantum mechanics experts.
Toshihide Maskawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
Sir Andre Konstantin Geim is a Russian-born Dutch–British physicist working in England in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
The safety of high energy particle collisions was a topic of widespread discussion and topical interest during the time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and later the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—currently the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator—were being constructed and commissioned. Concerns arose that such high energy experiments—designed to produce novel particles and forms of matter—had the potential to create harmful states of matter or even doomsday scenarios. Claims escalated as commissioning of the LHC drew closer, around 2008–2010. The claimed dangers included the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets, and these questions were explored in the media, on the Internet and at times through the courts.
Debendra Mohan Bose was an Indian physicist who made contributions in the field of cosmic rays, artificial radioactivity and neutron physics. He was the longest serving Director (1938–1967) of Bose Institute. Bose was the nephew of the famous physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who laid the foundations of modern science in India.
The buttered toast phenomenon is an observation that buttered toast tends to land butter-side down after it falls. It is used as an idiom representing pessimistic outlooks. Various people have attempted to determine whether there is an actual tendency for bread to fall in this fashion, with varying results.
Brian Gregory Keating is an American cosmologist. He works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, leading the POLARBEAR2 and Simons Array experiments. He also conceived the first BICEP experiment. He received his PhD in 2000, and is a distinguished professor of physics at University of California, San Diego, since 2019. He is the author of two books, Losing The Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.