Brexit memes and physics

A lot of memes have been circulating drawing parallels with the awkward Brexit attempts by the British government, such as this one.

I chose this one to highlight because the person seems to have a common misunderstanding that Galileo tried to clear up a long time ago about the nature of relative motion. Since the man was on the train, he had the same velocity as the train when he jumped off and hence was moving in the direction of the tracks when he hit the ground. It was not allowing for that that caused him to fall. If he had jumped more along the direction of the train’s motion and with a running action in that direction, it would have been much less jarring to him and may have managed to stay upright.

Not that I am recommending anything that dangerous of course!

Solution found to problem involving the sum of three cubes

Diophantine equations are a certain class of equations for which solutions that consist only of integers are sought. So, for example, we know that Pythagoras’s theorem x2+y2=z2 has many sets of solutions such as the numbers x=3, y=4, z=5 or the set x=6, y=8, z=10. A lot of these problems involve existence claims such as whether any solution exists at all and if none can be found, whether it can be proved that no solution exists.
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Rich new trove of Cambrian fossils found

The Cambrian explosion is the name given to the discovery of a vast range of fossils of organisms that existed about 500 million years ago. The first discovery of them was made in the Burgess Shale region of Canada in 1909 and other troves were later found in China and Australia. But now comes a report of an extremely rich new trove that has been discovered, again in China.
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Book review: Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Mechanics is Different by Philip Ball

(My review of the above book just appeared in the March 2019 issue of the American Journal of Physics (vol. 87, issue 4, p.319). You can access it here but I give the review below.)

A major problem with quantum mechanics is that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation is not conducive to providing visual images of what is going on. With special and general relativity, the initially unsettling ideas that time and distance are not invariants but depend upon the state of motion of the observer and that space can be warped by the presence of mass and energy have gone mainstream. Not so with quantum mechanics. Although of the same vintage as relativity, quantum mechanics has continued to greatly perplex people because it undermines the realist position that other theories, including relativity, take for granted, of a world existing independent of the observer, whose features we can discover by making observations. The denial of this made even Einstein uneasy.
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The Middle Ages and the periods before and after

We all have in our minds short histories of how knowledge grew and a popular one is that there was a period of scientific and philosophical growth that began more than a couple of millennia ago with the ancient Greek, Arabic, and Chinese civilizations that slowed down sometime during the early second millennium where there were no real advances and indeed a regression with a loss of knowledge. That was then followed by the period we now call the Age of Enlightenment with its associated scientific revolution that began in the 17th century around the time of Galileo. Scholars of the much-maligned middle period that has come to be down as the Middle Ages (or more pejoratively the Dark Ages) take umbrage with characterizations that compare that period unfavorably with what existed before and what came after.
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Students call for global strike to demand action on climate change

The revulsion over the mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand by white supremacists has overshadowed an important news event today and that is the call for a global strike by students to call attention to the need for governments to take action on climate change. They are rightly pointing out that it is their generation and those that follow who will have to live with the consequences of inaction by my generation.
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Fish falling from the sky

I got a message from an acquaintance in Sri Lanka forwarding a video that said that the BBC had reported yesterday that there had been fish raining from the sky in Mumbai, India. This is one of those things that are circulated widely and was accompanied by a message that claimed that this was proof of a miracle and of a god in action. The acquaintance who forwarded it to me (who is a Roman Catholic believer) asked me if this could be a miracle. My acquaintance likely asked me because he knows I am a scientist and since I have not had any contact with him for decades, he probably thinks I am still religious and thus likely to support his beliefs.
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Trying unsuccessfully to convince flat Earthers

National Geographic had a segment about the Flat Earth movement. The ten-minutes piece begins at about the 11:30 mark.
What surprised me is that it said that 2% of the American population believes in it. That works out to about 6 million people and is said to be growing. The other thing that disturbed me is that there seemed to be a lot of young people in the group. The video shows a small model of a flat Earth.
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