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Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer 09 March 2006 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Zeeya Merali DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology. The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara,...

A Lexington man's contribution to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity was celebrated last week at the Westford observatory where the theory was put to the test 40 years ago. About 100 invited guests at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory in Westford listened as Dr. Irwin Shapiro discussed the fourth test of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Einstein published three of his famous articles in 1905, including the theory of relativity. The World Year of Physics is commemorating the centennial anniversary of Einstein's most accomplished year, along with remembering Shapiro's experiment.

Gödel and Einstein: Friendship and RelativityBy PALLE YOURGRAU In the summer of 1942, while German U-boats roamed in wolf packs off the coast of Maine, residents in the small coastal town of Blue Hill were alarmed by the sight of a solitary figure, hands clasped behind his back, hunched over like a comma with his eyes fixed on the ground, making his way along the shore in a seemingly endless midnight stroll. Those who encountered the man were struck by his deep scowl and thick German accent. Speculation mounted that he was a German spy giving secret signals to enemy...

Even its critics admit that it was a great idea in 1959. It was then that three Stanford scientists, dangling their legs in a university swimming pool, agreed to team up on an ambitious effort to peer deep into the heart of the strangeness that is Albert Einstein's legacy. Now 45 years and $700 million later, their dream has materialized as a van-size assemblage of plumbing, electronics and quartz, known unpoetically as Gravity Probe B, sitting atop a rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It is to be launched into orbit next Monday on an 18-month mission. When...

The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...

[The Cassini spacecraft will reach Saturn in July 2004 and should send the small Huygens probe into the hazy atmosphere of Titan in January 2005. On its way there, Cassini flew nearly behind the Sun from Earth's point of view two years ago, offering a chance for a highly precise test of general relativity. Courtesy NASA/JPL.] Albert Einstein still rules. His 1915 theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, has just passed its most stringent test by far. Extremely precise measurements of the radio link between Earth and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, bound for Saturn, match general relativity's predictions extraordinarily...