List by Author: Rachel Thomas

What can we agree to look for?The limits to what we can observe are not only a matter of science, but also of politics and economics.
What can science see?Observing the smallest building blocks of matter doesn't involve seeing in the ordinary sense.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principleThere are limits to how much you can simultaneously squeeze the quantum fuzziness of an electron's position and momentum
A very useful pandemicCambridge researchers, the BBC, and thousands of citizen scientists have created a revolutionary infectious disease data set.
Stephen Hawking: Memories of a colleagueCambridge mathematicians and physicists remember their most famous colleague with fondness.
Abel Prize 2018: the power of asking good questionsRobert Langlands wins for his "visionary program".
Fighting future pandemicsTake part in an exciting new project and help fight future pandemics!
Loo-Q: Clearing aisles and relieving passengersHere 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.
Violating causalityLeslie 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 historiesOur 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.