String Theory 'blog

Physics looks for new Einstein as nature rewrites laws of universe
	Posted by telos On News/Activism 09/09/2001 4:05:44 PM EDT · 202 replies · 613+ views Times Newspapers Ltd. \| September 9 2001 \| Jonathan Leake A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is ...

Astronomers Celebrate Reliable Measure of Dark Matter
	Posted by callisto On News/Activism 10/30/2001 8:19:42 AM EST · 32 replies · 375+ views space.com \| 10.29.01 \| Heather Sparks Scientists are closer than ever to balancing the checkbook of cosmic matter. This is because two recent independent measurements of normal matter in the universe are in agreement. The results further strengthen the case for the Big Bang theory and for the nature of the universe as astronomers understand it today. The universe contains normal atomic matter, what makes you, your dog, the stars, and everything in between. Normal matter is what Carl Sagan was talking about when he said we are all star-stuff. But in addition to star-stuff, there is invisible dark matter that is known only because the ...

Fast Particles Inflated Universe
	Posted by callisto On General/Chat 05/08/2002 12:47:52 PM EDT · 8 replies · 199+ views Science News Week \| 05.08.02 \| Mike Martin, UPI Ultra-fast particles inflated Universe, physicists say By Mike Martin and copyright 2002 United Press International UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. May 7 (UPI) -- Tachyons -- particles that move faster than the speed of light in defiance of Einstein's strict prohibitions against such amazing speeds -- may be responsible for the inflation that expanded the Universe from zero to trillions of light years in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Only a particle that moves at the phenomenal speed of a rolling tachyon, physicists say, could inflate the Universe as quickly as cosmologist Alan Guth first predicted in his...

Earth's magnetic field 'boosts gravity'
	Posted by VadeRetro On News/Activism 09/23/2002 2:11:32 PM EDT · 117 replies · 869+ views New Scientist \| 09:20 22 September 02 \| Michael Brooks Exclusive from New Scientist Hidden extra dimensions are causing measurements of the strength of gravity at different locations on Earth to be affected by the planet's magnetic field, French researchers say. This is a controversial claim because no one has ever provided experimental evidence to support either the existence of extra dimensions or any interaction between gravity and electromagnetism. But lab measurements of Newton's gravitational constant G suggest that both are real. Newton's constant, which describes the strength of the gravitational pull that bodies exert on each other, is the most poorly determined of the constants of nature. The two...

Did physists just mathematicall prove the existence of God?
	Posted by Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit On News/Activism 10/30/2002 11:05:24 AM EST · 124 replies · 896+ views The New York Times \| Oct. 29, 2002 \| DENNIS OVERBYE stronomers have gazed out at the universe for centuries, asking why it is the way it is. But lately a growing number of them are dreaming of universes that never were and asking, why not? Why, they ask, do we live in 3 dimensions of space and not 2, 10 or 25? Why is a light ray so fast and a whisper so slow? Why are atoms so tiny and stars so big? Why is the universe so old? Does it have to be that way, or are there places, other universes, where things are different? Once upon a time...

Extra Dimensions Showing Hints Of Scientific Revolution
	Posted by RightWhale On News/Activism 02/19/2003 12:18:15 PM EST · 73 replies · 525+ views spacedaily.com \| 19 Feb 03 \| staff Extra Dimensions Showing Hints Of Scientific Revolution Chicago - Feb 19, 2003 The concept of extra dimensions, dismissed as nonsense even by one of its earliest proponents nearly nine decades ago, may soon help solve seemingly unrelated problems in particle physics, cosmology and gravitational physics, according to a panel of experts who spoke Feb. 15 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Denver. "It doesn't happen often that you get a confluence of ideas and experiments that come together and it's something that obviously would change your whole way of looking at the universe,"...

Gravity test confines string theory dimensions
	Posted by ganeshpuri89 On News/Activism 02/27/2003 3:22:06 AM EST · 14 replies · 302+ views NewScientist.com news service \| 26 Feb 03 \| Stephen Battersby † † Gravity test confines string theory dimensions † 19:00†26†February†03 † NewScientist.com news service † Gravity has been tested over a shorter distance than ever before. Using a delicate apparatus to measure gravitational forces over just a tenth of a millimetre, a team of physicists has found that they are roughly as Newton's laws predict. The result narrows down the possible nature of hidden extra dimensions, which would boost gravity over small scales. It is extraordinarily difficult to measure gravity over short distances, because weights that are small enough to be manipulated and held so close together only exert...

An Introduction to Zero-Point Energy
	Posted by sourcery On News/Activism 02/28/2003 5:59:02 PM EST · 281 replies · 852+ views CalPhysics.org Quantum physics predicts the existence of an underlying sea of zero-point energy at every point in the universe. This is different from the cosmic microwave background and is also referred to as the electromagnetic quantum vacuum since it is the lowest state of otherwise empty space. This energy is so enormous that most physicists believe that even though zero-point energy seems to be an inescapable consequence of elementary quantum theory, it cannot be physically real, and so is subtracted away in calculations. A minority of physicists accept it as real energy which we cannot directly sense since it is the...

The gods must be crazy (Physics article)
	Posted by RightWingAtheist On News/Activism 09/13/2003 12:39:02 AM EDT · 83 replies · 1,714+ views U.S. News and World Report \| September 8, 2003 \| Charles W. Petit More than 60 years ago, G. H. Hardy, an English mathematician besotted with abstraction, wrote, " `Imaginary' universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed `real' one." Were Hardy around today, he'd find plenty of company. From astronomers peering out into space to particle physicists inspecting atomic innards, the more scientists study the universe, the more preposterous, random, and, yes, ugly it becomes. But hold it. How can the universe be thought ugly? This realm of wheeling galaxies whose stars explode gloriously to seed space with the building blocks of life? A cosmos that bore at least one...

New particle turns up in Japan
	Posted by Diddley On News/Activism 11/15/2003 11:43:52 PM EST · 178 replies · 328+ views Physicsweb \| Nov 14, 2003 \| Belle Dume The Belle collaboration at the KEK laboratory in Japan has discovered a new sub-atomic particle which it is calling the "X(3872)". The particle does not fit into any known particle scheme and theorists are speculating that it might be a hitherto unseen type of meson that contains four quarks (arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0309032; Phys. Rev. Lett. to be published). The discovery has been confirmed by the CDF collaboration at Fermilab in the US, where the new particle is being called the "mystery meson". Mesons are particles that contain a quark and an antiquark that are held together by the strong nuclear force. Since...

String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal (Physics has hit rock bottom)
	Posted by mikegi On News/Activism 12/03/2003 12:50:40 AM EST · 56 replies · 389+ views www.arxiv.org \| Dec 2, 2003 \| Brian D Josephson ABSTRACT A model consistent with string theory is proposed for so-called paranormal phenomena such as extra-sensory perception (ESP). Our mathematical skills are assumed to derive from a special ëmental vacuum stateí, whose origin is explained on the basis of anthropic and biological arguments, taking into the need for the informational processes associated with such a state to be of a life-supporting character. ESP is then explained in terms of shared ëthought bubblesí generated by the participants out of the mental vacuum state. The paper concludes with a critique of arguments sometimes made claiming to ërule outí the possible existence of...

INFORMATION PARADOX SOLVED? IF SO, BLACK HOLES ARE "FUZZBALLS"
	Posted by AdmSmith On News/Activism 03/01/2004 12:21:01 PM EST · 36 replies · 211+ views Ohio State University \| 3/1/04 \| Pam Frost Gorder COLUMBUS, Ohio, Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne may owe John Preskill a set of encyclopedias. In 1997, the three cosmologists made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist -- that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it. Hawking's research suggested that the particles have no effect whatsoever. But his theory violated the laws of quantum mechanics and created a contradiction known as the "information paradox." Now physicists at Ohio State University have proposed a solution using string theory, a...

The Universe Made Simple
	Posted by Ronzo On News/Activism 05/25/2004 11:01:29 PM EDT · 70 replies · 343+ views Atlantic Monthly \| 5/20/2004 \| Bradley Jay <p>Can you access the flash of emancipation you felt the first time you were able to stay up on a bike or propel yourself through the water? Can you remember the way your new knowledge enhanced your life? And can you recall the gratitude you felt toward those people who had the skill and the patience to pass that knowledge along to you?</p>

Science as Metaphor
	Posted by ckilmer On News/Activism 07/10/2004 6:31:48 PM EDT · 6 replies · 256+ views Slate \| July 6, 2004, at 6:16 AM PT \| Amanda Schaffer Science as Metaphor Where does Brian Greene stand in the pantheon of physicists? By Amanda Schaffer Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2004, at 6:16 AM PT With his 1999 best seller The Elegant Universe, a NOVA special, and the recent release of a second book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Columbia professor Brian Greene has become the closest thing that physics has to a pop star. A Harvard grad and former Rhodes scholar, lured in 1996 from a professorship at Cornell to a tenured position at Columbia, he has emerged as the chief ambassador of string theory, bringing cutting-edge work to...

Dismantling Space and Time [Review of book by Brian Greene]
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 07/15/2004 10:52:36 AM EDT · 132 replies · 1,470+ views Tech Central Station \| 09 March 2004 \| Kenneth Silber Space and time are pervasive in our everyday experience, and yet it is hard to say exactly what they are. They resist definition in terms other than themselves. Moreover, they have various subtle and elusive properties, with which science continues to grapple. Relativity and quantum mechanics, the physics breakthroughs of the 20th century, revolutionized scientific thinking about these subjects. And this revolution has not played itself out, since cutting-edge physics today involves further radical rethinking of time and space. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, by Brian Greene (Knopf, $28.95), is an excellent guide...

Pioneer [gravitational] anomaly put to the test
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 09/27/2004 2:38:32 PM EDT · 49 replies · 1,454+ views Physics World \| September 2004 \| Slava Turyshev and John Anderson The European Space Agency is considering a unique experiment that could explain strange gravitational phenomena in the outer solar system. Since 1998 astronomers have known that the space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 are following trajectories that cannot be explained by conventional physics. Launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, to explore the outer planets, the Pioneer craft are now at the edge of the solar system, with Pioneer 10 being some 86 astronomical units (about 13 billion kilometres) from the Sun. But they are not quite where they should be, based on the gravitational pull of the known bodies...

Scientists zero in on why time flows in one direction
	Posted by ckilmer On News/Activism 10/26/2004 10:36:36 PM EDT · 298 replies · 6,145+ views eurekalert/University of Chicago \| 26-Oct-2004 \| Steve Koppes Public release date: 26-Oct-2004 [ Print This Article \| Close This Window ] Contact: Steve Koppes skoppes@uchicago.edu 773-702-8366 University of Chicago Scientists zero in on why time flows in one direction The big bang could be a normal event in the natural evolution of the universe that will happen repeatedly over incredibly vast time scales as the universe expands, empties out and cools off, according to two University of Chicago physicists. "We like to say that the big bang is nothing special in the history of our universe," said Sean Carroll, an Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of...

Cosmic Conundrum [Brief essay on multiple universes and the Anthropic Principle]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On General/Chat 11/26/2004 4:33:59 AM EST · 16 replies · 649+ views Time \| Monday, November 22, 2004 \| Michael D. Lemonick; J. Madeleine Nash Cosmic Conundrum The universe seems uncannily well suited to the existence of life. Could that really be an accident?[snip]

String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not)
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On General/Chat 12/07/2004 1:01:55 PM EST · 109 replies · 2,041+ views The New York Times \| December 7, 2004 \| Dennis Overbye December 7, 2004 String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not) By DENNIS OVERBYE SPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology.Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his...

Shiing-Shen Chern, 93, Innovator in New Geometry, Is Dead
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On General/Chat 12/07/2004 1:47:57 PM EST · 5 replies · 420+ views The New York Times \| December 7, 2004 \| Kenneth Chang December 7, 2004 Shiing-Shen Chern, 93, Innovator in New Geometry, Is Dead By KENNETH CHANG r. Shiing-Shen Chern, a mathematician whose seemingly purely abstract discoveries about the twistings of geometric surfaces have found wide use in physics and mathematics, died Friday at his home in Tianjin, China. He was 93.Dr. Chern also helped set up three mathematics institutes, two in China and one at the University of California, Berkeley. Nankai University, where Dr. Chern established an institute in 1985, reported his death."He's a towering figure in 20th-century mathematics," said Dr. Calvin C. Moore, a professor of mathematics at the...

String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (Are There 10 Dimensions Of Space and Time?)
	Posted by shrinkermd On News/Activism 12/10/2004 10:09:09 AM EST · 45 replies · 1,903+ views NY Times \| 7 December 2004 \| By DENNIS OVERBYE ASPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would...

The Growth of Inflation [On inflationary cosmology, string theory, and all that]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On General/Chat 12/12/2004 12:14:30 AM EST · 10 replies · 598+ views symmetry - dimensions of particle physics \| December 2004 / January 2005 \| Davide Castelvecchi The Growth of Inflation Twenty-five years after Alan Guth turned cosmology on its head, what's the latest story of the universe's first moments? by Davide Castelvecchi Photo: Fred Ullrich It was a true Eureka moment if there ever was one. On the night of December 6, 1979, an obscure Stanford Linear Accelerator Center postdoc was up late, sweating over an even more obscure problem about particles called magnetic monopoles. Looking at his calculations the next day, the usually low-key Alan Guth annotated the words "SPECTACULAR REALIZATION" at the top of the page. Guth had discovered cosmic inflation, an idea which...

Strings Attached [interview with physicist Andrew Strominger]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On General/Chat 12/22/2004 2:39:04 PM EST · 7 replies · 481+ views The Telegraph (Calcutta, India) \| December 20, 2004 \| Pathik Guha Strings attached Wanted: Proof that the mother of all theories is correct. Pathik Guha reports But is that physics? That seemed to have been the caveat raised by Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist, against the string theory, popularly known as the Theory of Everything. Though the experts, not particularly fond of hypes, donít like the name that much, the string theory is one of the attempts to unify the two seemingly irreconciliable concepts ó relativity and quantum mechanics ó which between them explain everything from an appleís fall to a pictureís formation on a TV screen. Albert Einstein, always...

Most Powerful Eruption in the Universe Discovered
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 01/06/2005 2:27:25 PM EST · 54 replies · 4,626+ views NASA website \| January 5, 2005 \| Dolores Beasley, Steve Roy, Megan Watzke Most Powerful Eruption in the Universe Discovered Astronomers have found the most powerful eruption in the universe using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. A super massive black hole generated this eruption by growing at a remarkable rate. This discovery shows the enormous appetite of large black holes, and the profound impact they have on their surroundings. The huge eruption was seen in a Chandra image of the hot, X-ray emitting gas of a galaxy cluster called MS 0735.6+7421. Two vast cavities extend away from the super massive black hole in the cluster's central galaxy. The eruption, which has lasted for...

What Was Here Before the Beginning? [Big Bang, Cosmology]
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 01/06/2005 8:29:32 PM EST · 114 replies · 2,218+ views RedNova.com \| 06 January 2005 \| Martin Rees & Helen Matsos In part 2 of the interview, Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees discusses the limits to our knowledge of what might have preceded the big bang. Everyone asks the question: what was 'there' the instant before everything came to be?, but the question may not go as deep as the answers it spawns. Helen Matsos: Last year the big "science event" was measuring the cosmic microwave background and dating the big bang to 13.8 billion years ago, within an 8 to 10 percent margin of error. Can you give us some idea of the boundaries of the big bang -- what...

In search of hidden dimensions
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 01/09/2005 3:26:51 PM EST · 59 replies · 1,403+ views Nature \| January 6, 2004 \| Geoff Brumfiel Nature 433, 10 (06 January 2005); doi:10.1038/433010a In search of hidden dimensions So far, string theory has defied experiments, but Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks he has found a way to put the idea to the test. Geoff Brumfiel finds out how. J. IDE/HARVARD UNIV. NEWS OFFICE String fellow: Nima Arkani-Hamed hopes that particle-collision experiments will show that gravity leaks into other dimensions. Ask most theorists when they think their calculations will be tested experimentally and you'll be told "decades" or sometimes, more honestly, "never".But ask Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at Harvard University, and he will give you a far closer...

String fellows - [interview with string theorist Edward Witten]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 01/21/2005 11:07:28 AM EST · 33 replies · 1,257+ views Education Guardian (U.K.) \| January 20, 2005 \| Alok Jha String fellows100 years after Einstein changed physics for ever, Alok Jha visits a leafy corner of Princeton to meet his intellectual heirs - still hunting for a theory of everythingAlok JhaThursday January 20, 2005GuardianEdward Witten is so softly spoken that his voice sometimes threatens to drift away completely. His desk is a jumble of papers and his blackboard a mess of equations. But his hushed words come straight to the point and are infused with understanding and passion.Witten's quiet manner belies his status. In his role as de facto scientist-in-chief of string theory, Witten, the Charles Simonyi professor of mathematical...

Escape from the universe - [wild, but fun, speculations from physicist Michio Kaku]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 01/21/2005 11:45:03 AM EST · 161 replies · 2,349+ views Prospect Magazine (U.K.) \| February 2005 issue \| Michio Kaku Issue†107 / February 2005 Escape from the universe The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it Michio KakuThe author is professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York. This article is adapted from his book "Parallel Worlds" (Allen Lane) The universe is out of control, in a runaway acceleration. Eventually all intelligent life will face the final doomóthe big freeze. An advanced...

Quark soup may cause cosmic flashes
	Posted by LibWhacker On News/Activism 02/24/2005 3:17:45 AM EST · 28 replies · 591+ views Nature \| 2/23/05 \| Philip Ball Gamma-ray bursts could be the signature of ultradense stars. This X-ray image shows the 3C58 pulsar, the remnant of a supernova noted on Earth in AD 1181, which astronomers suspect may be a quark star. It lies about 10,000 light years from Earth.© NASA/SAO/CXC/P.Slane et al. Intense flashes of gamma rays in far-off galaxies might be produced by a bizarre kind of star, consisting of phenomenally dense material in which the particles that make up atomic nuclei have fallen apart. Two astrophysicists have proposed that gamma-ray (gamma-ray) bursts, whose origins have foxed astronomers for decades, might be the signatures of...

Leaking Gravity May Explain Cosmic Puzzle
	Posted by AntiGuv On News/Activism 02/28/2005 9:29:00 PM EST · 68 replies · 1,883+ views SPACE.com \| February 28, 2005 \| Sara Goudarzi WASHINGTON, D.C. - Scientists may not have to go over to the dark side to explain the fate of the universe.The theory that the accelerated expansion of the universe is caused by mysterious "dark energy" is being challenged by New York University physicist Georgi Dvali. He thinks there's just a gravity leak.Scientists have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In the late 1990s, they realized that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. At a loss to explain the stunning discovery, cosmologists blamed it on dark energy, a newly coined term to describe the mysterious antigravity force...

Finding the Ultimate Theory of Everything
	Posted by Michael Barnes On News/Activism 03/02/2005 1:11:19 PM EST · 61 replies · 1,796+ views RedNove \| Today? \| Marcus Chown Could two lookalike galaxies, barely a whisker apart in the night sky, herald a revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics? Some physicists believe that the two galaxies are the same - its image has been split into two, they maintain, by a "cosmic string"; a San Andreas Fault in the very fabric of space and time. If this interpretation is correct, then CSL-1 - the name of the curious double galaxy - is the first concrete evidence for "superstring theory": the best candidate for a "theory of everything", which attempts to encapsulate all the phenomena of nature in one...

'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 03/16/2005 1:58:30 AM EST · 90 replies · 2,048+ views SFGate.com \| March 14, 2005 \| Keay Davidson 'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots- Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer Monday, March 14, 2005 The most celebrated theory in modern physics faces increasing attacks from skeptics who fear it has lured a generation of researchers down an intellectual dead end. In its original, simplified form, circa the mid-1980s, string theory held that reality consists of infinitesimally small, wiggling objects called strings, which vibrate in ways that yield the different subatomic particles that comprise the cosmos. An analogy is the vibrations on a violin string, which yield different musical notes. Advocates claimed that string theory would smooth out...

The Good and Bad of String Theory
	Posted by Paradox On News/Activism 03/21/2005 10:41:33 AM EST · 18 replies · 830+ views RedNova \| Monday, 21 March 2005 The Good and Bad of String Theory The most celebrated theory in modern physics faces increasing attacks from skeptics who fear it has lured a generation of researchers down an intellectual dead end. In its original, simplified form, circa the mid-1980s, string theory held that reality consists of infinitesimally small, wiggling objects called strings, which vibrate in ways that yield the different subatomic particles that comprise the cosmos. Advocates claimed that string theory would smooth out the conflicts between Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics and the result would be a unifying "theory of everything," which could explain everything from...

How Einstein may have got the theory of relativity wrong
	Posted by bloggodocio On News/Activism 04/12/2005 1:16:58 AM EDT · 34 replies · 1,761+ views THE GUARDIAN \| 4/12/05 Tuesday, Apr 12, 2005 A century after Albert Einstein published his most famous ideas, physicists commemorated the occasion by trying to demolish one of them. Yesterday astronomers were to tell experts gathering at Warwick University in England to celebrate the anniversary of the great man's "miracle year" that the speed of light -- Einstein's unchanging yardstick that underpins his special theory of relativity -- might be slowing down. Michael Murphy, of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, said: "We are claiming something extraordinary here. fundamental "The findings suggest that there is a more fundamental theory of the way that...

The 'Cartesian Split' Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It
	Posted by betty boop On News/Activism 06/12/2005 10:27:56 PM EDT · 252 replies · 3,745+ views June 12, 2005 \| Jean F. Drew The 'Cartesian Split' Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It by Jean F. Drew The Ancient Heritage of Western Science The history of science goes back at least two and a half millennia, to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece. Democritus and Leucippus were the fathers of atomic theory ó at least they were the first thinkers ever to formulate one. Heraclitus was the first thinker to consider what in the modern age developed as the laws of thermodynamics. Likewise Platoís Chora, in the myth of the Demiurge (see Timaeus), may have been the very first anticipation of...

Physicists create a 'perfect' way to study the Big Bang
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 07/22/2005 7:15:47 AM EDT · 25 replies · 779+ views Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council via PhysOrg \| 21 July 2005 \| Staff 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...

Four Keys to Cosmology
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 08/31/2005 11:19:37 AM EDT · 109 replies · 1,439+ views Scientific American \| February 2004 \| George Musser 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...

Dark matter highlights extra dimensions
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 09/02/2005 2:33:22 PM EDT · 37 replies · 1,002+ views Nature Magazine \| 02 September 2005 \| Philip Ball 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...

The Beauty of Branes [Cosmology & Lisa Randall]
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 09/30/2005 9:38:27 PM EDT · 74 replies · 1,518+ views Scientific American \| October 2005 issue \| Marguerite Holloway 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...

Swirl Theory - For the "Told You So" archives.
	Posted by md2576 On News/Activism 10/01/2005 3:30:30 AM EDT · 34 replies · 967+ views Nova, Discovery, and My Personal Opinion \| Oct. 1st \| Me My "Swirl Theory"We hear of string theory, the Big Bang and many other ideas.I have come up with this idea over the past several days. Katrina and Rita has turned my attention towards this as I have discovered a new theory as of late that black holes may be present at the center of each galaxy.Using the theory that a black hole could have possibly been created in space by gases which collapsed into itself churning and sucking gasses and space debris around it into a swirling vortex. This swirling vortex of gas eventually condensed into planets and solar systems.Here...

Einstein's Dark Energy Accelerates the Universe
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 11/24/2005 1:08:26 PM EST · 45 replies · 1,071+ views Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council [PPARC] \| 22 November 2005 \| Staff 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...

Prof Ventures Into New Dimension [Lisa Randall alert!]
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 11/28/2005 2:58:35 PM EST · 63 replies · 2,083+ views Boston Herald.com \| 28 November 2005 \| Paul Restuccia 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 doesnít mean she still isnít 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...

Is string theory in trouble?
	Posted by samtheman On News/Activism 12/18/2005 8:46:34 AM EST · 70 replies · 1,483+ views newscientist.com \| 17 December 2005 \| Amanda Gefter Why are physicists taking the idea of multiple universes seriously now? First, there was the discovery in the past few years that inflation seems right. This theory that the universe expanded spectacularly in the first fraction of a second fits a lot of data. Inflation tells us that the universe is probably extremely big and necessarily diverse. On sufficiently big scales, and if inflation lasts long enough, this diversity will produce every possible universe. The same process that forged our universe in a big bang will happen over and over. The mathematics are rickety, but that's what inflation implies: a...

Design for Living: A theoretical physicist weighs in on a hot-button topic (Leonard Susskind)
	Posted by gobucks On News/Activism 01/10/2006 9:14:20 PM EST · 15 replies · 576+ views Village Voice \| 10 Jan 06 \| Geeta Dayal Many high-profile critics in the raging debate over "intelligent design" have, understandably, been evolutionary biologists. Legendary Oxford professor Richard Dawkins regularly appears on British TV to talk up Darwin and lash out against ID between books. Harvard emeritus prof E.O. Wilson has edited a hefty new 1,700-page anthology of Darwin's collected works, with the fighting title From So Simple a Beginning. They're generally not people like Leonard Susskind, a renowned physics professor at Stanford and a prime architect of string theory. His new book, his first for a general audience, has the provocative title The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and...

Supersymmetry and Parallel Dimensions [profile of Harvard physicist Lisa Randall]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 01/12/2006 2:54:38 PM EST · 76 replies · 2,105+ views The Harvard Crimson \| January 6, 2006 \| Adrian J. Smith Supersymmetry and Parallel Dimensions Harvard Physicst Randall among worldís leading string theorists Published On Friday, January 06, 2006††1:00 AM By ADRIAN J. SMITH Crimson Staff Writer Professor of Physics Lisa Randall í83, recently named one of Newsweekís most influential people of 2006, rose to the top with her theories on gravity. (Photo credit: CRIMSON/GLORIA B. HO) Professor of Physics Lisa Randall í83 saw how strong gravity could be during a climbing fall in New Hampshire two years ago. She was performing a 'challenging' move when she took a surprising fall, she says. Instead of stopping the fall, her support...

A scientific leap, but without the faith
	Posted by bvw On News/Activism 02/08/2006 5:33:11 PM EST · 28 replies · 609+ views Philadelhpia Inquirer \| Sun, Feb. 05, 2006 \| Amanda Gefter The recent ruling in Dover, Pa., against the mention of intelligent design in biology textbooks was a small cultural victory for science - not because intelligent design posed a genuine threat to the theory of evolution, but because the decision showed the public that there is an important difference between science and pseudoscience. In the wake of the trial, scientists are being criticized, even by their own colleagues, for working on anything that might be construed as pseudoscience - and string theory is drawing most of the heat. An intense controversy has erupted regarding the status of this potential "theory...

South Pole Detector Could Yield Signs of Extra Dimensions
	Posted by Marius3188 On News/Activism 02/16/2006 12:30:32 AM EST · 67 replies · 1,212+ views Northeastern University \| 26 Jan 2006 \| Newswise Newswise ó Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine say that scientists might soon have evidence for extra dimensions and other exotic predictions of string theory. Early results from a neutrino detector at the South Pole, called AMANDA, show that ghostlike particles from space could serve as probes to a world beyond our familiar three dimensions, the research team says. No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far. However, the current detection rate and energy range indicate that AMANDA's larger successor, called IceCube, now under construction, could provide the first evidence for string...

Oldest light shows universe grew fast, researchers say [inflationary cosmology gets a big boost]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 03/17/2006 6:46:30 AM EST · 104 replies · 1,112+ views Houston Chronicle (www.chron.com) \| March 17, 2006 \| Dennis O'Brien SEARCH RESULTS Evidence for Universe Expansion FoundEvidence for Universe Expansion FoundScientists: Find explains how universe formedCold War gamma-ray mystery solved in a flashU.S. spacecraft set to study cosmic bursts Front page March 17, 2006, 12:51AMOldest light shows universe grew fast, researchers sayFirst stars arose 400 million years after big bang, not 200 million years, as once thought By DENNIS O'BRIEN Baltimore Sun Scientists examining the oldest light in the universe say they've found clear evidence that matter expanded at an almost inconceivable rate after the big bang, creating conditions that led to the formation of the first stars.Light from...

One universe or many? Panel holds unusual debate
	Posted by snarks_when_bored On News/Activism 04/02/2006 10:46:13 PM EDT · 132 replies · 1,777+ views World Science \| March 30,. 2006 One universe or many? Panel holds unusual debate March 30, 2006 Special to World Science Scientific debates are as old as science. But in science, 'debate' usually means a battle of ideas in general, not an actual, politician-style duel in front of an audience. Occasionally, though, the latter also happens. And when the topic is as esoteric as the existence of multiple universes, sparks can fly. According to one proposal, new universes could sprout like bubbles off a spacetime "foam" that's not unlike soap bubbles. (Courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Such was the scene Wednesday evening at the American Museum...

Is faster-than-light propagation allowed by the laws of physics? (a primer on Lorentzian relativity)
	Posted by SunkenCiv On General/Chat 05/17/2006 12:04:18 PM EDT · 21 replies · 282+ views Meta Research \| May 1, 2006 \| Tom Van Flandern The proof that faster-than-light (FTL) propagation is not allowed by nature is simple. Special relativity (SR) forbids it because, in that theory, time slows and approaches a cessation of flow for any material entity approaching the speed of light. So no matter how much energy is brought to bear, the entity cannot be propelled all the way to, much less beyond, the point where time ceases. The entityís inertia simply increases towards infinity as the speed barrier is approached.[*] But most importantly, relativists are confident that SR is a valid theory because it has passed eleven independent experiments confirming most...

The universe before it began
	Posted by LibWhacker On News/Activism 05/24/2006 6:59:24 PM EDT · 124 replies · 1,638+ views Seed Magazine \| 5/22/06 \| Maggie Wittlin Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

Satellite could open door on extra dimension (Universe is floating!? Black holes in Solar System!?)
	Posted by Wiz On News/Activism 05/31/2006 10:35:22 AM EDT · 15 replies · 751+ views New Scientist Space \| 2006 May 30 \| Maggie McKee An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007. Such theories are notoriously difficult to test. But a new study suggests that such hidden dimensions could give rise to thousands of mini-black holes within our own solar system ñ and the theory could be tested within Plutoís orbit in just a few years. Black holes of various masses are thought to have sprung into existence within 1 second of the big bang, as elementary particles clumped together...

From the present to the past [Stephen Hawking]
	Posted by PatrickHenry On News/Activism 07/04/2006 7:29:06 AM EDT · 31 replies · 732+ views PhysicsWeb \| 30 June 2006 \| Staff Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking and his CERN colleague Thomas Hertog have proposed a radical new approach to understanding the universe that studies it from the "top down" rather than the "bottom up" as in traditional models. The approach acknowledges that the universe did not have just one unique beginning and history but a multitude of different beginnings and histories, and that it has experienced them all. But because most of these other alternative histories disappeared very early after the Big Bang to leave behind the universe we observe today, the best way to understand the past, they say, is to...

Why a large hadron collider?
	Posted by LibWhacker On News/Activism 07/07/2006 2:14:14 PM EDT · 17 replies · 658+ views Seed Magazine \| 7/6/06 \| Edit Staff Why a Large Hadron Collider? Seed asks some of the greatest physicists alive what we hope to learn from the LHC. by Edit Staff ‚Ä¢ Posted July 6, 2006 12:32 AM View of the ATLAS detector in the experiment hall, roughly 100 meters underground. ATLAS is one of the five particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Credit: Guido Mocafico The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently under construction at CERN is the greatest basic science endeavor in history. Roughly half of the world's particle physicists, 7,000 individuals, make the Collider their workplace. This single-minded group of men and women...

The Energy of Empty Space that isn't Zero
	Posted by djf On General/Chat 07/11/2006 7:17:03 PM EDT · 7 replies · 179+ views The Edge \| LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS THE ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO [LAWRENCE KRAUSS:] I just returned from the Virgin Islands, from a delightful event ó a conference in St. Thomas ó that I organized with 21 physicists. I like small events, and I got to hand-pick the people. The topic of the meeting was "Confronting Gravity. " I wanted to have a meeting where people would look forward to the key issues facing fundamental physics and cosmology. And if you think about it they all revolve in one way or another around gravity. Someone at the meeting said, well, you know, don't we...

What if Black Holes Didn't Exist?
	Posted by LibWhacker On News/Activism 07/23/2006 4:05:35 PM EDT · 38 replies · 1,145+ views Seed Magazine \| 7/21/06 \| Richard Morgan How an alternate theory of the universe exposes the 'war of words' that underlies modern cosmology. Theoretical physicists have recently been frustrated by a bold hypothesis concerning black holesóspecifically, that they don't exist. In March, at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara, Calif., George Chapline, an applied physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, gave a talk based on ideas he's been incubating for several years. His goal: to amend astrophysics by applying theories of dark energy and condensed matter physics. His work reinvents black holes as so-called "dark energy stars," which are what is left over when...

Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery
	Posted by neverdem On News/Activism 08/15/2006 2:26:41 AM EDT · 100 replies · 2,557+ views New York Times \| August 15, 2006 \| DENNIS OVERBYE Grisha Perelman, where are you? Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincare conjecture, about the nature of space. After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the worldís mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right. Now they say they have finished his work,...

Pluto's Planet Status / String Theory
	Posted by SunkenCiv On General/Chat 08/17/2006 11:31:19 PM EDT · 22 replies · 163+ views Science Friday \| August 18, 2006 \| segment produced by Annette Heist Is string theory the answer to the last big questions in physics, or a dead end? While some physicists believe that string theory could lead to a unifying 'theory of everything,' detractors say that string theory is sloppy and founded on unwarranted assumptions. One new book calls string theory 'not even wrong.' In this hour of Science Friday, we'll look at the pros and con of string theory, with physicists Lee Smolin and Brian Greene.

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