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GENEVA – The world's largest atom smasher has recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons, a spokeswoman said Wednesday. Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The collisions occurred Tuesday evening as the Large Haldron Collider underwent test runs in preparation for operations next year, said Christine Sutton of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. Two beams of circulating particles traveling in opposite directions at 1.18...

Shortly after the first of the year (if not already), the Large Hadron Collider — the most powerful particle accelerator ever built — will smash protons together at record energies. If the Earth remains intact, doomsayers will once again have been falsified. Every time they forecast the demise of the planet, those prophets of Earthly annihilation prove themselves no more foresightful than mortgage bankers or phony psychics.

Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity. Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line. For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr Hořava,...

Today the John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), snip D'Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr. snip Third view Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If...

Science fiction looks closer to becoming science fact. Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists that sweeps away one of the key objections to the mind boggling and controversial idea. The work has wider implications since the idea of parallel universes sidesteps one of the key problems with time travel. Every since it was given serious lab cred in 1949 by the great logician Kurt Godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his...

Harvard University researchers have halted a pulse of laser light in its tracks and revived it a fraction of a millimeter away. Here's the twist: they stopped it in a cloud of supercold sodium atoms, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and then restarted it in a second, distinct BEC as though the pulse had spookily jumped between the two locations. "It's odd," says atomic physicist Lene Hau, the team's leader. "We can actually revive the light pulse and send it back on its way as if nothing had happened." ~snip~ BEC clouds are prized because their atoms' delicate quantum...

Why Quantum Mechanics Is Not So Weird after All Richard Feynman's "least-action" approach to quantum physics in effect shows that it is just classical physics constrained by a simple mechanism. When the complicated mathematics is left aside, valuable insights are gained. PAUL QUINCEY The birth of quantum mechanics can be dated to 1925, when physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger invented mathematical procedures that accurately replicated many of the observed properties of atoms. The change from earlier types of physics was dramatic, and pre-quantum physics was soon called classical physics in a kind of nostalgia for the...

...Bohm showed that Einstein was partly right in that Bohr's view was incomplete. One must keep both the particles and force fields of the old physics in addition to the new quantum wave function. Contrary to Bohr, we can picture the motion of particles in space at the quantum level , but there is a new kind of quantum force in addition to the classical forces of electromagnetism, gravity and even the strong and weak forces of modern high energy physics. This new quantum force or "connection" is like The Force in George Lucas's Star Wars. Unlike ordinary forces the...

December 27, 2005 Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory By DENNIS OVERBYE Einstein said there would be days like this.This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in...

At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences. One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness. He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation...

Interview with Martin Gardner Martin Gardner occupies a unique position in the mathematical world. The author of the “Mathematical Games” column that ran for twenty-five years in Scientific American magazine, he opened the eyes of the general public to the beauty and fascination of mathematics and inspired many to go on to make the subject their life’s work. His column was the place where several important mathematical notions, such as Conway’s Game of Life and Penrose tiles, first became widely known. It was also a place where the sheer fun of mathematical games and puzzles was celebrated and savored....

Dear Cecil: Cecil, you're my final hope Of finding out the true Straight Dope For I have been reading of Schroedinger's cat But none of my cats are at all like that. This unusual animal (so it is said) Is simultaneously live and dead! What I don't understand is just why he Can't be one or other, unquestionably. My future now hangs in between eigenstates. In one I'm enlightened, the other I ain't. If you understand, Cecil, then show me the way And rescue my psyche from quantum decay. But if this queer thing has perplexed even you, Then I...

A research team in Japan says it has successfully demonstrated for the first time in the world in a solid-state device one of the two basic building blocks that will be needed to construct a viable quantum computer. The team has built a controlled NOT (CNOT) gate, a fundamental building block for quantum computing in the same way that a NAND gate is for classical computing. Research into quantum computers is still in its early days and experts predict it will be at least 10 years before a viable quantum computer is developed. But if they can be developed, quantum...

Schrodinger's Cat A cat is placed in a box, together with a radioactive atom. If the atom decays, a hammer kills the cat; if the atom doesn't decay, the cat lives. As the atom is considered to be in either state before the observer opens the box, the cat must thus be considered to be simultaneously dead and alive. -ERWIN SCHODINGER'S CAT PARADOX, 1935 Wittgenstein's Banana A banana is flying first class from New York to L.A. Two scientists, one in each city, are talking on the phone about the banana. Because it is moving in relationship to its noun,...