Latest news with #IanMoss
Daily Mail
08-07-2025
- Daily Mail
Legendary rock icon faces court after being caught speeding on his way to a gig
Cold Chisel guitarist Ian Moss will have to watch his speed whether he's taking the last car out of Sydney or passing flame trees as a weary driver. The legendary rocker was nabbed by police doing 115km/h in a 100km/h zone over the Labour Day long weekend in October while driving to Brisbane from Armidale in NSW 's northern tablelands. Moss is one of the founding members of Cold Chisel which is known for Australian rock classics such as Khe Sanh, Flame Trees, Cheap Wine and Choir Girl. Opting to contest the matter in court, an administrative mistake meant the musician was convicted and fined in his absence. Moss appeared before magistrate Christine Haskett in John Madison Tower on Tuesday when his lawyer Paul McGirr sought to have his conviction thrown out. His case would have been heard in the adjacent Downing Centre but that complex has been closed due to flooding from a burst water main since June 17. 'Oh, it's Mr Moss,' magistrate Christine Haskett said, recognising the Cold Chisel founding member. When asked his 70-year-old client's age, Mr McGirr said: 'I don't want to embarrass him, he looks better than me.' Moss had his Peugeot on cruise control at the time he was caught by police, the court was told. The car did not have an automatic braking mechanism and sped up going down a hill, Mr McGirr said. He described his client as a modest man who was not a jetsetter. 'He's one of those old school rockers who likes to get into his car and drive,' the lawyer told Ms Haskett. Moss appeared in court supported by the band's tour manager Chris Bastick. Bastick provided written evidence to the magistrate that Moss had done a lot for charity, including by driving to remote towns and doing concerts there. 'Because of his legendary status… people will turn up anywhere and pay to listen to him,' Mr McGirr said. Moss was also travelling to the US to go on a motorcycling trip and a conviction would upend all of that, his lawyer argued. As well as the administrative matter leading to the conviction in his absence, Moss had also had his licence suspended for a month in error, the court was told. 'It's been a real runaround with respect to this particular matter,' Mr McGirr said. Ms Haskett agreed that a conviction was not warranted, instead imposing a three-month conditional release order. Cold Chisel, who formed in Adelaide in 1973 and have sold more than 7million albums, performed a 50th anniversary tour last year. Moss wrote Bow River for the band's 1982 album Circus Animals and it has become his signature tune, along with the solo recording, Tucker's Daughter. His vocals also feature on Cold Chisel favourites Saturday Night, When the War Is Over and My Baby.
Daily Mail
28-06-2025
- Science
- Daily Mail
Is THIS how the world will end? The universe has a 'self-destruct button' that could WIPE OUT life in an instant, scientists warn
From the Big Crunch to the heat death of the universe, it seems that science is always finding new ways the cosmos might come to an end. But physicists have now revealed the most devastating doomsday scenario possible. Experts believe the universe may have a built-in 'self-destruct button' called false vacuum decay. If this was ever triggered, every planet, star, and galaxy would be wiped out and life as we know it would become impossible. The basic idea is that our universe isn't currently in its most stable state, meaning we are in what scientists call a 'false vacuum'. If any part of the universe is ever pushed into its stable state, a bubble of 'true vacuum' will expand through the universe, destroying everything it touches. Professor Ian Moss, a cosmologist at Newcastle University, told MailOnline that the universe is like 'a table-top with many dominoes standing on their side.' Professor Moss says: 'They can stay upright unless some small disturbance topples one, and triggers all of them to fall.' What is a false vacuum? All objects contain a certain amount of energy and the amount of energy it contains is called its 'energy state'. The lower the energy state, the more stable the object becomes. If you think about a lump of coal, it has a very high energy state because it contains lots of potential energy, which means it's unstable and could catch on fire. Once that coal has been burned and the energy released as heat, the remaining ash has a very low energy state and becomes stable. Everything in the universe, from lumps of coals to stars, wants to get to its most stable state and so always tends towards the lowest energy state possible. We call the lowest energy state an object can have its 'vacuum' state, but sometimes objects can get trapped in something called a 'false vacuum'. Dr Louise Hamaide, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Naples, told MailOnline: 'A good analogy for a field in a false vacuum is a marble in a bowl on top of a stool. 'The marble cannot leave the bowl unless it is given some energy in the form of a push, and if it does it will fall all the way to the ground.' Being on the ground is what we would call the vacuum state, whereas the bowl is merely a false vacuum which prevents the marble from falling to the ground. What makes this idea worrying is the possibility that a fundamental part of the universe's structure could be stuck in one of these false vacuums. All it needs is a little push, and the structure of reality itself will come crashing down to the ground. The universe's self-destruct button The idea of a false vacuum gets really scary when we apply it to our current model of reality. The universe and everything in it is made of subatomic particles such as electrons, photons, and quarks. But according to quantum field theory, all of these particles are actually just disturbances in an underlying field. What is false vacuum decay? One of the fundamental concepts of the universe is that things are moving from a state of high energy to a more stable 'ground' state, of lower energy. This fundamental concept holds true even in the strange world of quantum mechanics, with particles trying to reach their ground, called their vacuum state. The concept takes a stranger turn when it comes to the Higgs field – the quantum field which gives particles throughout the universe their mass. It is thought that this field is in its lowest energy state, but one theory states it may not be as stable as it seems. With the right kick, the Higgs field could careen towards its true lower energy state, sparking a chain reaction which would spread in all directions. Dr Alessandro Zenesini, a scientist at the National Institute of Optics in Italy, told MailOnline: 'The basic idea of quantum field theory is to represent reality only with fields. 'Think of a water surface. When flat, it is an empty field. As soon you have a wave, this wave can be seen as a particle which can interact with another wave.' Just like everything else, these fields have energy states, and want to get to their lowest energy state possible like a body of water becoming flat and calm. In the first few seconds of the Big Bang, so much energy was released that it pushed all the fundamental fields down into their vacuum states. But scientists now think that one of the fields might have gotten stuck along the way. Some researchers believe that the Higgs field, the field which makes the elusive Higgs Boson, is stuck in a false vacuum state. This essentially means that the entire universe could be rigged to blow at any moment. What would happen if a false vacuum collapsed? If the Higgs field is ever pushed down to its true vacuum, the resulting 'phase shift' will release a vast amount of energy. This energy is so concentrated that it will force nearby areas of the field out of their false vacuum, dropping their energy level and releasing even more energy. The resulting chain reaction would spread through the universe like the flames from a match dropped into a lake of petrol. A bubble of true vacuum would then spread out in a sphere from the starting point until it consumes the entire cosmos. At its edge, between the true and false vacuum, the energy would collect into a thin wall of incredible power. Dr Hamaide says: 'That kinetic energy of the wall is so high, even though the Higgs carrying this energy is a very heavy particle, it would move at the speed of light. 'So we would never see the wall coming, because light couldn't reach us before the wall did.' If the wall hit the solar system, Dr Hamaide says it would have so much energy that 'it would instantaneously destroy any star or planet its path'. However, what would be left behind after the initial destruction is perhaps even more terrifying. The interaction between the fundamental fields is what gives particles their properties and determines how they interact. This, in turn, determines everything from the physics that holds planets together to the chemical reactions taking place inside our cells. If the Higgs field suddenly takes on a new energy level, none of the physics we are familiar with would be possible. Dr Dejan Stojkovic, a cosmologist from the University at Buffalo, told MailOnline: 'As a consequence, electrons, quarks and neutrinos would acquire masses different from their current values. 'Since the structures that we observe around us are made atoms, whose existence depends on the precise values of the parameters in the standard model, it is likely that all these structures would be destroyed, and perhaps new ones would be formed.' Scientists have no idea what the world left behind by false vacuum decay would be like. But we do know that it would be absolutely incompatible with life as we now know it. What could trigger the end of the world? To trigger false vacuum decay, you would need an extremely powerful force to pack a huge amount of Higgs particles into a tiny space. In the current universe, places with this much energy might not even be possible but the bad news is that the early universe might have been violent enough to do it. In particular, scientists think that dense regions of matter might have been crushed into tiny primordial black holes in the first few seconds of the Big Bang. These are ultra-dense points of matter no larger than a single hydrogen atom but containing the mass of an entire planet. As these black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, some researchers believe they could trigger false vacuum decay. Professor Moss says: 'Condensation is a similar process to vacuum decay, the condensation of water vapour into clouds is triggered by tiny grains of dust or ice crystals. 'Tiny black holes seed vacuum decay in the same way.' Is the world already over? Perhaps one of the strangest implications of false vacuum decay is that it might have already started somewhere in the universe. Dr Hamaide says: 'Under some very specific assumptions, we showed these bubbles are 100 per cent likely to occur.' According to some calculations, one primordial black hole in the universe would be enough to trigger the universe's self-destruct process. Likewise, due to small fluctuations at the quantum level, known as quantum tunnelling, it is possible that the parts of the universe might randomly jump into the lower energy state at any time. That could mean that a bubble of true vacuum is already out there somewhere in the cosmos, racing towards us at the speed of light and annihilating everything it encounters. The comforting news is that, even at the speed of light, it could take billions of years for a true vacuum bubble to reach us. If the bubble starts far enough away, the expansion of the universe might even mean it never reaches us at all. Dr Hamaide and Professor Moss suggest that the fact we aren't already dead is evidence that there aren't any primordial black holes out there in the first place. We also don't know what effects dark matter and dark energy could have on the energy state of the universe. It might be possible that these mysterious substances reverse any bubble expansions as soon as they occur to keep the universe stable. However, until a bubble of true vacuum does tear our reality apart, there might not be any way to know who's right. The theories and discoveries of thousands of physicists since the 1930s have resulted in a remarkable insight into the fundamental structure of matter. Everything in the universe is found to be made from a few basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how these particles and three of the forces are related to each other is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle physics. All matter around us is made of elementary particles, the building blocks of matter. These particles occur in two basic types called quarks and leptons. Each consists of six particles, which are related in pairs, or 'generations'. All stable matter in the universe is made from particles that belong to the first generation. Any heavier particles quickly decay to the next most stable level. There are also four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range. The electromagnetic force also has infinite range but it is many times stronger than gravity. The weak and strong forces are effective only over a very short range and dominate only at the level of subatomic particles. The Standard Model includes the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces and all their carrier particles, and explains well how these forces act on all of the matter particles.
Metro
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
70s rock star bans fans from using phones at upcoming shows
The guitarist of rock band Cold Chisel has announced fans will be barred from taking photos and recording during his tour. Ian Moss was one of the founding members of the Australian band, which came together in 1973 and was fronted by Jimmy Barnes. Their debut single Khe Sanh, released in 1978, is one of the most popular songs ever recorded by an Australian act. Although they disbanded in 1983, they've subsequently re-formed several times since then, the most recent being in 2012 when they also toured around the UK. In the decades since Ian, 70, has embarked on a successful solo career, with his 1989 debut album reaching number one on the Aria Albums Chart. This week he is hitting the road again for his latest tour, One Guitar One Night Only, but has now told fans they won't be able to use their phones at the gigs. Posting on Instagram, Ian explained the decision. 'To ensure the best possible experience for everyone – both the audience and the artists – photography and video recording will not be permitted during the performance,' he began. 'In the past, we've taken a relaxed approach, but following feedback about disruptions, we've changed our policy. Venue staff have been briefed and will help us enforce this policy. There will be no exceptions. 'We kindly ask you to respect the performers, fellow concertgoers, and the atmosphere by switching off phones and other devices for the duration of the show. Be present and enjoy the performance with your eyes.' Although some questioned the ban, the decision was largely met with support. 'While I think this is a cool move, I also think people should be allowed to record short 20 second videos of just their favourite songs! But I do still respect the decision made here,' Davis commented. 'Can't wait. What a great idea!' Laura shared. 'Having people videoing and shoving cameras up your nose is sort of putting when performing. Good call Ian,' Craig explained. 'This is objectively an improvement for concertgoers too, who don't want to watch the experience from behind the devices of those in the rows before them,' Joey added. Last year Bob Dylan announced he would be banning phones throughout his UK tour. The shows in London, Liverpool, Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Edinburgh, were phone-free, with people having to put their phones in a pouch, which closed automatically when in the venue and unlocked in the venue's concourse. At the time organisers said they hoped that by removing fans' ability to use phones, the concerts would be more 'in keeping with many past performances'. More Trending Two years earlier Placebo requested fans keep their phones in their pockets. 'It makes Placebo's performance so much more difficult,' they said. 'More difficult to connect with you and to communicate effectively the emotions of the songs. 'It is also disrespectful to your fellow concertgoers who want to watch the show, not the back of your phone.' Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: 70s rock icon granted his dying wish to be buried at sea MORE: Gloria Gaynor: 'The biggest misconception about me? That I'm a feminist' MORE: When is Eurovision 2025? Final date, UK entry, latest odds and more
