Cosmos could be key to yet undiscovered advances

Talking about pulsars, spinning neutron stars weighing as much as the Sun but only 20km across, Professor Jocelyn Bell made a throw away remark at the end of a presentation to the Institute of Physics that physicists now think that only 4 per cent of the mass of the universe is made up of conventional material while 26 per cent is made up of ‘dark matter’ which holds the galaxies together but nobody understands and 70 per cent is made of mass associated is ‘dark energy’ which is pushing them apart but nobody understands either. Sensing that humanity is once again in a similar position to early scientists who observed lightning strikes and marvelled at the power involved but had no understanding of electricity or how to harness it, we asked her afterwards if there were still big things to discover. She responded that there were, “Lots, stacks!” and the more that was understood, the more physicists realised they did not understand. We asked if there was any possibility that the gravitational forces on neutron stars that are sufficient to reduce ordinary matter to a kind of neutron soup led to the release of atomic zero point energy, long one of the holy grails of quite a few respectable scientists but she said that in a neutron star, it is in fact higher and more locked up than normal so no hope on that one. Neutron stars are, incidentally thought to be coated in an iron polymer orders of magnitude stronger than steel, but there is no power yet available on earth to generate the forces required to either make it or hold it together. The Institute of Physics holds many excellent lectures and seminars at various locations, more than a few of them of interest to engineers as well as being free and accompanied by free refreshments. More information from http://whatson.iop.org/events TS