Apparently I was on an episode of the BBC program Horizon a couple of hours ago over in the UK. I completely forgot that was coming up and forgot to mention it. Sorry! I’ve no idea what parts of the interview with me they used, or what the final thrust of the episode is, but I did have a lot of fun shooting the episode with the filmmakers over in Joshua Tree some time last year. See a post I did about it here. I spent some time explaining why negative mass is problematic, especially in the context of gravity… The program talks a lot about people who are trying to find anti-gravity of various sorts. I was reminded that the episode aired since I found myself tagged on social media, and wondered what the ruckus was about. Then I found the following tweet by @homeworkjunkie with a screen shot, and the caption “Nice reaction to runaway problem;zero cost energy proposed by some people in BBC Horizon”:
Nice reaction to runaway problem;zero cost energy proposed by some people in @bbc_horizon @ProfBrianCox @daraobriain pic.twitter.com/MZWm2biMAf
— homeworkjunkie (@homeworkjunkie) March 23, 2016
Should be interesting to see the episode. I don’t know if it airs again, but you can see it here for a while if you are in the UK> I do not know when/if it airs in the USA.
-cvj
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It’s the standard runaway paradox that you encounter by stopping a sign. I was explaining Why that would need to be dealt with to make progress. I don’t know anything about a vafa paper. Will have a look.
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Great photo!
Why is negative mass problematic? It’s possible to prevent instabilities as long as you distinguish carefully between inertial and gravitational mass. I saw the Vafa paper on Monday, but not sure what to make of this. What do you think about this?
So many science-related TV appearances it is tough to keep track!
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Yep — I think your last sentence would sum it up … but maybe I/we can’t tell how a lay audience really sees it…besides I was cringeing through a lot of it 😉
Hi! Eeek. Thanks for the report. I shall have to see it at some point. I was a bit worried about how the emphasis would turn out, but overall I decided that it is not a bad thing to have programs out there about more speculative ideas, as long as there’s a good discussion about where they fit with what we know about the actual science. I was hoping that they’d do this reasonably well… The writer/director seemed a good guy who’s very interested in physics and he listened very carefully to my explanations about what’s sensible and what seems very much a long shot – or just plain nuts. I imagine he (and Horizon’s overlords) wanted to keep alive some of the science-fiction-y stuff that people like to believe in, and I did say (maybe even to camera) that there’s nothing wrong with dreaming, and sometimes there are surprises… So I imagine that to a lay audience we must have seemed like boring curmudgeonly sorts amongst the visionaries? Oh well.
Hey Clifford, I actually stumbled on this programme whilst channel flipping this evening – I felt it was a weird programme by BBC-Horizon standards. A lot of it, at least the parts I saw, was about crackpot ideas on “anti-gravity” (wtf) sprinkled here and there with sensible comments from you and John Ellis (those were the only sensible physics comments in the programme). I felt the overall tilt of the programme and editing gave a misleading picture to the lay viewer.
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It was interesting. A good blend of the old and new.
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Very interesting – and cool! Even features BAE Systems 😉
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