The Magnus Effect: The Beautiful Games’s Most Beautiful Cheat Code

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I was in the pub Friday evening, having a sneaky pint after walking the pooch. As is inevitable at the moment, talk was on the World Cup. We were discussing England’s chances (I believe!), the Balogun/Infantino/Trump controversy, amongst other football related things. One of the guys, I shall call him Dave (because that is his name) said “what about that goal from Pavard for France in the 2018 final against Argentina.” We all nodded agreeing it is probably one of the finest goals ever scored in World Cup history (it really is). Before someone else (who probably doesn’t like the French, don’t worry France, we don’t like him!), piped up and said, “Pah, it was just a wonder goal, no skill in that, just luck. You never see defenders scoring goals like that. Even Beckham as good as he was in his day, wouldn’t have scored that.”

Now, this made me cross, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I don’t like the guy who said it very much anyway. He doesn’t know much about footy, just repeats other people’s opinions. And secondly, he was wrong. On many counts.

Number one:
Of course he intended to score, he took the shot for goodness’ sake!!
Number Two:
There was a lot of skill involved in that shot. As a professional footballer, he knew instinctively what he was doing     
Number Three:
Beckham so could have made that shot, even on whim, have you ever seen him hit a ball to switch play across field?
Number Four:
Yes, there was bit of luck in it, he hit it perfectly. That was the lucky bit.

The wonder bit came when physics took over.

Me being me, I then went on to try and explain how and why to all who would listen. That’s when everyone in the pub’s eyes started to glass over. So, I said, “I’ll tell you what, if you promise to read my blog, I’ll explain it in an article.”

And that is how I have found myself breaking one of my own rules and writing over the weekend.

Now then, after that massive intro are you ready?

Picture this:

A free kick is awarded 25 yards from goal. The defenders build a wall. The goalkeeper shuffles nervously across his line, pointing and shouting, the striker takes a few steps back, raises his hand (why do they do this?), runs up, and hits the ball.

For a split second the fans groan as it looks like the shot is heading straight into Row Z.

Then the ball changes its mind.

It bends around the wall, curls towards the top corner, and sends the goalkeeper flying through the air in pursuit of a ball that had already made its appointment with the net the second it was kicked. And the fans go wild!!!

Now then, this piece of football wizardry is the called the Magnus Effect after the dude who investigated this amazing phenomenon back in the 19th Century.

Most football fans often imagine a curling free kick as a battle between the player and the goalkeeper. Others are aware of the term Magnus Effect. And then you get people like me, who know far too much seemingly useless information that nobody wants to hear about in the pub when they’re discussing the footy.

It’s not a battle between the player and the keeper but against the air.

When a football is struck cleanly through the middle, it tends to travel fairly straight. But when it’s hit off-centre, it starts spinning, and as it spins, it drags air around with it, creating a pressure difference on either side of the ball. This results in one side of the ball ending up with lower pressure, and the other with higher pressure, which makes the ball get pushed sideways.

The result of which is you have a football that appears to have developed independent thought.

Players discovered this long before scientists explained that the spin is the power. If you add enough sidespin the ball curves left or right through the air.

This is why free-kick specialists are football’s equivalent of stage magicians. They know how to bend shots around walls, curl crosses into dangerous areas, shape passes around defenders, switch play so effectively as Beckham did and make highly skilled goalkeepers maybe question their career choices.

OK. There are three elements to this spin. There is sidespin, which is the classic freekick curve, hit the ball across its side and it swerves left or right through the air. It’s responsible for some of football’s most gorgeous goals. Think: David Beckham, Lionel Messi and pretty much every YouTube free-kick compilation that’s ever been made.

You have topspin, which makes the ball dive. The shot rises, clears the wall, and then suddenly plunges towards goal like it’s on its way to the World Cup and it remembers it’s left the oven on back home. This is the physics behind those infuriating shots that seem to drop out of the sky at the last possible moment.

And you have Backspin. It creates a lifting effect that helps the ball stay airborne longer, chip passes, floated crosses and delicate lobs often make use of it.

That was how Benjamin Pavard scored that amazing goal against Argentina back in 2018 when France beat them.

I don’t want to talk about that one though, I want to talk about another one, the one that Roberto Carlos hit against the French in 1997. This is the goal I asked you to imagine earlier, and no discussion of the Magnus Effect is complete without it.

In 1997, Roberto Carlos hit a free kick against France, in the Tournoi de France. A competition played in France with four international teams as a warm-up for the World Cup.

Now then, initially that free kick looked like it was going to go embarrassingly wide. It didn’t though, it turned out to be a 40 yard screamer into the back of the net, and is rightly considered one of the most famous and spectacular examples of the Magnus Effect in football.

For generations of football fans, this was the moment physics got a highlight reel, as it was all over the news with physicists explaining it. Just like I am now.

And this is why some players look like they have superpowers, as it gets stronger when players combine more spin, as this generally means more curve, more speed, as a faster moving ball experiences stronger aerodynamic forces, and technique.

And it is the technique that is the real secret here, and why elite players at the very top of their game don’t just hit the ball, they control exactly where, how, and what angle to strike it.

That’s why millions of Sunday-league footballers can understand the Magnus Effect, while the likes of Messi, can invoke it!

And there’s more! The Magnus Effect has a weird cousin, and that is the knuckleball which is where the fun really gets started.

Sometimes players try to do the opposite and hit the ball with almost no spin. So, instead of curving smoothly, the airflow becomes unstable and the ball wobbles unpredictably. The knuckleball is the famous free kick associated with players like Cristiano Ronaldo.

Where a Magnus free kick is a graceful ballerina, knuckleball is a shopping trolley with a faulty wheel. And that for me wins the ‘who’s better, Messi or Ronaldo’ debate.

The real magic involved with the Magnus Effect is that once you understand it, football somehow becomes even more impressive. Every curling free kick is a player manipulating air pressure, rotational velocity, aerodynamics, and fluid dynamics.

Where the crowd sees the magical, wizardly wondergoal, the physicist (and physics nerds like me) see pressure differentials, and the footballer sees a top corner that needs decorating with his mastery of the beautiful game.

And the ball? That’s the best bit, folks. The ball just follows the science.

The Magnus Effect is what turns football from a game of kicking a ball up and down the pitch into a game of mind-bending reality, just enough to make 60,000 people lose their minds!

Bell’s Inequalities: Spooky Action’s Reckoning

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Way, way back in 1935, Albert Einstein looked at the emerging theory of quantum mechanics and although he said a lot of things about it at the time, and a lot of things after that too, what it really boils down to is this. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, Einstein had a teeny-tiny (did you see what I did there?) problem with quantum mechanics. To summarise, what he was basically declaring was…

“This cannot be the whole story.”

By the mid 1930’s quantum mechanics had already become hugely and enormously successful (LOL I did it again, didn’t I!). It correctly described atoms, light, and the microscopic world. Einstein, however, being Einstein, believed wholeheartedly that it contained a profound flaw. He couldn’t accept that physical properties might not exist until they had been measured.

As far as Einstein was concerned, the Moon was still there even when nobody looked at it. Which to him meant, a particle should possess a definite state before anyone measures it. If quantum mechanics suggested otherwise, then perhaps some deeper set of hidden facts and hidden variables remained awaiting discovery.

This argument seemed destined to remain philosophical for nearly thirty years, before a quiet physicist from Northern Ireland by the name of John Bell came along.

What Bell did was ask an astonishingly simple question. He didn’t ask whether Einstein or Bohr (brilliant Danish dude, one of many things he is most famous for is developing the Bohr model of the atom) were right. He asked a much more powerful question:

If Einstein’s intuition is correct, what measurable consequences would follow?

At the time this was revolutionary. In an instant, Bell had transformed a debate about the nature of reality into a scientific hypothesis that could be tested in a laboratory.

The result of which he published in 1964, which became universally known as Bell’s Theorem.

I hear one of those questions nagging at you again. You want to know what Bell’s Theorem is, don’t you?

Well, at its heart lies a family of mathematical relationships called Bell’s Inequalities.

Let’s assume for a moment, that the Universe trots along, as it does, according to good old-fashioned common-sense.

Let’s catch up with Bob and Betty again. Imagine that two particles, born together, have then been hurled in opposite directions.

One travels to Betty and the other one travels to Bob, so now two experiments are so far apart that even a light signal cannot travel between them quickly enough to coordinate their measurements.

Now you have to ask yourself, if that’s the case, how could the particles remain correlated?

And that is when the common-sense answer comes in and seems the most obvious. They must have left the source carrying matching instructions.

Like two naughty boys, who have already agreed on their response before getting told off severely for doing something stupid (middle school, my best mate Duncan and the green houses in the garden behind the Spar next door spring to mind, but that is 100% a different story and not for now). What if the particles already know how to respond to every possible measurement?

This view, however, rests on two assumptions:

Number one: Realism. That is the properties of the particles exist before measurement, and Number two: Locality. Nothing can influence something far away faster than light.

Put them together and these two ideas form what physicists call local realism (original, huh?).

Now then, to most people, like you and old me before I learnt all this stuff, local realism sounds less like a theory and more like plain old-fashioned common-sense.

And that was Bell’s perfectly set trap!

He wondered whether pre-arranged instructions could explain every possible pattern observed in entangled particles, and he imagined particles carrying complete answer sheets.

Here’s the clever bit though: Betty and Bob don’t just get asked one question each, they can each be asked one of two different questions. So each answer sheet needs a pre-written response ready for both, not just whichever one actually gets asked.

So, if Betty chooses measurement A, the particle will give a predetermined result.

And if Bob chooses measurement B, his particle will also give a predetermined result.

What’s so unreasonable about that? Sounds very reasonable to me. I hear you say.

The thing is, Bell had discovered something quite remarkable.

He discovered that no matter how cleverly those answer sheets are designed, they can only produce correlations up to a certain mathematical limit. And that limit, folks, is a Bell Inequality!

The most famous version of which is the CHSH inequality, which predicts that a quantity called S cannot exceed 2 if local realism is true.

Nature, however, had other plans. That’s right, you’ve hit the nail firmly on the head. It’s those pesky quantum mechanics breaking the rules again, isn’t it!

And you’re right! Quantum theory predicts that entangled particles can produce correlations stronger than Bell’s limit. Not infinitely stronger. Just strong enough. Instead of stopping at 2, quantum mechanics allows values as high as:

or approximately 2.828. This maximum quantum value is called the Tsirelson bound (you’ll have to take my word on this as it’s way to complicated for me to explain simply), and to Bell, this meant something extraordinary. (If you really wanna know about Tsirelson’s bound, have a look at Wikipedia here).

If experiments ever exceeded the classical limit of 2, then no theory based on local hidden variables could fully describe reality. That was when the argument ceased to be philosophical, as reality itself would have to choose a side.

And so the experiments began. In the 1970s, physicists John Clauser and Stuart Freedman conducted the first significant tests. The results of which agreed with quantum mechanics. Although a 1973 Harvard experiment by Francis Pipkin and Richard Holt initially produced opposite results before later experiments, such as Fry and Thompson in 1976, strongly violated Bell’s Inequalities, aligning perfectly with quantum mechanics.

There were still many sceptics who remained unconvinced though.

“Perhaps the experiments contained flaws!” they shouted

“Perhaps the particles somehow communicated!” they screamed

“Perhaps the detectors introduced biases?” the shyer ones whispered to each other.

Then, in the early 1980s, a French physicist called Alain Aspect and his collaborators performed more sophisticated experiments in which detector settings changed while the particles were already in flight. And, you’ve guessed it, once again, Bell inequalities were violated. And this time the evidence was growing harder to dismiss.

For decades, physicists searched for loopholes, but every escape route was closed.

Maybe detector inefficiencies could explain the results? Nope!

Or it could be experimental effects mimicking quantum correlations? Nope!

Ah, could the measurement choices somehow be known in advance? Nope!

Researchers attacked each loophole one by one, and every time the loopholes were firmly closed.

More recently in 2015, multiple groups began reporting “loophole-free” Bell tests. However, these experiments simultaneously addressed the major known objections and still found violations of Bell Inequalities exactly where quantum mechanics predicted them. The verdict was becoming increasingly unavoidable with everything they tried. Simply put, Nature does not obey local realism.

So, what did Bell actually prove?

We often hear popular science accounts say that “Particles communicate faster than light.”

Bell did not prove that. Nor did he prove that information travels instantaneously. Nor did he show that relativity is wrong. What he proved was way, way subtler.

Basically, Bell was saying that the world cannot be explained by a picture in which distant objects merely carry pre-existing local instructions, and that something about our classical understanding of reality must give way.

And so, the great mystery remains.

The awkward truth of the matter is that physicists still disagree about exactly what Bell’s theorem means, with some interpretations abandoning realism, and others abandoning locality.

Other physicists have attempted to rethink the measurement altogether.

But all serious interpretations must confront Bell’s result.  The experimental facts may no longer be in doubt, but the philosophical meaning remains fiercely debated.

And that leads us to why Bell matters. While many scientific discoveries tell us how the universe behaves, Bell’s theorem is fundamentally different. It tells us how the universe cannot behave.

It places a permanent limit on any explanation that can be built from everyday intuitions about objects carrying definite properties which are interacting only through local causes.

For centuries, philosophers wondered whether reality existed independently of observation. Bell found a way to ask the question experimentally.

The answer appears to be that the microscopic world is stranger than even Einstein imagined. And perhaps the most astonishing part of all is that a debate that began around blackboards and thought experiments ended with photons, detectors, laboratory equipment, and reality itself casting the deciding vote.

Hopefully, with my explanation of Bell’s Inequalities, my previous two articles will make a bit more sense now.

It’s mind-bogglingly amazing that with all the mind-bogglingly stuff all the clever physicists and quantum dudes have learned and discovered and now understand, that we have been going around in circles with this one for nearly a century. And that, my friends, is one of the many reasons I love physics!

Spooky Action at a Distance Part Two: Down the Rabbit Hole

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Hello again, lovely readers. If you missed Part One, here’s the short version: quantum entanglement lets two particles share a connection so deep that measuring one instantly tells you something about the other, no matter the distance between them. Einstein hated it, called it “spooky action at a distance,” and spent decades convinced something deeper had to be going on underneath. Turns out he was wrong about the “something’s missing” bit but, as we found out, also sort of right that something deeper was going on, just not in the way he expected. If you want a full recap of the article click here.

This one was a toughie folks, and I’m glad I took the extra week to get it right, and believe me, it gets weirder!

OK. Here we go. Now, where were we? Ah yes…

We left things with entanglement’s strangest party trick: the correlation between two particles is instant, but you still can’t use it to send a message faster than light. Relativity stays safe. Causality stays intact. Crisis averted.

So, if entanglement can’t be used to break physics, what is it actually good for? As it turns out, it’s good for quite a lot as from here on, things get genuinely practical, and then genuinely weird, in roughly that order.

We’re going to look at the real technology entanglement already powers, then follow the rabbit hole all the way down to black holes, wormholes, and the unsettling possibility that the universe itself might be built out of nothing but connections.

So, if you’re ready, buckle up, it’s time for an amazingly quantumly entangled ride…!

For decades, entanglement was just a philosophical curiosity, whereas these days it’s an actual working tool. Thanks to entanglement, quantum cryptography is possible. Entangled particles can be used to generate secure encryption keys, and the process appears almost magical! Any attempt to eavesdrop disturbs the system, so if you attempt to spy, you are immediately detected, clapped in irons, and locked in a dark room for ever (or spend hours and hours and days and days writing a blog piece trying to explain quantum entanglement as punishment. Obviously, I jest. I haven’t been spying. Honest. I wouldn’t know how to).

Something else that entanglement gives us is quantum computing, which again, is something else we are always hearing about, without actually hearing about it. Classical computers use bits, that is zeros and ones. Quantum computers use qubits (no, not Q*Bert, he’s the cute orange dude from the Nintendo game, which was originally an arcade game by someone else. I might be wrong on that one though, answer in the comments if you’re so inclined). Using qubits means each one can be zero, one, or both, at the same time, behaving as a single system with many possible simultaneous states, allowing problems to be solved dramatically faster.

And there’s more! Entanglement also gives us quantum teleportation; we can beam people from orbit to M class planets just like Star Trek!!! Sorry, got a bit carried away there, we sadly can’t do the Star Trek stuff, and it’s very likely we never will. Although it’s not anywhere near as exciting as Star Trek, quantum teleportation is still remarkably awesome as we can transfer the exact quantum state of a particle from one place to another without physically sending it.

Let me try and explain that with an analogy! Bob and Betty both share an entangled pair, Betty measures her particle in a way that reveals its information but destroys its original state in the process and sends the result to Bob as an ordinary classical message. Bob then uses that message to transform his own particle, the other half of the entangled pair, into the exact state Betty’s particle used to hold.

Hopefully that all makes sense, as we’re moving on to an even bigger idea now. Entanglement as the fabric of reality. How mind bendingly cool does that sound?

Let me try and explain that in my rambling way without rambling too much.

Some physicists suspect entanglement isn’t just a feature of the universe, but that it might be the thing that everything else is built on. Let’s take a look at black holes and entropy. You know what entropy is even if you don’t think you do. Rudolf Clausius, the German physicist, said (in 1850…?), when describing the second law of thermodynamics, that the universe’s natural state moves from order to disorder, which is known as entropy. You can see this in action just by watching an ice cube you have taken out of the freezer and left on the kitchen work top, as it naturally melts in a warm room, the puddle of water it leaves behind, however, never spontaneously freezes back into an ice cube. I have a feeling that I’m going to have to add thermodynamics and entropy to the list of future blog articles. At least I’ll be keeping myself busy!

Sorry, went off on a tangent there, back to black holes and entropy (you already know about black holes as you’ve read my Black Holes article, haven’t you?).

Black holes have entropy, but the strange thing is their entropy is proportional to their surface area, not their volume, which suggests something profound. It suggests that the information content of a region of space might live on its boundary and that space may be more like a hologram than a solid volume.

Let me try and explain that better.

When scientists analyse this, they find that the entropy of a black hole behaves like entanglement entropy, a bit like entanglement acting as a sticky information glue. The inside and the outside of a black hole are deeply entangled, which means the structure of spacetime within may emerge from these connections.

A modern theory suggests that entangled particles may be connected to tiny wormholes, not like the Star Trek wormhole near Bajor that you can travel through and start an intergalactic war, think of them more like mathematical bridges linking them together.

Right, here’s the bit I said in Part One I would attempt to explain later, this stuff is all relatively new, but I’m going to have a good stab at it.

To attempt to explain this, we’re going back to Einstein. ER = EPR (yes, another equation, this is new stuff though, real, current research and I love it!).

EPR is the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect and refers to the bit in quantum mechanics where two particles become linked so that measuring one will instantly affect the other, regardless of distance.

ER is the Einstein-Rosen bridge (this is what actually got me interested in all this stuff way back in 1996 just after I bought my first house). The Einstein-Rosen bridge is a type of wormhole, a hypothetical tunnel connecting two different points in spacetime.

In simple terms, this means that when two particles are entangled, it’s as if they are connected by an invisible geometric link, in this case, think of it as a teeny tiny wormhole, not in the sense of travelling as I stated above with my Star Trek analogy, but just as a theoretical way to describe the connection. This is important because it tries to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity and may help to explain what happens in black holes.

The way it was first explained to me (by my father back in said nineties) is one of those things that you often see in sci-fi movies when the science boffin is trying to explain space travel (or something similar) to us regular folk. Imagine two particles as two dots left by a marker pen, on a piece of A4, one at the top of the page, the other at the bottom. Looking at the page, they are far apart, but you can fold the paper in half, so the two dots are touching. This “fold” is essentially the wormhole (the ER bit of the above equation. The Einstein-Rosen bridge).

This was Einstein’s description of quantum entanglement. His “Spooky action at a distance.” As I mentioned in my last article, he thought entanglement was weird and suspicious. These days the teeny tiny physics dudes (quantum physicists, not small people made out of physics, although that is technically not far off what we actually are, albeit all different shapes and sizes) have a different, more boring way of describing it.

They just say, “what if it’s not spooky, what if the particles are literally connected through spacetime?”

Don’t just take my word for it, this isn’t just theory, it has been engineered in labs and I have more equations to demonstrate coming up.

To create entanglement there is this simple recipe:

First off, you start with two qubits:

|0> |0>

Then you apply a Hadamard gate (a fundamental logic gate) which puts one qubit into a superposition. Next you apply a CNOT (Controlled not gate, another fundamental logic gate). This links the second qubit to the first. The result is:

(|00> + |11>) / √2

And that, folks, is an entangled state.

And it gives us real world hardware with different technologies that can achieve this physically. Superconducting qubits are controlled with microwave pulses, trapped ions use shared motion to couple particles and photons can be entangled through nonlinear optics. These processes, however, are precise, delicate and extremely sensitive to noise. Which is partly why we don’t see this in everyday use. With entanglement everywhere, why does the whole world look so normal? The answer to that is decoherence.

When quantum systems interact with their environment, such as air molecules, light, and heat, these interactions spread entanglement everywhere and destroy any clean quantum correlations, resulting in quantum weirdness fading as classical reality re-emerges. Because of entanglement, we are forced to rethink some deeply held assumptions. Here’s a little table to help visualise it:
 

What we expectWhat quantum physics says
Objects are separateSystems can be fundamentally inseparable
Properties exist alreadyThey may only form during measurement
Influences are localCorrelations can be nonlocal

This in turn leaves us with three uncomfortable truths.

  • Reality isn’t local.
  • It isn’t fully predetermined.
  • Information plays a central role in physics.

This forces us to think of the universe in a new way, which isn’t very easy if you are entrenched in the old ways. Instead of thinking of the universe in terms of things, think of it in terms of relationships. What entanglement is telling us is that what matters most isn’t what something is but how it is connected to everything else.

Poor old Einstein worried that entanglement meant that physics had gone off the rails, and it bothered him for years, when instead it revealed something so much deeper: the universe isn’t just a collection of isolated objects moving through space, it is a web of connections where space and separation may emerge from something more fundamental underneath.

Quantum entanglement shows us that reality is built not from independent pieces, but from shared states that link distant parts of the universe into a single, unified whole.

I suppose this could lead us into a discussion on dark matter and dark energy, but along with lots of other stuff I’ve mentioned while writing these articles, that is for another time. First, I need to crack on with some of the stuff I’ve teased already. Bell’s Inequalities next methinks, which will be another biggie!

Quantum Entanglement Part One – Spooky Action at a Distance

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Just a quick note before we start: I got a bit carried away with this one. What was meant to be one article on quantum entanglement turned into something closer to a small dissertation, so I’ve split it into two parts rather than dumping the whole lot on you in one sitting which will also give me an extra week do the research and get Part Two much more readable.

This week, Part One: entanglement itself, what Einstein got wrong (and sort of right), and why it doesn’t break the universe. Next Friday, Part Two: what entanglement actually builds, and how deep the rabbit hole goes. Right, on with the show…

Hello, my lovely readers, how about today we take a friendly deep dive into the universe’s strangest connection: Quantum Entanglement.

At some point in your life, you were probably told the universe works like a well-behaved machine. Things move, collide, push, and pull. Causes lead neatly to effects. Objects exist whether or not you’re looking at them.

Then quantum physics came along and politely, but firmly, said:

“Er… Excuse me? I like your thinking, but that’s not quite right.”

And at the heart of that disruption is something both beautiful and unsettling, something the physics boffins call quantum entanglement. The term was first coined by Erwin Schrödinger, you know, the guy with the cat in the box you’re always hearing about?

Einstein famously mocked it as “spooky action at a distance.” He thought it was a flaw, but it actually turned out to be a feature.

Let me try and unpack what that really means, without getting lost in too much maths, (as, I’ve mentioned before, maths isn’t one of my strong points), but still going deeper than the usual surface explanations.

So, what is entanglement?

Imagine two particles created together, say, two photons born from the same event. From that moment on, their properties become linked. They are not just similar, and not just predictable. They are shared, which means if you measure something about one such as its orientation or “spin”, you instantly know the corresponding property of the other.

Even, and this is the truly mind blowing bit, if it’s on the other side of the galaxy.

Well, that doesn’t sound so weird, right? At first glance, it feels normal, I’ll go with the classic analogy, say you have two gloves, one left and one right and you put them in separate boxes. You send one to Norwich and the other one to Waitangi (I chose these two places as I live in Norwich and I googled what is the antipodal point of Norwich City UK; here’s a link for no reason: https://tinyurl.com/4ap8w4d3). When you open one you immediately know what the other one is. No mystery, right? Except this analogy quietly assumes something critical and that is the gloves already had definite identities before you looked.

Unfortunately, quantum particles don’t behave that way.

The twist is that reality isn’t really set until you look. In quantum mechanics, particles can exist in a superposition which is a blend of possibilities. Before measurement, an electron doesn’t have a definite “spin” like up or down, it simply exists in a cloud of probabilities. Are you still with me? I’m going to carry on regardless even if you’re not as you’ll get it at the end, I promise. If I can understand it, absolutely anyone can.

So, when two particles are entangled, it’s not that they secretly agreed in advance that is what they were going to do, it’s more like they didn’t fully decide until one of them was observed and then they both snapped into agreement instantly!

Einstein didn’t like this at all and that’s the part he just couldn’t accept, and was quite vocal about it for many years. He believed in two key ideas: locality, where nothing can influence something else faster than light, and realism: where physical properties exist whether we observe them or not.

Einstein’s big problem with entanglement was that it seems to violate both. So, in 1935, Einstein and colleagues proposed the EPR paradox (I’ll attempt to actually explain this a bit later).

“Quantum mechanics must be incomplete. Something deeper must be going on.”

He suspected hidden variables, unknown factors quietly determining outcomes behind the scenes.

This debate simmered on and on for decades, it sounded philosophical and almost untestable until in 1964, physicist John Bell made a breakthrough.

He showed that if Einstein was right, that is, if hidden variables governed everything, then there should be strict limits on how correlated entangled particles can be. Right?

These limits are called Bell inequalities.

Basically, (without attempting any heavy maths), Bell’s logic boiled down to this:

If particles carry pre-existing answers, and no influence travels faster than light, then their measurement correlations must stay within certain bounds.

Right? Get it? No? Me neither at first and it’ll take yet another blog post to explain it fully, so just go with it for now and I’ll have to tell you all about Bell Inequalities in a different post.

Anyway, back to where we were: quantum mechanics predicts something different. It predicts stronger correlations than classical physics allows.

Physicists tested Bell’s predictions with real experiments, over and over, by taking entangled particles, separating them, and measuring them in different ways.

The result showed that quantum mechanics wins. Every time. Without fail. The observed correlations broke Bell’s Inequality, they couldn’t be explained with hidden variables, and they couldn’t be explained by local interactions either. Furthermore, recent experiments have ruled out all the usual loopholes.

This means we are forced to accept something different and more radical; the universe isn’t both local and real in the classical sense, which means something about our everyday intuition is wrong.

Hang on just a minute, didn’t you say in your last article that you couldn’t have faster than light messaging? If one particle instantly affects another, why can’t we use this to send messages faster than light?

And the answer to that question is quite a simple one, you can’t control the outcome of your measurement. When you measure a particle, you can’t choose “spin up” versus “spin down”; you can only observe whatever happens. Which means you get a random result. While the correlation is instant, there’s no way to encode and transmit information. Nature gives you Einstein’s spooky connection but keeps communications firmly limited by relativity.

And there we have it, the end of Part One, a short one this week as all the extra fun stuff will be packed in to Part Two, which judging by my draft, will be a tad longer. Thanks again for reading, and stay tuned folks, if I pull my finger out and crack on I’ll have Part Two ready for this time next week.

The Speed of Light: The Universe’s Ultimate Limit

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Due to another recent sleepless night thanks to my mind working in overdrive, I found myself contemplating the speed of light, and the more I contemplated it, the more it wouldn’t let me go back to sleep, and the stranger it seemed.

It’s one of those things you hear about your whole life. School, documentaries, random science articles, the closing song to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, so much so you sort of take it for granted. Light goes very fast. End of story, right?

Er, no. The more I started thinking about it, the more I realised it’s not just about how fast light travels.

It’s something much deeper than that.

So, what actually is the speed of light?

At its most basic level, it’s just a number, but not just any number. It is a number that quietly governs everything in the universe, how fast signals travel, how time flows, how gravity behaves, and even how reality itself is stitched together.

That number is the speed of light, usually written as c.

It’s not just the speed at which sunlight reaches your face or lasers shoot across a room. It goes far deeper than that. It is, in many ways, the fundamental rhythm of reality.

The speed of light in a vacuum is: c = 299,792,458 metres per second.

That’s about 300,000 kilometres per second, or if you prefer it in imperial, 186,000 miles per second, fast enough to go around the Earth more than seven times in a single second.

But here’s the interesting part: this number isn’t just measured, it’s defined. Since 1983, the metre itself has been based on how far light travels in a fraction of a second.

So, in a strange way, we’re not just measuring light, we’re using it to define reality.

Another thing that’s easy to miss is that c isn’t really about light on its own. It’s the speed of all electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves to gamma rays, and even appears in the laws governing phenomena like gravitational waves.

Nothing in the universe can go faster than light. Not matter, not energy, and not information. That’s what gives the universe its speed limit. Why? I hear you ask. And the answer, my friends, is because anything with mass accelerating toward c will require more and more energy. To actually reach it would require infinite energy, which is impossible.

The speed of light is therefore not just fast, it is absolute.

This is where Einstein comes in. Back in 1905 he made a radical leap. He proposed that the speed of light is the same for all observers, no matter how fast they themselves are moving.

That seemingly simple idea shattered classical physics to smithereens (I might be being a bit over dramatic there) and led to the theory of special relativity, and with it came strange and beautiful consequences: time slows down for objects moving near light speed, and length shrinks in the direction of motion. Mass and energy turned out to be two sides of the same coin too, which gives us the most famous equation of all:

In that one brilliant moment, the speed of light became more than just a velocity. It became a statement about how we see the universe itself: because light travels at a fixed speed, we never see the universe as it is, only as it was.

So, if you look at the Sun you are seeing it from 8 minutes in the past, the moon is from 1.3 seconds ago, any nearby stars you gaze at are years ago, and if you were to look at distant galaxies, they are from millions or billions of years ago. Amazing, isn’t it? Every time you look into the night sky, you are literally looking into history.

Let’s take a closer look at light, fields, and the deep structure of physics.

In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell showed us that light is actually an electromagnetic wave, and its speed comes from the properties of empty space itself, which in itself is a bit mind bending!

Then, in modern quantum physics, we go a step further. Reality, as far as we can tell, is made of fields. Particles are just ripples in those fields, and the speed of light is the maximum speed those ripples can travel. In this view, c is not just about light, it is the speed of all cause-and-effect in the universe.

And this ties into black holes as well (as I was rambling about in my last post). If you make gravity strong enough, you eventually reach a point where the escape velocity equals the speed of light and that’s the event horizon. Beyond that, nothing gets out, not because something is pulling it back in like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, but because spacetime itself is warped in such a way that every possible path leads inward.

What’s that? Another question I hear? Can we go faster than light? No, we can’t, not with the laws of physics as we understand them now. Modern physics is very strict on this; nothing can move through space faster than light.

But the universe does have a trick up its sleeve. Space itself can expand faster than light. Distant galaxies are being carried away faster than light so that some are forever beyond our reach. Crucially, this doesn’t break relativity, because nothing is actually moving through space faster than light, space itself is stretching.

Which leads us to another question: if we could travel faster than light, why would doing so break reality?

And the answer to that question is this: if faster-than-light communication were possible, something extraordinary, and dangerous, would happen. Cause and effect could reverse, which in some reference frames means a message would arrive before it was sent, creating a paradox where an effect precedes its cause.

And this is why physicists think of c not as the speed of light, but as the speed of causality.

Still with me? Good, I’m going to get a bit more technical here and bung in an equation, I try to avoid equations as much as possible as they can be baffling to understand (apart from the one above, obviously), it’s only as I have got older and more learned (hark at me!!) that I am better able to get my head around them.

Anyway, the speed of light also appears in one of physics’ most mysterious numbers, The fine-structure constant:

It basically shows us how strongly electromagnetism works, and it depends on the speed of light, along with quantum mechanics and electric charge and other quantumy stuff. Anyway, together these constants define how atoms hold together, how chemistry works, and ultimately how anything exists at all, but that is for another blog post, so you’ll just have to take my word for it for now.

All this brings us to the one final mystery which nobody really has an answer to. Why this number? Why does the speed of light have this exact value? We know how to measure it. We can use it. We know it shapes spacetime itself. But why that value?

At the deepest level, where quantum mechanics meets gravity, we still don’t know. Remember, I’m just an amateur here and I definitely have no idea. However, some theories suggest spacetime may emerge from something deeper, and that c might emerge with it.

Putting all this into perspective (and adding some cool bullet points), the speed of light is:

  • The maximum speed of information
  • The structure of spacetime
  • The limit of cause and effect
  • A link between energy, mass, space, and time

It is not just a property of light. It is a property of reality itself. How’s that for a statement?

But wait, it gets even better as perhaps the strangest thing of all is that every single moment, everything in the universe is obeying that limit.

Whether we notice it or not, the future is only ever unfolding as fast as light allows.

Black Holes: What the Hell are they Really?

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As is often the case, I’ve had a lot of things on my mind recently, mainly work stuff as there’s been a lot of uncertainty around mine, and my mate Chris who I work with, roles. All sorted now, well, sort of, I’ll tell you about it another time, if you’re lucky.

Anyway, when things start to overwhelm me, I tend to start ruminating on random stuff I know, or have learnt, that has stuck with me. Today, for no particular reason, other than I’ve been getting quite sciency recently, it has been black holes, and as I seem to have my writing mojo back, I thought to myself, why not put these thoughts to paper and bang out an article for my blog. I know I only have a handful of readers (friends and family who humour me by showing an interest), but I find it quite therapeutic. 

So, Black Holes, what the hell are they really? They’re one of those things that you hear about your whole life, mostly in passing, science programmes, random articles, the odd bit on the news, songs by Muse etc., and you sort of think you know what they are as in they’re a big gravity thing and nothing escapes from them, right?

That’s all very true, but the more I started properly looking into them, the more I realised that I didn’t really understand them at all. Or maybe a better way of putting it is, I understood the idea of them, but not what they actually are. And that’s where things start to get a bit weird.

So, what actually is a black hole?

At the most basic level, a black hole is just a place in space where gravity has become so strong that nothing can escape it. Not even light, just as I said above, but that alone is already slightly weird, because light, as we all know, is the fastest thing there is. If light can’t escape, then whatever’s going on there must be pretty extreme.

The reason this happens is actually quite simple in principle. If you take a massive object, like a star, and compress all that mass into a ridiculously small space that it fits within a critical radius, the gravitational pull increases. Keep compressing it, and eventually you reach a point where the escape velocity (the speed you’d need to get away from it) is higher than the speed of light, and at that point, you’ve got yourself a black hole.

Simple enough, in theory.

But it’s not really gravity in the way we think, and this is where it starts to shift a bit as black holes aren’t just strong gravity in the usual sense, they’re more like a distortion in spacetime itself. And although that sounds like one of those throwaway science phrases, it’s actually the key to everything.

As Einstein pointed out in his theory of relativity, space and time aren’t actually separate things, they’re part of the same fabric. Spacetime. And massive objects bend that fabric. That is they bend spacetime. The Earth bends it a bit, the Sun bends it a lot more, and a black hole basically folds it in on itself like someone’s tried to fold up a fitted sheet and given up halfway through (to this day, and despite my wife showing me numerous times, I still can’t fold a fitted sheet).

So, what is the event horizon, this so called point of no return? I hear you say

Well, the event horizon isn’t a physical surface. You won’t bump into it like a wall. It’s just a boundary in space, once you cross it, there is literally no path back out. Not because something is blocking you, but because all possible directions you could move through spacetime point further inward, cones of light tilt inward so that all future paths lead deeper in. It quite literally is the point of no return.

And what’s really strange is what it looks like from the outside. If you were watching someone fall into a black hole, they’d appear to slow down as they got closer to the event horizon, they would become slower and slower, until to the eyes of the observer, they appear to freeze there before slowly fading away, so you never actually see them going all the way in, but from their point of view, they just fall straight through.

That disconnect between what’s actually happening and what you see is where things start to feel a bit off and one of those questions that always seems to come up is, what happens if I were to fall in to one? and the honest answer is:

It depends.

I know that answer is a bit of a cop out, but if it’s a smaller black hole, you’re in a lot of trouble very quickly. The difference in gravitational pull between your feet and your head becomes so extreme that you get stretched out into a thin strand. This is what people in physics circles call spaghettification, which sounds almost funny until you think about it.

For a really massive black hole though, like the one at the centre of our galaxy (and the one in the song by Muse), it’s a bit less dramatic at first. You could actually cross the event horizon without noticing anything particularly unusual in that moment. It’s only later, the deeper in you go, that it becomes unavoidable and you’re on a one way trip.

Either way, you’re not coming back.

At the centre of a black hole is something called the singularity. In theory, this is a point where all the mass is crushed down into an infinitely small space, with infinite density, but here’s the thing, infinite in physics usually means we don’t actually know what’s going on. Physics dudes don’t like anything to be infinite as it mucks up all the other stuff we know about the universe. It’s basically our equations throwing their hands up and saying, this doesn’t make sense anymore.

So, the singularity might not actually exist in that exact form. It’s more likely that something else is happening there, something we just don’t yet have the tools or the physics to describe properly, and that’s where black holes start to become really cool.

For one thing, they’re not actually completely black, which surprised me the most when I first came across it, and black holes can actually lose energy.

There’s this process called Hawking radiation (yes, that cool dude who wrote that brilliant book, if you haven’t read it, you should), where tiny quantum effects near the edge of a black hole allow particles to escape. It’s often explained in terms of virtual particle pairs forming near the event horizon, with one falling in and the other escaping. It’s incredibly weak, but over very, very long periods of time, it means the black hole slowly shrinks and would eventually disappear entirely. Which is a strange idea in itself, something that swallows everything, but can also slowly evaporate.

Still with me? Good, as now we get to the bit we really don’t understand and where it all ties together.

Black holes are basically where two major parts of physics collide:

General relativity (which describes gravity and large-scale things) and Quantum mechanics (which describes teeny tiny things).

Both of these work extremely well on their own, but inside a black hole they don’t agree, which leads to some big problems, one of the biggest being, what happens to information?

If something falls into a black hole, all the information about it should still exist in some form as physics says information can’t just be destroyed, but black holes seem to do exactly that, either the information isn’t actually lost (and we don’t understand how it’s preserved), or our understanding of physics is incomplete. And if we’re being honest, it’s probably the latter, there’s something missing from our understanding of physics.

The part I keep coming back to is, as all this stuffs wanders through my noggin, is why does any of this matter? And it matters because black holes aren’t just weird objects sitting out there doing their own thing. They actually seem to play a huge role in how the universe works.

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centre which influences how stars form, how galaxies evolve, and possibly even how structure forms on a cosmic scale, but more than that, they’re one of the few places where we can really test the limits of our theories. They’re not just interesting in their own right, they actually do something, we just haven’t figured out exactly what that is yet.

In the end, I don’t think black holes are really about “things that suck stuff in,” even though that’s how they’re often described. They’re more like boundaries. Points where our current understanding of reality runs out and something deeper takes over. And the more you look into them, the more you start to feel like we’re still only scratching the surface.

Which, if nothing else, makes them worth thinking about properly.

A thought experiment about how advanced civilisations might preserve knowledge. Not through communication, but through persistence

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I’ve been thinking about the Fermi Paradox again recently, that slightly uncomfortable question about why, if intelligent life is likely in the universe, we don’t seem to have any real evidence of it.

For decades, the search has mostly focused on listening. Radio signals, communication, signs that something out there is trying to make itself known. So far, despite years of searching we have nothing definitive.

This got me wondering whether we’ve been looking for the wrong thing entirely. If you look at what we’re doing as a civilisation, there’s been a noticeable shift.

We’re getting very good at storing information by placing huge amounts of data in tiny physical space. We have materials designed to last for extremely long periods (fused silica, for example), and more recently, even starting to think about storing data off-world

There are already data payloads on the Moon, essentially early attempts at creating long-term archives beyond Earth. In a similar spirit, earlier missions like Pioneer 10 and 11 even carried engraved plaques, simple, durable messages intended to outlast the spacecraft themselves and potentially be understood by any intelligence that might encounter them.

Because we are sending these data stores to the moon, it feels like a subtle but important step, it suggests something quite different about where technology might be heading. Not outward and loud, but inward and durable.

So, I had this idea, and my thought is this:

What if advanced civilisations don’t broadcast signals, those huge technosignatures and radio communications that SETI have been searching for? What if they leave records instead?

Rather than trying to communicate across vast distances, they might create something that simply persists as a kind of long-term archive. If that’s the case, those archives would probably be small and compact. passive (no need for active power), and extremely durable, designed to last for very long periods, and possibly deliberately placed somewhere stable and discoverable.

If you were looking for a place to store something long-term in our solar system, Mars orbit actually starts to make a lot of sense.  It’s relatively quiet compared to Earth orbit as there is less atmospheric drag, fewer large perturbations, and a simpler gravitational environment overall. There’s also the added point that Mars itself likely had a very different past, thicker atmosphere, liquid water, maybe even early-life conditions. So, it’s not just stable, it’s interesting from a biological perspective.

From an engineering standpoint, there are a couple of obvious candidates. Higher Mars orbit (away from atmospheric effects and lower orbital decay), gravitationally stable regions like the Lagrange points (L4 and L5), where objects can remain relatively stable over long periods.

What would we actually see though? If something like this existed, I doubt it would look like a spacecraft in the way we tend to imagine it. It would probably be small. Passive. Unremarkable at first glance. Maybe the sort of things we’d need to look for are:

  • Small objects in unusual but stable orbits
  • Occasional bright reflections, glints, where light catches on a surface
  • Slightly odd thermal behaviour
  • Shapes or edges that don’t quite look natural

In other words, subtle anomalies. Nothing dramatic. Nothing obvious. Just things that don’t quite fit. None of this is especially speculative, it’s just basic orbital mechanics.

One of the most interesting parts of this idea is the possibility that we might already have the data.

We’ve been observing Mars for decades now, with high-resolution imagery, radar data. And thermal measurements, But, all of that work has been focused on the surface, not on systematically looking for small, anomalous objects in orbit. Which means there’s a gap. We might already have the data; we’ve just never really asked this particular question of it.

Is all this actually testable? The answer is yes, and that’s what makes this idea interesting to me.

It’s not just a thought experiment,. It’s something that could be tested, even at a basic level by taking existing Mars datasets and running anomaly detection on them. We can search for anything that looks odd or behaves in an unexpected way while filtering out the obvious stuff such as known spacecraft, debris, noise, etc.

Even if nothing turns up, we’d still learn something about what’s there, and what isn’t.

Why does this matter? I hear you ask. Well, If something like this did exist, even just one confirmed example, it would completely change the situation, because it wouldn’t rely on communication, It wouldn’t rely on timing or distance or whether anyone is still “out there”. It would just be… evidence. At that point, the Fermi Paradox wouldn’t really be about silence anymore, it would be more like: Have we simply not recognised what we’re looking at?

As a final thought, I’m not claiming that there are definitely extraterrestrial archives sitting out there in Mars orbit, but it does feel like one of those ideas that sits right on the edge between speculative and testable. And more importantly:

It’s something we haven’t really looked for.

Given how much data we already have, and how our own technology is evolving — it feels like a question that’s at least worth asking properly, because if those kinds of records did exist, we might not even realise we’re looking at them.

Hypothesis (for clarity)

Advanced extraterrestrial civilisations may prioritise long-term information preservation over visible energetic expansion, and may therefore deploy compact, durable archival systems in stable orbital environments, such as Mars orbit or associated gravitationally stable regions, where such artefacts could plausibly persist over extended timescales and be discoverable through systematic analysis of orbital data.

This is a simplified statement of the idea discussed above.

Full Paper

If you’d like to explore the idea in more detail, including the full framework, methodology, and supporting reasoning:

👉 Download my full paper (PDF):
https://malandally.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/andrews_2026_06_12.pdf

How Killing Joke Soundtracked 40 Years of My Life

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Killing joke are my favourite band and have been my favourite band ever since I first saw them on The Tube in 1983. I particularly remember Eighties from that performance, and although with it being nearly 40 years ago, a quick search on YouTube, and viewing it now for the first time since I first watched it on a Friday evening after school on our little CRT TV, the whole three track set is exactly as I remember, and has brought back instant lost memories of the little house we lived in.

And here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zETNFX-s6Q4

When it was broadcast, I had just turned 14, and although by that age I was very much into Punk, mostly Siouxsie and the Banshees,the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and the Damned, along with Exploited, UK Subs, Chron Gen and Crass etc. this was a whole new sound and image for me. Prior to this, my music taste had been formulated from my disjointed childhood, the archetypal, council estate, single parent family, mostly just me and my mum, my sister being 12 years older than I had more or less flown the nest at that point. My punk aspirations go back to 1979, I can remember watching a feature on Nationwide on the telly about the death of Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols, I would have been 9 or 10 at the time and that would be the first fuel on my lifelong journey into the very best of musical genres. It would be a couple of years yet, to my last year at middle school, for the metamorphosis to become complete.

At that time, at 12 years old, my best friend was Duncan Rivett, we were firm friends, the friendship being born of our similar situation of it being just us and our mums, and us both being into the same noise. Together we would discover Exploited, UK Subs, Charged GBH and other iconic eighties punk bands of the time. There was also another kid at school, Jonathan Read (a.k.a Grubby, I’ve no idea where the nickname came from, you’ll have to ask him). My memory of Grubby is him being more of a metalhead, into AC/DC and Saxon, but it was he that introduced me to the Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle. I remember taking the album to one of our school discos, and Mr Watt, the teacher/DJ point blankly refusing to play anything from it until we badgered him into playing Who Killed Bambi.

Anyway, enough of the rambling, there’s another blog post waiting to be written about those last two paragraphs.

Back to Killing Joke. I had just turned 14 when I saw that performance on the telly and I was mesmerised by it. The energy of Big Paul’s drums, the power emanating from Geordies vintage Gibson ES-295, Raven’s thumping bass and the image of Jaz Colman in that make-up and stomping around hit me straight in my chest.

I remember buying the first album in Robin’s Records in Norwich the following Saturday on our weekly trip to the City, desperately wanting to get home to play it. And playing it constantly when I did, my mum yelling up the stairs to me in my room, to turn down that appalling noise, I couldn’t hear her of course, the music was too loud, she scared the shit out of me, as she often did, storming through the door and bellowing at me to turn it off. I remember taking it in to school on the Monday to show my friends, having already taped a few copies to give away (I know home taping was killing music, the record sleeves told me that, but we all did it anyway, in all honesty, without home taping I wouldn’t have discovered many of the bands that defined my youth and are still with me today).

By the time I first got to see them live at the UEA in Norwich, the following February of ’84, I had the full discography, and they were my favourite band (those of you that know me, this was a good 18 months before I turned into Robert Smith). This wasn’t my first live gig, I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts about my sister’s then boyfriend, Chris, who took me to so many gigs in the early eighties, and who had a massive influence on me musically, introducing me to all sorts from Tom Newman, The Grateful Dead and Joy Division, and a boat load of other stuff along the way.

This though, was the loudest I had ever been to. It was amazing, every track they performed, thumped through me, most of the night is lost in my memory, but I do remember Eighties and Requiem as well as Wardance with complete clarity. My ears rang for days after the gig.

I’ve seen Killing Joke a few times since. The Night Time tour at the UEA in ’85. 1994 at The Waterfront on the Pandemonium tour, the UEA again in 1995. I didn’t see them again until nearly ten years later when I went to the Astoria in London in 2003, two gigs over two nights at that venue. And what an amazing couple of nights they were. I’d been playing the new album, 2003’s Killing Joke, constantly since its release, and when the tour was announced there was no way I was going to miss it, and no way I wasn’t going to both. Back to Norwich and The Waterfront in 2006 and 2012, and again at the UEA in 2018, which was the first concert I went to with my punk gigs buddy Paul. Since that first gig in 1984 I have never missed one in my hometown.

The last time I saw them was last night, as I write this, at Hammersmith Apollo for the last gig of the current, short, tour. Travelling down with Paul for yet another gig, we’ve been to a few together now, over the last few years, despite COVID and lockdown keeping us away for two years.

They were awesome, and I spent the whole night bouncing around in the mosh pit at the front, lost completely in the moment, at one with the music and the atmosphere of The Gathering, revelling in the amazing sound of the music emanating from the stage. It was a great weekend, meeting up with so many fellow fans before and after the gig. And, I have to admit, soppy old me with my emotions always plain to see, I shed a tear or two during, at the end of, and after the gig.

My journey with Killing Joke, may not have started when the band first started, but they have been in my life, and constantly in my ears, for nearly forty years. I love each and every Album (not Outside the Gate, it wasn’t really a Killing Joke album anyway, just a Jaz Coleman opus, which having caused the loss of Big Paul led me to resent the recording and I haven’t listened to it since its release). I love the not so popular Night Time and Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Rubicon and Love of the Masses are two songs from the latter that got me through some tricky times. Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions thumped, Pandemonium is my favourite, a powerful album that also reminds me what a great year for me 1994 was as I headed into my mid-twenties. Democracy with its mellower acoustic sound, Medicine Wheel being my favourite from that one. The power and brute force of 2003’s Killing Joke, a return to form that continued with Hosanna’s from the Basements of Hell, that album is ear bleedingly brilliant. Then the return of Big Paul Ferguson and Youth, the original line up back together for the first time since 1982, for Absolute Dissent in 2010. 2012’s MMXII, ready for the end of the world as predicted by the Mayans. Another head-splitting powerhouse outing with 2015’s Pylon, the track I Am The Virus an eerily scary and accurate prediction of what would hit the world a few years later in 2020. The latest release, the Lord Of Chaos EP, an awesome track, which got dropped from the setlist mid tour for an unknown reason. It’s great, I urge you to listen to it. Indeed, I urge you to listen and immerse yourself in all that is Killing Joke.

Honour the fire!

She Had to Run… This Is What She Left Behind

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Thanks to crippling writers block, this is the first piece of micro fiction, or anything for that matter, I have written in a very long time. It is a long way from my best work with a dodgy paragraph or two, and it took me an hour and not the usual ten minutes, but I’m pleased I’ve managed to get something out. Here it is in it’s unedited form as it was written, I plan to revisit it at sometime.

Massive thanks to my awesome friend over at https://lb-writes.com for the prompt, although it did take me three days to act upon it!

On this scrap of paper, she hastily wrote…

As she jumped from the wall, she landed awkwardly and tumbled to one side, letting out a gasp and a slight groan in surprise as she did so, then cursed inwardly as she heard voices from the other side of the wall. “Over here, I heard something, she’s gone over the wall, c’mon.”

She picked herself up, looked up at the wall behind her, noting the light from the flashlights beaming erratically into the sky like miniature searchlights. Her pursuers were close, closer than she realised. She could hear them clearly now, barking instructions to each other as they began to climb up the other side of the wall.

MOVE IT… she screamed to herself as she pulled herself to her feet and ran, falling forward slightly, almost losing her balance as she did so, correcting her gait as she gained momentum and ran for her life.

She kept running, until the adrenaline began to wear away and the pain in her feet started sweeping   into her consciousness, then slumped down, with her back against the trunk of an ancient oak. They had been forced to flee barefoot, her and her beloved, and the wounds on her souls pained her greatly. The memory of her beloved distracting her from the pain in her feet. She wondered where he was, hoping he had managed to escape, they had been forced to separate at the wall, no time for him to climb over as their hunters gained on them.

No time for this, got to keep moving, she cursed to herself, wiping a tear from her cheek as she did so, rising wearily from her resting place, then standing bent over, hands on her knees as she let the sudden rush of blood to her head drain away and set off, once again, as the sudden dizziness dissipated.

An hour later she reached the rendezvous point, an old flint shed tucked away in the corner of a field, secluded somewhat by a thick copse that had grown around it as the disused building had become derelict its use having become redundant as modern farming techniques tool over. She went in and huddled in a corner where there was still enough of the roof structure to afford her some protection form the drizzle in the air.

There she waited. Falling into a deep, exhaustive sleep from her exertions, just as the light of the sun was rising with a new dawn. She awoke, the brightness of the sun arching overhead, breaching the cover of the remaining roof tiles and startling her awake. For a moment, she panicked, forgetting where she was as the memories of the night before reasserted themselves in her mind. What time is it, she wondered, how long have I been asleep? She blinked rapidly against the powerful light the sun in her eyes, judging it to be early afternoon. where was he? Her mind instantly sprang to her beloved, should have been here by now. He must have been forced to take a longer route, he will be here soon, don’t worry. Her mind tried to reassure her.

Several hours passed, and soon the sun was fading, as dusk and the night approached. She had to move, if she stayed too much longer, she would be discovered and taken back to that dreadful place, where she would surely die. From her pocket she fished out a piece of creased paper and the stub of a pencil. On this scrap of paper, she hastily wrote a quick note:

 “My beloved M

I’ve had to leave, it’s too dangerous here for me to wait any longer,
I pray that you find this note and follow quickly my love.
I’ll await you in the secret place at the border. Hurry, please my love,
I cannot bear for us to be apart and yearn to hold you close to me again.

                                    L”


Prologue

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Below is the prologue to my new book. The story I started to put to paper eighteen months ago without really knowing what it was I was writing about. The plot has been rolling around in the back of my mind for the past eighteen years. It is only now I have been able to put the two together. Have a read and let me know what you think, and if you would like a taster of what is to come, let me know.

Prologue

So, time only moves forward, yes? Time does not go backwards, neither does it go up, down, left, right, top to bottom, or slantways?

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in an isolated system, entropy only increases. Entropy is defined as the measure of disorder in a system. The direction in which time runs, which we refer to as forward, is the direction in which disorder or entropy increases.

In thermodynamics, an isolated system refers to a confined space impervious to any external forces or energy aids. To put it another way. If your kids are like mine and you are forever clearing up their toys by shoving them into boxes and back in the cupboard without first sorting them out , they will continue to pile up and become mixed and jumbled up, in a cupboard with mixed and jumbled up toys – an isolated system –  disorder will only increase.

That is what Rudolf Clausius said, the German physicist and mathematician who was considered one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics during the nineteenth century.

Albert Einstein, initially believed the universe to be static, it just existed, a belief he stated in later life to be his biggest blunder. The Big Bang theory is now accepted universally. This states the universe was formed from an almighty, colossal, cataclysmic event, and expanded outwards, continually travelling forward in time, so when we look through our most powerful telescopes at the very dim and distant galaxies, we are actually seeing them as they existed billions of years ago due to the speed of light and the amount of time it takes for that light to reach us. Another analogy would be to look at our own sun (not literally, that would be silly and probably damage your eyes), which is approximately 93 million miles away from the Earth, light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so the light from our sun takes about 8.3 minutes to travel to us, effectively the sun we see in the sky at any given moment, is the sun from 8.3 minutes ago.

What if I were to tell you that Einstein was wrong? And in the very next sentence declared he was right? You would think me a fool, right? After all, I am just an uneducated old man who has spent his life jumping from one job to another, lurching from one mistake to another, and generally making a complete fuck up of everything along the way. All of which is true.

What if I were to tell that time is happing all around us, all at once. Every moment of every event happening simultaneously, predetermined from start to finish, and we are just travelling forward through it obliviously? Would you think me a nutter? Highly likely.

It is true though, as incredible and preposterous as it sounds. It is true and very real. I know this because I live in every single moment of my lifetime at the same time. I am present everywhere throughout the past 99 years, at the same time, and I am able to instantaneously jump and appear as a version of myself at any point within my lifetime, my appearance is always the same and that of my first jump, which happened at a particularly low point in my life, where I have to say, in all honesty, I’m not looking my best.

I have witnessed my birth.

I have witnessed my death, that is, my many deaths.

If you are interested in attempting to understand the how the what and the why, read on, keep an open mind though as you are in for a mind bogglingly, time jumpingly, bumpy ride…