Articles

Listening for ripples in spacetime

Find out about the heroic effort that led to the detection of gravitational waves and the excitement of their discovery.

Maths in a minute: How does laser interferometry work?

How does LIGO detect gravitational waves? Here is a quick introduction.

Dropping Schrödinger's cat into a black hole

Since the detection of gravitational waves we know for sure that black holes do exist. To understand what really goes on inside them we need a new theory.

Maths in a minute: Gravitational waves

A quick introduction to one of the greatest discoveries of the century.

Maths in a minute: Black holes

A quick introduction to the monsters that lurk at the centre of each galaxy.

Loo-Q: Clearing aisles and relieving passengers

Here we present a worked example of a distributed system in action, to illustrate Leslie Lamport's rules of ordering history using logical clocks.

Clocks to the rescue!

Leslie Lamport explains how he used logical clocks to set history straight in distributed systems.

High fidelity

Is the Universe digital, just like the world of computers? Discuss!

Violating causality

Leslie Lamport explains how an understanding of special relativity helped him realise how to order events in computer science, and enabled the development of distributed computing.

What happens inside your computer?

My view of the events taking place on my computer is very different to how a computer scientist, a engineer or a physicist would view what is happening inside the box. Leslie Lamport explains how the definition of an event distinguishes between these areas of research.

Distributed systems and ambiguous histories

Our digital lives rely on distributed computer systems, such as the network of banks that allow us to deposit cash in one place and withdraw it in another. But understanding the order of events in such systems is not always straightforward.

Outer space: Archimedean ice cream cones

What shape of cone maximises the ice cream to wafer ratio?