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Physicists are using surprising ideas and mathematical tools originating in string theory to guide research into strange materials that are cropping up in condensed matter laboratories... “Let’s start here,” Sachdev says. “Condensed matter physicists study the behaviour of electrons in many materials – semiconductors, metals, and exotic materials like superconductors.” Normally, these physicists can model the behaviour of a material as if electrons were moving freely around inside it. Even if that’s not what’s actually happening, because of complex interactions, it makes the model easy to understand and the calculations easier to do. Electrons (and occasionally other particles) used in...

Explanation: In the center of a swirling whirlpool of hot gas is likely a beast that has never been seen directly: a black hole. Studies of the bright light emitted by the swirling gas frequently indicate not only that a black hole is present, but also likely attributes. The gas surrounding GRO J1655-40, for example, has been found to display an unusual flickering at a rate of 450 times a second. Given a previous mass estimate for the central object of seven times the mass of our Sun, the rate of the fast flickering can be explained by a black...

"The first evidence for the primordial B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been detected by astronomers working on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) telescope at the South Pole.".........

  "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods." —Albert Einstein  The general, historical dialogue between religion and science goes back a long way—at least to Plato, Aristotle, and Leibniz. Before the 17th century, the goals of science were wisdom, understanding the natural order, and living in harmony with it. Ever since the "quantum revolution" of about 70 years ago, various scientists have been finding the intriguing parallels between their results and certain mystical-transcendental religions. Heisenberg, Bohr, Schroedinger, Eddington, Einstein—all held a mystical, spiritual...

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not...

If you "lived inside" a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring. Fermilab is building a interferometer to test space time for holographic blurring. Possible consequence of holography Hypothesis: observable correlations are encoded on light sheets and limited by information capacity of a Planck wavelength carrier (“Planck information flux” limit) Predicts uncertainty in position at Planck diffraction scale

The universe is a hologram and everything you can see - including this article and the device you are reading it on - is a mere projection. This is according to a controversial model proposed in 1997 by theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena.Until now the bizarre theory had never been tested, but recent mathematical models suggest that the mind-boggling principle could be true.Professor Maldacena's model suggests that the universe exists in nine dimensions of space and one of time.Now Japanese researchers have attempted to tackle this problem by providing mathematical evidence that the holographic principle might be correct, according to a...

Researchers focusing on gravitational waves find the first direct evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation, a faster-than-light expansion just after the big bang. Scientists staring at the faint afterglow from the universe's birth 13.8 billion years ago have discovered the first direct evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation — the mysterious and violent expansion after the big bang. The findings, made using radio telescopes at the South Pole, support the idea that our known cosmos make up just a tiny fragment in a much larger, unknown frontier that extends far beyond the reaches of light. During this period...

Explanation: Did the universe undergo an early epoch of extremely rapid expansion? Such an inflationary epoch has been postulated to explain several puzzling cosmic attributes such as why our universe looks similar in opposite directions. Yesterday, results were released showing an expected signal of unexpected strength, bolstering a prediction of inflation that specific patterns of polarization should exist in cosmic microwave background radiation -- light emitted 13.8 billion years ago as the universe first became transparent. Called B-mode polarizations, these early swirling patterns can be directly attributed to squeeze and stretch effects that gravitational radiation has on photon-emitting electrons. The...

On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right. Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second...

Astronomers propose an experiment that may close the last major loophole of Bell's inequality -- a 50-year-old theorem that, if violated by experiments, would mean that our universe is based not on the textbook laws of classical physics, but on the less-tangible probabilities of quantum mechanics. Such a quantum view would allow for seemingly counterintuitive phenomena such as entanglement, in which the measurement of one particle instantly affects another, even if those entangled particles are at opposite ends of the universe. Among other things, entanglement -- a quantum feature Albert Einstein skeptically referred to as "spooky action at a distance"...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-First-Test-That-Proves-General-Theory-of-Relativity-Wrong-20259.shtml According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than...

The current thinking regarding black holes is that they have two very simple parts, an event horizon and a singularity. Because a probe cannot be sent inside a black hole to see what is truly going on, researchers have to rely on theories. The singularity theory suffers from what has come to be known as the "information paradox"—black holes appear to destroy information, which would seem to violate the rules of general relativity, because they follow rules of quantum mechanics instead. This paradox has left deep thinking physicists such as Stephen Hawking uneasy—so much so that he and others have...

South Pole Telescope scientists have detected for the first time a subtle distortion in the oldest light in the universe, which may help reveal secrets about the earliest moments in the universe's formation. The scientists observed twisting patterns in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background -- light that last interacted with matter very early in the history of the universe, less than 400,000 years after the big bang. These patterns, known as "B modes," are caused by gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that occurs when the trajectory of light is bent by massive objects, much like a lens focuses light.

Physicists have proposed an experiment that could force us to make a choice between extremes to describe the behaviour of the Universe. The proposal comes from an international team of researchers from Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Singapore, and is published today in Nature Physics. It is based on what the researchers call a 'hidden influence inequality'. This exposes how quantum predictions challenge our best understanding about the nature of space and time, Einstein's theory of relativity. "We are interested in whether we can explain the funky phenomena we observe without sacrificing our sense of things happening smoothly in space and...

Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter Photons with strong mutual attraction in a quantum nonlinear medium. Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it. Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25...

Almost a century ago, renowned quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg found fundamental limits on how well a quantum system can be prepared and measured, known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. However, only the limit that pertains to the preparation of quantum systems has been quantified; the other two, relating to measurements, have long been a matter of debate, lacking a formal treatment. These limits are: That it is impossible to jointly measure incompatible quantities, for instance, location and speed of a quantum object, with perfect accuracy; and that a measurement of one of these quantities necessarily disturbs the other. Last year, UQ's...

Team found that Polaris is 2.5 times brighter today than in 137CE Experts say find is 'entirely unexpected' Astronomers have discovered that Polaris, the north star, is getting brighter. They say the star has suddenly reversed two decades of dimming. It is expanding at more than 100 times the rate they expected - and nobody is sure why. A team led by Scott Engle of Villanova University in Pennsylvania recalibrated historic measurements of Polaris by Ptolemy in 137 C.E., the Persian astronomer Al-Sufi in 964 C.E., and others. They investigated the fluctuations of the star over the course of several...

Black holes can radiate in a way that agrees with thermodynamics, and the region near the event horizon doesn’t have a firewall, just as general relativity requires. So Hawking’s proposal is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

By proving a single photon can't travel faster than light, scientists say they have proven time travel is impossible. THE GIST Hong Kong physicists say they have proven a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light. This demonstrates that time travel is impossible, they say. Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had...