Free Republic

Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behaviour of space and time, but where these entities come from.“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from...

Scientists say they've created a handful of atoms of the elusive element 115, which occupies a mysterious corner of the periodic table. The super-heavy element has yet to be officially named, but it is temporarily called ununpentium, roughly based on the Latin and Greek words for the digits in its atomic number, 115.   The atomic number is the number of protons an element contains. The heaviest element commonly found in nature is uranium, which has 92 protons, but scientists can load even more protons into an atomic nucleus and make heavier elements through nuclear fusion reactions. [Wacky Physics: The...

DALLAS — Warp-drive technology, a form of "faster than light" travel popularized by TV's "Star Trek," could be bolstered by the physics of quantum thrusters — another science-fiction idea made plausible by modern science. NASA scientists are performing experiments that could help make warp drive a possibility sometime in the future from a lab built for the Apollo program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. A warp-drive-enabled spacecraft would look like a football with two large rings fully encircling it. The rings would utilize an exotic form of matter to cause space-time to contract in front of and expand...

A simple, yet elegant method of measuring the surface gravity of a star has just been discovered. These computations are important because they reveal stellar physical properties and evolutionary state – and that’s not all. The technique works equally well for estimating the size of hundreds of exoplanets. Developed by a team of astronomers and headed by Vanderbilt Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Keivan Stassun, this new technique measures a star’s “flicker”. With an uncertainty ranging from 50 percent to 200 percent, astronomers have been eager to seize on a new way of measuring a star’s surface gravity which will...

In quite an eerie feat, physicists have floated microscopic diamonds in midair using laser beams. Researchers have already used lasers to levitate extremely small particles, such as individual atoms, but this is the first time that the technique has worked on a nanodiamond, which, in this case, measures just 100 nanometers (3.9 x 10-8 inches) across, or more than 1,000 times thinner than a fingernail. In the new study, the physicists from the University of Rochester relied on the fact that a laser beam, which is made up of photons, creates a tiny force that usually can't be felt.....

The Blackbody force is a newly discovered force that attracts atoms and molecules to hot, opaque objects emitting blackbody radiation. Under certain circumstances, the new force is stronger than gravity.

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We'll suppose it's a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.: The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and...

Black holes can be described by just two fundamental characteristics: mass and spin. Astronomers have been able to measure the objects’ mass for decades, by looking for gravitational effects on the orbits of nearby stars. But measuring spin, which records the angular momentum of the matter that falls into the holes, has proved troublesome, particularly for the supermassive black holes that lie at the centres of galaxies. No light emanates from the black holes’ spinning event horizons, so astronomers instead look for proxies that emit X-rays, such as the swirling disks of matter that feed into some holes. Such indirect...

Original title:Scientists to Discuss Universe's Strange Dense Spot Wednesday: Watch Live You can't watch it live anymore but you can watch the video of the event. This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. An odd dense spot in the universe populated...

(Phys.org) —When a molten material cools quickly, parts of it may have enough time to grow into orderly crystals. But if the cooling rate is too fast for the entire melt to crystallize, the remaining material ends up in a non-crystalline state known as a glass, with atoms caught in place essentially as a frozen liquid. Recently, a group of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) came across an unexpected reversal of this usual sequence of events. After cooling a molten alloy of aluminum, iron, and silicon, they found that glassy nodules of a non-crystalline solid...

It creeps in slowly in the dark of night, and once inside, it almost never goes away. It's known as the Hum, a steady, droning sound that's heard in places as disparate as Taos, N.M.; Bristol, England; and Largs, Scotland. But what causes the Hum, and why it only affects a small percentage of the population in certain areas, remain a mystery, despite a number of scientific investigations...

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory. Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects. He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it...

Neutrinos come in three flavors — electron, muon and tau — and have been known to change, or oscillate, between certain flavors. Now, for the first time, scientists can definitively say they've discovered muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos.

Exotic particles called neutrinos have been caught in the act of shape-shifting, switching from one flavor to another, in a discovery that could help solve the mystery of antimatter. Neutrinos come in three flavors — electron, muon and tau — and have been known to change, or oscillate, between certain flavors. Now, for the first time, scientists can definitively say they've discovered muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos. The discovery was made at the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan, where scientists sent a beam of muon neutrinos from the J-PARC laboratory in Tokai Village on the eastern coast of Japan,...

Enlarge Image Shining example. The GERDA experiment at the Gran Sasso lab in Italy has all but ruled out earlier claims for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Credit: The University of Tübingen A long-standing controversy among particle physicists looks to be settled—in the less exciting way—thanks to new data from an ultrasensitive particle detector deep underground. Physicists operating the GERmanium Detector Array (GERDA) 1400 meters down in Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory say that they see no signs of a hypothesized type of nuclear decay called neutrinoless double-beta decay that, were it conclusively observed, would almost certainly merit a Nobel Prize....

What is rarer than a shooting star? Rarer than a diamond? Rarer than any metal, any mineral, so rare that if you scan the entire earth, all six million billion billion kilos or 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of our planet, you would find only one ounce of it? What is so rare it has never been seen directly, because if you could get enough of it together, it would self-vaporize from its own radioactive heat? What is this stuff that can't be seen or found? Well, here's a hint. It's sitting modestly in a lower row in the Periodic Table, down on...

Sharp corners and jagged edges on graphene sheets enable them to puncture cell membranes. Researchers from Brown University have shown how tiny graphene microsheets — ultra-thin materials with a number of commercial applications — could be big trouble for human cells. The research shows that sharp corners and jagged protrusions along the edges of graphene sheets can easily pierce cell membranes. After the membrane is pierced, an entire graphene sheet can be pulled inside the cell where it may disrupt normal function. The new insight may be helpful in finding ways to minimize the potential toxicity of graphene, said...

A black hole is created when a huge star runs out of fuel for nuclear fusion and collapses under its own gravity. The star's outer layers are expelled, and its core falls in on itself, with the pull of gravity becoming ever stronger, until what's left is the core's mass condensed into an extremely small area. According to general relativity, this area is a single point of space-time, and the density there is infinitely large — a singularity. But most scientists think singularities don't really exist, that they're just a sign that equations have broken down and fail to adequately...

Courtesy of Kirk Zamieroski, American Chemical Society WASHINGTON — The pursuit that obsessed some of the world's greatest geniuses for centuries — alchemy and its quest for the “Philosopher’s Stone” that would transform lead and other base metals into gold — is the topic of a new episode in the American Chemical Society Bytesize Science video series. The video, from the world’s largest scientific society, is at www.BytesizeScience.com. It features Laurence Principe, Ph.D., a noted historian of science and expert on alchemy, which, far from being solely a misguided pseudoscience, helped set the stage for the emergence of modern science....

If each energy field pervading space is thought of as the surface of a pond, and waves and particles are the turbulence on that surface, then the new evidence strengthens the argument that a vibrant, hidden world lies beneath. For decades, the surface-level description of the subatomic world has been sufficient to make accurate calculations about most physical phenomena. But recently, a strange class of matter that defies description by known quantum mechanical methods has drawn physicists into the depths below... Of all the strange forms of matter, cuprates -- copper-containing metals that exhibit a property called high-temperature superconductivity...