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Musk’s Spacecar, Baby Boom, Paper Mills, and String Theory Maths
This week’s science bits from SWTG
Sabine Hossenfelder
February 05, 2025
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Back From Mars: New Asteroid is Elon Musk’s Car
A new “near earth object” identified on Jan 2nd upon closer inspection turned out to be a car launched into space by Elon Musk. The Tesla Roadster which has a mannequin in a spacesuit in the driver’s seat was used as a dummy payload for a test flight in 2018. It has since passed near Mars and returned to Earth’s vicinity. According to computer simulations, the car has a 6% probability of falling back down to Earth in the next 3 million years. More here.
This Science News episode is about the world of string theory… and the science media’s thirst for headlines. Last month, physicists published a paper claiming that string theory’s Veneziano amplitude is the only way to complete a quantum theory of gravity. The popular science press took that to ask whether string theory is inevitable. What is this all about? I've had a look. The video also comes with a quiz, which you can take here.
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New Supersonic Aeroplane Aces First Test Flight
Image: Boom Aerospace
The American company Boom Aerospace has successfully tested “Baby Boom,” a small prototype of its planned supersonic aeroplane “Overture”. On January 28, Baby Boom reached Mach 1.2 in a test flight above the Mojave desert in southern California. According to people watching the event, the supersonic boom was not audible on the ground, presumably due to the high altitude the plane was flying.
Baby Boom is the first civilian aeroplane to fly faster than sound since the Concorde. The company hopes to complete construction on the full-size passenger plane Overture by 2029. It will be able to carry 64-80 passengers at Mach 1.7, about twice as fast as current commercial aeroplanes. More here.
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Biology and Medicine See Most Publishing Fraud
Figure: Papermill Alerts by Field. Credit: Clear Skies
The London-based company Clear Skies that provides analyses of scientific publications, ran a fraud detector over a large set of 2022 science papers. This analysis looked for associations with “paper mills” that are networks of fraudsters who sell authorships for papers in academic journals or citations. A decade ago, paper mills used to be a problem almost exclusively found in the Middle East and Asia, but in the past years more incidents have surfaced in Eastern Europe, Middle Europe, and also the United States.
Clear Skies estimates that about 2% of scientific papers in their analysis came from paper mills. Most of the mills are active in biology and medicine, closely followed by computer science and chemistry, presumably owing to the large total number of publications in these fields.The analysis is a subscription service, so I don’t know any more than that, but I am happy to see that paper mills do not seem to be much of an issue in physics – yet. More here.
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