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Here's a nice surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than we thought. An international team of researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. The result is published 19 December in Nature Communications. Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner made the breakthrough while at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. They found that 'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum 'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one."The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you...

2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning, and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe December 8, 2014 |By Lee Billings In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past. Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 TeamPhysicists have a problem with time.   Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s...

Quantum gravity The most exciting discovery in physics could come about thanks to telecoms satellites. Is a single theory of reality in sight? Kindle ESA’s Optical Ground Station in the Canary Islands has set a new distance world record in ‘quantum teleportation’ by reproducing the characteristics of a light particle across 143 km of open air. Photo courtesy ESA Sidney Perkowitz is professor of physics emeritus at Emory University in Atlanta. His latest books are Slow Light (2011) and Hollywood Chemistry (2014), and he is at work on a new edition of Universal Foam (2001). Watching a rocket as it...

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, faster is better. Faster means more powerful particle collisions and looking deeper into the makeup of matter. However, other researchers are proclaiming not so fast. LHC may not have discovered the Higgs Boson, the boson that imparts mass to everything, the god particle as some have called it. While the Higgs Boson discovery in 2012 culminated with the awarding in December 2013 of the Nobel Prize to Peter Higgs and François Englert, a team of researchers has raised these doubts about the Higgs Boson in their paper published in the journal Physical...

Scientists at the world's largest smasher said Wednesday they have discovered two new subatomic particles never seen before that could widen our understanding of the universe. An experiment using the European Organization for Nuclear Research's Large Hadron Collider found the new particles, which were predicted to exist, and are both baryons made from three quarks bound together by a strong force.

GPS has a new job. It does a great job of telling us our location, but the network of hyper-accurate clocks in space could get a fix on something far more elusive: dark matter. Dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter but scarcely interacts with ordinary matter. A novel particle is the most popular candidate, but Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada propose that kinks or cracks in the quantum fields that permeate the universe could be the culprit. If they are right,...

The apparent absence of shadows where shadows were expected to be is raising new questions about the faint glow of microwave radiation once hailed as proof that the universe was created by a "Big Bang." In a finding sure to cause controversy, scientists at UAH found a lack of evidence of shadows from "nearby" clusters of galaxies using new, highly accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background. A team of UAH scientists led by Dr. Richard Lieu, a professor of physics, used data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to scan the cosmic microwave background for shadows caused by...

FIFTY years ago this month, the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell submitted a short, quirky article to a fly-by-night journal titled Physics, Physique, Fizika. He had been too shy to ask his American hosts, whom he was visiting during a sabbatical, to cover the steep page charges at a mainstream journal, the Physical Review. Though the journal he selected folded a few years later, his paper became a blockbuster. Today it is among the most frequently cited physics articles of all time. Bell’s paper made important claims about quantum entanglement, one of those captivating features of quantum theory that depart...

Particle physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research announced 2 years ago they had discovered the Higgs particle, considered the foundation particle in the Standard Model of Particle physics, and a Nobel Prize was awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson. Now, though, researchers at the University of Southern Denmark's Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology suggest that while the CERN scientists did discover a unique new particle, there's no conclusive evidence of it being the Higgs boson. The Higgs could explain data obtained by CERN scientists using...

A new record-breaking atomic clock is so precise it neither loses nor gains a second in five billion years - longer than the age of the Earth. The 'strontium lattice clock' is 50% more accurate than the previous record holder, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) quantum logic clock. Researchers say the clock is so accurate, it can even reveal the effect gravity has on time.

Galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (Pandora’s Cluster), with X-ray emissions in red. Credit: NASA, ESA, ESO, CXC and D. COE (STSCI) J. Merten (Heidelberg/Bologna) If redshift equals distance calculations are incorrect, the Universe could be a much different looking place. “Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an ‘elegant’ or ‘robust’ theory. But it isn’t science.” — Halton Arp The speed of light is used as a benchmark for defining cosmological distance calculations. As discussed in past Picture of the Day articles, the shifting of Fraunhofer lines into the red end of electromagnetic spectra is...

Measurements indicate that this nebula is one degree above absolute zero. Temperature has little to do with electricity, though. “Bipolar outflow” is a term used to describe the nebular structure seen above, although the cause of the effect remains baffling to scientists who study such phenomena. One theory is that its shape is due to slow-moving stellar material interfering with dust and gas that was ejected from a red giant star at higher velocities. Magnetic fields are sometimes invoked to describe lobate celestial objects, but the electric current flow needed for their generation is neglected. Astronomical theories do not...

Could TARS From ‘Interstellar’ Actually Exist? We Asked Science A robotics expert breaks down TARS. by Shaunna Murphy 15 hours ago Apologies to Matthew McConaughey, but the real, breakout star of “Interstellar” was clearly TARS the sarcastic space robot (voiced by Bill Irwin). A former marine companion bot with angular limbs and acerbic wit, director Christopher Nolan somehow made TARS (and his sister robot, CASE) one of the most fully-formed, anthropomorphized robots in film history — without even giving him a face. “I wanted a more realistic approach to what a robot would be,” Nolan told the Associated Press. “I...

Two USC researchers have proposed a link between string field theory and quantum mechanics that could open the door to using string field theory—or a broader version of it, called M-theory—as the basis of all physics. "This could solve the mystery of where quantum mechanics comes from," said Itzhak Bars, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences professor and lead author of the paper. Bars collaborated with Dmitry Rychkov, his Ph.D. student at USC. The paper was published online on Oct. 27 by the journal Physics Letters. Rather than use quantum mechanics to validate string field theory, the researchers...

Last year CERN announced the finding of a new elementary particle, the Higgs particle. But maybe it wasn't the Higgs particle, maybe it just looks like it. And maybe it is not alone. Many calculations indicate that the particle discovered last year in the CERN particle accelerator was indeed the famous Higgs particle. Physicists agree that the CERN experiments did find a new particle that had never been seen before, but according to an international research team, there is no conclusive evidence that the particle was indeed the Higgs particle... "The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the...

Physicists Resurrect an Old, ‘Strange’ Dark Matter Theory Written by Michael Byrne Editor November 5, 2014 // 09:15 AM EST Dark matter might not be nearly as exotic as most theories about the stuff suggest. Instead, it could be macroscopic clumps of material formed from common particles already found within the Standard Model of particle physics. This argument comes courtesy of physicists at Case Western University, as presented in a new paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server. Dark matter is usually thought of in terms of exotic, so-far undiscovered particles. The leading candidates are known as weakly interacting massive particles,...

Imagine if you were told that the world is simple and exactly as it seems, but that there is an infinite number of worlds just like ours. They share the same space and time, and interact with each other. These worlds behave as Newton first envisioned, except that the slightest interactions of the infinite number create nuances and deviations from the Newtonian mechanics. What could be deterministic is swayed by many worlds to become the unpredictable. Schrödinger, in explaining his wave function and the interaction of two particles (EPR paradox) coined the term “entanglement”. In effect, the MIW theory is...

If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable. To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and...

Photons generally do not interact with each other in free space but instead one passes through the other with no effect to either one. Vienna University of Technology researchers have made a significant and groundbreaking discovery in the field of quantum mechanics. A team of researchers has developed some unique hardware, which enable photons to interact. This hardware is composed of micro-thin fiber made of glass, which in turn attached to a device called a resonator. The photon particle light can enter the resonator, moves in a circular fashion and then returns to the glass fiber. This change in pathways...

A chunk of copper became the coldest cubic meter (35.3 cubic feet) on Earth when researchers chilled it to 6 millikelvins, or six-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin). This is the closest a substance of this mass and volume has ever come to absolute zero. Researchers put the 880-lb. (400 kilograms) copper cube inside a container called a cryostat that is specially designed to keep items extremely cold. This is the first cryostat built that is capable of keeping substances so close to absolute zero.