That is by design. The school is modelled on the Kolmogorov Physics and Mathematics School in Moscow, which from the mid-1960s took Russia’s smartest 15-year-olds and exposed them to the best maths teaching in the country. Michael
Gove, Britain’s education secretary from
2010 to 2014, imported the idea, pushing
universities to start specialist maths colleges. The aim was to make it possible for
any child to have an “Eton-level education” in maths or physics, recalls Dominic
Cummings, a former adviser to Mr Gove

By lifting obstacles to job
changes and giving workers a social safety net that enables them
to refuse the crummiest jobs, societies can foster employment
that is not just full, but fulfilling.

Physics

Andrew Geraci’s equipment, on the other
hand, comprises a glass bead 300 billionths ofa metre across, held in a lattice of
laser light inside an airless chamber. The
power it consumes would run a few oldfashioned light bulbs. Like researchers at
the LHC, Dr Geraci and his team at the University of Nevada, in Reno, hope to find
things unexplained by established theories such as the Standard Model of particle
physics and Newton’s law of gravity.
Whereas the LHC cost around SFr4.6bn
($5bn) to build, however, DrGeraci’sset-up

In Dr Geraci’s experiment the suspended bead scatters laser light onto a detector.
If a force displaces the bead, the pattern of
light changes, permitting the bead’s new
position to be calculated. In work published last year in Physical Review A, his
team showed that the apparatus can detect
forces of a few billionths of a trillionth of a
newton. (Anewton isaboutthe force exerted by Earth’s gravity on an apple.) Their
next step will be to move a weight past the
bead at a distance of five microns (five
thousandths of a millimetre), to measure
the gravitational attraction between them.
That experiment is now under way
cost a mere $300,000 and fits on a table
about a metre wide and three long

Any
departure from this law would provide
support for theories which hope to solve
what is known as the hierarchy problem of
physics. This is the question ofwhy gravity
isso much weakerthan the otherthree fundamental interactions between particles,
namely electromagnetism and the weak
and strongnuclearforces   and strongnuclearforces. The disparity be
tween gravity and these forces explains,

for example, why a small magnet can pick
up a paper clip against the gravitational
force ofan entire planet.
One putative explan

Distinguishing between cause and effect is
always hard in the social sciences.

on trump
Mr Trump is hardly the first tycoon to discover that business
and politics work by different rules. If you fall out over a property deal, you can always find another sucker. In politics you
cannot walk away so easily. Even if Mr Trump now despises
the Republican factions that dared defy him over health care,
Congress is the only place he can go to pass legislation.


 Mr Stone has admitted
Trump and Russia
Never-ending story

being in indirect contact with Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, and exchanging messages with Guccifer 2.0, an online
persona considered a front for Russian
spooks. Carter Page, onc