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Lisa Randall has become a star in the rarefied world of high-energy physics, and her theory about a “fifth dimension” has caught the imagination of the general public too. That doesn’t mean she still isn’t shy and a little nervous about all the hoopla. “I really like that my work is getting more people interested in science,” says the 43-year old Harvard physicist. “And while it can get a little nerve-wracking dealing with all the attention, I really enjoy speaking to the public and answering questions.” Randall seems constantly in motion. She seldom sits still, and says her mind brims...

The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a "cosmological constant" to his equation for the expansion of the universe but later retracted it, may be vindicated by new research published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The enigmatic "dark energy" that drives the acceleration of the Universe behaves just like Einstein's famed cosmological constant, according to the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS), an international team of researchers in France and Toronto and Victoria in Canada, collaborating with large telescope observers in Oxford, Caltech and Berkeley. Their observations reveal that the dark energy behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant to a precision...

Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have detected light that may be from the earliest objects in the universe. If confirmed, the observation provides a glimpse of an era more than 13 billion years ago when, after the fading embers of the theorized Big Bang gave way to millions of years of pervasive darkness, the universe came alive. This light could be from the very first stars or perhaps from hot gas falling into the first black holes. The science team, based at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., describes the observation as seeing the...

Bishop James Ussher Sets the Date for Creation: October 23, 4004 BC When Clarence Darrow prepared his famous examination of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, he chose to focus primarily on a chronology of Biblical events prepared by a seventeenth-century Irish bishop, James Ussher. American fundamentalists in 1925 found—and generally accepted as accurate—Ussher’s careful calculation of dates, going all the way back to Creation, in the margins of their family Bibles. (In fact, until the 1970s, the Bibles placed in nearly every hotel room by the Gideon Society carried his chronology.) The King James Version of the Bible...

Crisis in the Cosmos?Galaxy-formation theory is in peril Ron Cowen Imagine peering into a nursery and seeing, among the cooing babies, a few that look like grown men. That's the startling situation that astronomers have stumbled upon as they've looked deep into space and thus back to a time when newborn galaxies filled the cosmos. Some of these babies have turned out to be nearly as massive as the Milky Way and other galactic geezers that have taken billions of years to form. Despite being only about 800 million years old, some of the infants are chock-full of old stars....

Dark Matter: Invisible, Mysterious and Perhaps Nonexistent - By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer 10 October 2005 Galaxies don't have enough regular matter to keep them from flying apart, scientists have been telling us for years. So there must be a bunch of unseen "dark matter" lurking in every galaxy. But dark matter has never been directly detected, and nobody knows what it might be made of. A few scientists remeain skeptical. To a lay person, it might sound downright crazy. Now a new study suggests there may be no such thing as dark matter. Fred Cooperstock of Northeastern...

It was the summer of 1998, recalls Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall, when extra dimensions finally pulled her in. Extra dimensions -- beyond the four we encounter every day (three of space plus one of time) -- have been an ingredient of theoretical physics for decades: mathematician Theodor Kaluza proposed a fifth in 1919, string theory requires 10 of them, M-theory needs 11. But Randall hadn't much use for them, she says, until that summer when she decided they might be helpful to supersymmetry, one of the conundrums she was pondering. Randall contacted Raman Sundrum, a Boston University postdoctoral student...

The brilliant cosmologist and mathematician Sir Hermann Bondi has died at the age of 85. He was best known for developing the "steady-state" theory of the universe together with Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle. Bondi also led a successful career as a science administrator, running the European Space Research Organisation for four years and spending six years as chief scientist to the UK Ministry of Defence. Bondi died on 10 September. Bondi was born in Vienna, Austria, on 1 November 1919 into a Jewish family. Alarmed by the rise of the Nazis in neighbouring Germany and encouraged by the cosmologist...

Welcome to the fourth dimension. And the fifth, and the sixth. A team of astrophysicists claims to have identified evidence that space is six-dimensional. Joseph Silk of the University of Oxford, UK, and his co-workers say that these extra spatial dimensions can be inferred from the perplexing behaviour of dark matter. This mysterious stuff cannot be seen, but its presence in galaxies is betrayed by the gravitational tug that it exerts on visible stars. Silk and his colleagues looked at how dark matter behaves differently in small galaxies and large clusters of galaxies. In the smaller ones, dark matter seems...

In what is widely regarded as the most important scientific discovery of 1998, researchers turned their telescopes to measure the rate at which cosmic expansion was decelerating and instead saw that it was accelerating. They have been gripping the steering wheel very tightly ever since. As deeply mysterious as acceleration is, if you just accept it without trying to fathom its cause, it solves all kinds of problems. Before 1998, cosmologists had been troubled by discrepancies in the age, density and clumpiness of the universe. Acceleration made everything click together. It is one of the conceptual keys, along with other...

What is the mysterious dark energy that's causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate? Is it some form of Einstein's famous cosmological constant, or is it an exotic repulsive force, dubbed "quintessence," that could make up as much as three-quarters of the cosmos? Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Dartmouth College believe there is a way to find out. n a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters, physicists Eric Linder of Berkeley Lab and Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth show that physics models of dark energy can be separated into distinct scenarios, which could be...

A new analysis of 'cool' spots in the cosmic microwave background may cast new doubts on a key piece of evidence supporting the big bang theory of how the universe was formed. Two scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) looked for but couldn't find evidence of gravitational "lensing" where you might expect to find it, in the most distant light source in the universe -- the cosmic microwave background. Results of this research by Dr. Richard Lieu, a UAH physics professor, and Dr. Jonathan Mittaz, a UAH research associate, were published Monday in the "Astrophysical Journal." In...

Getting a Bang Out of Gamow By Professor Eamon Harper In August 1934 there appeared on the GW campus a 6-foot-3-inch, 30-year-old, flaxen-haired, Ukrainian émigré scientist. His startlingly blue eyes twinkled myopically behind lenses that resembled the bottoms of cider bottles. He conversed with a cosmopolitan circle of friends in a variety of European languages, with a fractured but poetic delivery that was animated and usually high-pitched. His name: George Gamow [pronounced GAM-off]. The young Ukrainian had a straightforward, no-nonsense way of doing theoretical physics. His approach was strongly intuitive and he lost little time on florid mathematical formalism. That...

Physicists have created the state of matter thought to have filled the Universe just a few microseconds after the big bang and found it to be different from what they were expecting. Instead of a gas, it is more like a liquid. Understanding why it is a liquid should take physicists a step closer to explaining the earliest moments of our Universe. Not just any old liquid, either. Its collective movement is rather like the way a school of fish swims 'as one' and is a sign that the fluid possesses an extremely low viscosity, making it what physicists call...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is entering a new phase with new goals. SDSS is already the most ambitious astronomical survey project ever undertaken. During its five years of operation, the 300-plus scientists in the SDSS consortium have mapped galaxies, stars and quasars by the hundreds of millions over a large swath of sky. Their large-scale and very detailed surveys have confirmed that the galaxies follow a lacy, foam-like pattern that may well owe its existence to quantum effects during the Big Bang. They have identified far-off quasars that had already burst into life when the universe was just...

One of the most profound features of the universe is that it is stratified. Our everyday world depends hardly at all on the details either of atoms or of galaxies, and the feeling is mutual. Were it otherwise, science would not be possible: we could not know anything without knowing everything. Sometimes, though, the levels of reality do get jumbled, with odd effects. This past March a group of cosmologists -- Edward Kolb of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Sabino Matarrese, Alessio Notari and Antonio Riotto of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physic -- argued that the acceleration of...

THUNDERBOLTS PICTURE OF THE DAYExploring the electric universe From ancient mythology to cosmic plasma discharge   homethe book quotes picture of the day picture archive subject index the film(video clips) products Contact usElectric Universe: Holoscience Electric Cosmos The Universe Dragon Science Plasma Cosmology Society for Interdisciplinary Studies     Jul 05, 2005Deep Impact?First ImpressionsThe Deep Impact was an amazing show, and there will be much more information to come.In advance of the event we set forth our expectations as explicitly as possible. Therefore, we urge readers of this page to refer to our previous Picture of the Day.We also...

THUNDERBOLTS PICTURE OF THE DAYExploring the electric universe From ancient mythology to cosmic plasma discharge Credit: NASA/JPL/UMD Artwork by Pat Rawlings the book quotes picture of the day picture archive subject index the film(video clips) products Contact usElectric Universe: Holoscience Electric Cosmos The Universe Dragon Science Plasma Cosmology Society for Interdisciplinary Studies     Jul 04, 2005Predictions on "Deep Impact"With the imminent arrival of the "Deep Impact" spacecraft at the comet Tempel 1, it is time to test competing theories on the nature of comets. The predictions and lines of reasoning offered here will set the stage for future...

Astronomers have spotted a signature of neutrinos created just seconds after the Big Bang. The find supports current models of the origins of our Universe, and may provide a glimpse of its birth. The fundamental particles called neutrinos are difficult to study, because they interact so weakly with normal matter - trillions whizz straight through your body every second. But Roberto Trotta, an astrophysicist from Oxford University, UK, and his colleague Alessandro Melchiorri of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Italy, say that the signature of primordial neutrinos is written in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These microwaves are the...

The Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from the UK, Germany, Japan, Canada and the USA has today (June 2nd) released first results from the largest and most realistic simulation ever of the growth of cosmic structure and the formation of galaxies and quasars. In a paper published in Nature, the Virgo Consortium shows how comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys can reveal the physical processes underlying the build-up of real galaxies and black holes. The "Millennium Simulation" [links below] employed more than 10 billion particles of matter to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in...