Free Republic

Ultra-simple Desktop Device Slows Light To A Crawl At Room Temperature Though Einstein put his foot down and demanded that nothing can move faster than light, a new device developed at the University of Rochester may let you outpace a beam by putting your foot down on the gas pedal. At 127 miles per hour, the light in the new device travels more than 5 million times slower than normal as it passes through a ruby just a few centimeters long. Instead of the complex, room-filling mechanisms previously used to slow light, the new apparatus is small and, in the...

Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 10:24:29 -0800 From: Jim Warren Subject: Autodesk's founder reports gross errors by Limbaugh, CNN, Snopes Cc: [Snopes and a whole bunch of CNN circular file email addresses; Mr. Warren doesn't seem to know the news biz very well --DMTW] [If you know John, you know him to be a most ardent stickler for facts. Here, John is not reporting hearsay; he's reporting about what's happened on his own server, and images he provides thereon. --jim] At 12:34 AM +0100 3/29/03, John Walker wrote: Subject: Sniping at Snopes.comAlmost everybody's experienced the phenomenon of encountering a description...

Flat Lens Could Significantly Enhance Object Resolution by Nicolle Wahl Toronto - Mar 28, 2003 By constructing artificial materials that break long-standing rules of nature, a U of T researcher has developed a flat lens that could significantly enhance the resolution of imaged objects. This, in turn, could lead to smaller and more effective antennas and devices for cell phones, increased space for data storage on CD-ROMs and more complex electronic circuits. "This is new physics," says George Eleftheriades, a U of T professor specializing in electromagnetic technology at the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering...

Astronomers Deal Blow To Quantum Theories Of Time, Space, Gravity Huntsville - Mar 28, 2003 For the second time in as many months, images gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) are raising questions about the structures of time and gravity, and the fabric of space.Using two HST images, astronomers from Italy and Germany looked for but did not find evidence supporting a prevailing scientific theory that says time, space and gravity are composed of tiny quantum bits. Using existing theories, the team led by Dr. Roberto Ragazzoni from the Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri, Italy, and the Max Planck Institute...

In living organisms, enzymes called hydrogenases harness plentiful metals to turn water into hydrogen and vice versa. Stripped of their proteins, they may show chemists a surprising shortcut to producing the fuel of the future In his recent State of the Union address, President George W. Bush touted hydrogen as the automotive fuel of the future, one that will reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil while cutting greenhouse-gas and other noxious emissions. "A single chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes," he said in requesting...

The Big Rip: New Theory Ends Universe by Shredding EverythingBy Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 12:04 pm ET06 March 2003 A rather harrowing new theory about the death of the universe paints a picture of "phantom energy" ripping apart galaxies, stars, planets and eventually every speck of matter in a fantastical end to time.Scientifically it is just about the most repulsive notion ever conceived.The speculative but serious cosmology is described as a "pretty fantastic possibility" even by its lead author, Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth University. It explains one possible outcome for solid astronomical observations made in the late 1990s...

PITTSBURGH -- The race for smaller, faster, and more powerful computers and consumer electronics took a new spin as researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) became the first to control electrons using electrical, rather than magnetic, fields. In its Jan. 23 edition, Science Express, the online portal of the magazine Science, published a report on the breakthrough of Jeremy Levy and David Awschalom. Levy is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Pitt and director of its Center for Oxide-Semiconductor Materials for Quantum Computing ( http://cosmqc.net ). Awschalom is a...

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...

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,"...

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY--In, then out, then in again. In 1998, the United States withdrew from a previous incarnation of the $5 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) experiment, which will use a doughnut-shaped magnetic bottle to confine a superhot hydrogen plasma and induce it to undergo nuclear fusion. But last week, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced that the United States would seek to become a partner in ITERagain, as part of its push for long-term energy independence. "I am pleased to announce today that President Bush has decided that the United States will join the international negotiations on ITER,"...

Jan. 31 — From an idea that was only considered practicable 10 years ago, scientists say they have succeeded in teleporting laser photons over two kilometers (1.25 miles), the biggest distance yet achieved. In science fiction, teleportation entails taking someone and creating a replica of him or her a long distance away, and destroying the original. It remained confined to pulp literature until a decade ago. The perceived barrier to it was something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This principle states that the more accurately you try to scan or measure an atom or other object in order to...

<p>PRINCETON, N.J., Jan. 30 (UPI) -- The United States will join negotiations to build and operate a major international fusion research project, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Thursday.</p> <p>Known as ITER -- from the Latin word meaning "the way" -- the project is intended to build on previous fusion concepts involving magnetic containment of high-temperature plasma, a state of matter so hot that even atoms cannot hold together.</p>

Employing a facet of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," scientists have taken particles of light, destroyed them and then resurrected copies more than a mile away. Previous experiments in so-called quantum teleportation moved particles of light about a yard. The findings could aid the sending of unbreakable coded messages, which is limited to a few tens of miles. The new experiment used longer wavelengths of light than earlier ones, letting the scientists copy the light through standard glass fiber found in fiber optic cables. "The central issue is to move to telecom fibers and...

Santa Barbara, Calif. -- Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and at the University of Pittsburgh have provided "proof of concept that quantum spin information can be locally manipulated using high-speed electrical circuits," according to the abstract of their paper being published Jan. 23 on the "Science Express" website, Science Magazine's rapid portal for publication of significant research findings to appear subsequently in print in Science. The findings are significant because they demonstrate a solid-state quantum logic gate (i.e, control mechanism) that works with gating technologies in today's electronics, today's computers. This research also moves esoteric...

Physicists leveled heavy criticism Thursday on a report from last week that claimed the speed of gravity had been determined by observation and was equal to the speed of light. One physicist called the interpretation of the finding "nonsense". Others were more diplomatic, suggesting that the experiment, involving observations of the bending of light from a distant galaxy as the light sped by the planet Jupiter, had instead measured other phenomena. The brewing controversy, which illustrates the fits and spurts with which science sometimes grudgingly moves forward, appears to have ground to a stalemate for now as the two scientists...

The speed of gravity has been measured for the first time. The landmark experiment shows that it travels at the speed of light, meaning that Einstein's general theory of relativity has passed another test with flying colours. Ed Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri in Columbia made the measurement, with the help of the planet Jupiter. "We became the first two people to know the speed of gravity, one of the fundamental constants of nature," the scientists say, in an article in New Scientist print edition. One important...

For many in the northern hemisphere, the appearance of icicles adds a little sparkle to the holiday season and makes the fire seem that little bit warmer. But when ice storms strike as they did in Canada and the American north-east in 1998, power lines can become so encrusted with ice that they collapse, leaving millions without electricity. Surrounding every power line with a heating element is one option. But Victor Petrenko, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, thinks he has a smarter idea - use the ice itself as the element. Working with a consortium of US and Canadian...

PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Monday, December 09, 2002 Los Alamos National Laboratory New theory unravels magnetic instability Reconnection, the merging of magnetic field lines of opposite polarity near the surface of the sun, Earth and some black holes, is believed to be the root cause of many spectacular astronomical events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, but the reason for this is not well understood. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory now have a new theory that may explain the instability and advance the understanding of these phenomena. Theorists Giovanni Lapenta of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Plasma Theory...

An international team researching particle physics at Tohoku University has observed a new kind of neutrino--one of the building blocks of the universe--and almost certainly confirmed that the particles have mass, it was learned Tuesday. The neutrinos are different from the type detected by Tokyo University professor emeritus and Nobel laureate Masatoshi Koshiba and others, according to the researchers. Working at Tokohu University's Research Center for Neutrino Science neutrino observation facility, the researchers detected antielectron neutrinos, which are the antimatter of one of three types of neutrinos. They almost certainly confirmed that the neutrinos they detected had mass--just as the...

[Referenced pictures displayed at end] Two Australian scientists believe they have found evidence of a parallel universe of strange matter within our own Solar System. Dr Robert Foot and Dr Saibal Mitra, of the University of Melbourne, report that close-up observations of the asteroid Eros by the Near-Shoemaker probe indicate it has been splattered by so-called "mirror matter". Mirror matter is not anti-matter, it is altogether weirder. It is somehow a "reflection" of normal matter, a sort of parallel series of particles required to restore the balance of the Universe. Sounds far-fetched - some believe so. However, experiments are underway...