Free Republic 2nd Qtr 2025 Fundraising Target: $81,000 Receipts & Pledges to-date: $79,241
97%  
Woo hoo!! And we're now over 97%!! Thank you all very much!! God bless.

Keyword: stringtheory

Brevity: Headers | « Text »
  • Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected

    01/10/2019 6:35:36 AM PST · by Red Badger · 49 replies
    BBC ^ | 9 January 2019 | By Helen Briggs
    Astronomers have revealed details of mysterious signals emanating from a distant galaxy, picked up by a telescope in Canada. The precise nature and origin of the blasts of radio waves is unknown. Among the 13 fast radio bursts, known as FRBs, was a very unusual repeating signal, coming from the same source about 1.5 billion light years away. Such an event has only been reported once before, by a different telescope. "Knowing that there is another suggests that there could be more out there," said Ingrid Stairs, an astrophysicist from the University of British Columbia (UBC). "And with more repeaters...
  • Flat Earther & Sovereign Citizen Meets Veteran Cop

    01/12/2019 8:10:17 PM PST · by NRx · 13 replies
    YouTube ^ | 12-13-2018 | Inside The Badge Channel
    If stupidity were a virtue this guy would become the first man to be declared a saint while still alive.
  • Mathematicians Discovered a Computer Problem that No One Can Ever Solve

    01/12/2019 5:15:03 AM PST · by BenLurkin · 182 replies
    livescience.com ^ | January 11, 2019 08:08am ET | By Rafi Letzter,
    The trouble is, math is sort of broken. It's been broken since 1931, when the logician Kurt Gödel published his famous incompleteness theorems. They showed that in any mathematical system, there are certain questions that cannot be answered. They're not really difficult — they're unknowable. Mathematicians learned that their ability to understand the universe was fundamentally limited. Gödel and another mathematician named Paul Cohen found an example: the continuum hypothesis. The continuum hypothesis goes like this: Mathematicians already know that there are infinities of different sizes. For instance, there are infinitely many integers (numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...
  • A Brief History of Black Holes

    12/29/2018 5:39:27 PM PST · by MtnClimber · 18 replies
    Real Clear Science ^ | 29 Dec, 2018 | Carla Rodrigues Almeida
    Late in 2018, the gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, announced that they had detected the most distant and massive source of ripples of spacetime ever monitored: waves triggered by pairs of black holes colliding in deep space. Only since 2015 have we been able to observe these invisible astronomical bodies, which can be detected only by their gravitational attraction. The history of our hunt for these enigmatic objects traces back to the 18th century, but the crucial phase took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II. The concept of a body that would trap light,...
  • James Prescott Joule was born 200 years ago today

    12/24/2018 8:49:26 AM PST · by Borges · 30 replies
    Thought this bears notice. Heat! Energy!
  • Gravity is mathematically relatable to dynamics of subatomic particles

    12/24/2018 11:31:25 AM PST · by ETL · 65 replies
    Phys.org ^ | Dec 18, 2018 | Catherine Zandonella, Princeton University
    Albert Einstein's desk can still be found on the second floor of Princeton's physics department. Positioned in front of a floor-to-ceiling blackboard covered with equations, the desk seems to embody the spirit of the frizzy-haired genius as he asks the department's current occupants, "So, have you solved it yet?" Einstein never achieved his goal of a unified theory to explain the natural world in a single, coherent framework. Over the last century, researchers have pieced together links between three of the four known physical forces in a "standard model," but the fourth force, gravity, has always stood alone.No longer. Thanks...
  • Stellar corpse reveals clues to missing stardust

    12/22/2018 10:29:52 AM PST · by ETL · 15 replies
    Phys.org ^ | December 21, 2018 | Daniel Stolte, University of Arizona
    Everything around you – your desk, your laptop, your coffee cup – in fact, even you – is made of stardust, the stuff forged in the fiery furnaces of stars that died before our sun was born. Probing the space surrounding a mysterious stellar corpse, scientists at the University of Arizona have made a discovery that could help solve a long-standing mystery: Where does stardust come from? When stars die, they seed the cosmos around them with the elements that go on to coalesce into new stars, planets, asteroids and comets. Most everything that makes up Earth, even life itself,...
  • Matter Sucked in by Black Holes May Travel into the Future, Get Spit Back Out

    12/21/2018 12:36:00 PM PST · by ETL · 82 replies
    LiveScience.com ^ | Dec 18, 2018 | Don Lincoln, Senior Scientist, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; Adjunct Professor of Physics
    Black holes are among the most mysterious places in the universe; locations where the very fabric of space and time are warped so badly that not even light can escape from them. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, at their center lies a singularity, a place where the mass of many stars is crushed into a volume with exactly zero size. However, two recent physics papers, published on Dec.10 in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D, respectively, may make scientists reconsider what we think we know about black holes. Black holes might not last forever, and...
  • Niels Bohr’s Flight From the Nazis Was a Science Drama

    12/20/2018 6:55:25 AM PST · by C19fan · 10 replies
    War is Boring ^ | December 20, 2018 | Christopher Miskimon
    Danish physicist Niels Bohr was a scientific genius who also displayed a coincidental penchant for espionage and intrigue. He employed these skills, along with a bit of science, to foil the Nazi at several turns. His small crusade began in 1933 after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Over the next few years several scientists fled Germany with Bohr’s help. Many escapees went on to work on the Manhattan Project, including Edward Teller, James Franck and Otto Frisch. Some of them stayed with Bohr in Denmark, working at the Bohr Institute until moving elsewhere.
  • Scientists design new material to harness power of light

    12/17/2018 2:30:13 PM PST · by ETL · 27 replies
    Phys.org ^ | Dec 17, 2018 | University of Massachusetts Lowell
    Scientists have long known that synthetic materials—called metamaterials—can manipulate electromagnetic waves such as visible light to make them behave in ways that cannot be found in nature. That has led to breakthroughs such as super-high resolution imaging. Now, UMass Lowell is part of a research team that is taking the technology of manipulating light in a new direction. The team—which includes collaborators from UMass Lowell, King's College London, Paris Diderot University and the University of Hartford -has created a new class of metamaterial that can be "tuned" to change the color of light. This technology could someday enable on-chip optical...
  • Time travel is possible – but only if you have an object with infinite mass

    12/13/2018 2:07:09 PM PST · by ETL · 95 replies
    Phys.org ^ | Dec 13, 2018 | Gaurav Khanna
    The concept of time travel has always captured the imagination of physicists and laypersons alike. But is it really possible? Of course it is. We're doing it right now, aren't we? We are all traveling into the future one second at a time. But that was not what you were thinking. Can we travel much further into the future? Absolutely. If we could travel close to the speed of light, or in the proximity of a black hole, time would slow down enabling us to travel arbitrarily far into the future. The really interesting question is whether we can travel...
  • Physicists Create Quark-Gluon Plasma Droplets

    12/12/2018 7:17:18 AM PST · by ETL · 39 replies
    Sci-News.com ^ | Dec 12, 2018 | News Staff / Source
    Scientists believe that quark-gluon plasma filled the entire Universe during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang when the Universe was still too hot for particles to come together to make atoms.The PHENIX team used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory to recreate that matter.In a series of tests, the physicists smashed packets of small projectiles in different combinations (single protons, two-particle deuterons, and three-particle helium-3 nuclei) into much bigger gold nuclei.“RHIC is the only accelerator in the world where we can perform such a tightly controlled experiment, colliding particles made of one, two, and...
  • After botched launch, orbiting atomic clocks confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity

    12/07/2018 12:39:21 PM PST · by ETL · 75 replies
    ScienceMag.org ^ | Dec 7, 2018 | Adrian Cho
    Making lemonade from lemons, two teams of physicists have used data from misguided satellites to put Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, to an unexpected test. The opportunistic experiment confirms to unprecedented precision a key prediction of the theory—that time ticks slower near a massive body like Earth than it does farther away. As Einstein explained, gravity arises because massive bodies warp space-time. Free-falling objects follow the straightest possible paths in that curved space-time, which to us appear as the parabolic arc of a thrown ball or the circular or elliptical orbit of a satellite. As...
  • Bringing balance to the universe: New theory could explain missing 95 percent of the cosmos

    12/05/2018 9:02:07 AM PST · by ETL · 89 replies
    Scientists at the University of Oxford may have solved one of the biggest questions in modern physics, with a new paper unifying dark matter and dark energy into a single phenomenon: a fluid which possesses 'negative mass." If you were to push a negative mass, it would accelerate towards you. This astonishing new theory may also prove right a prediction that Einstein made 100 years ago. Our current, widely recognised model of the Universe, called LambdaCDM, tells us nothing about what dark matter and dark energy are like physically. We only know about them because of the gravitational effects they...
  • Astronomers find far-flung wind from a black hole in the universe’s first light

    12/05/2018 7:07:24 AM PST · by ETL · 22 replies
    ScienceNews.com ^ | Dec 5, 2018 | Lisa Grossman
    Astronomer Mark Lacy and colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to observe the universe’s first light, and found evidence of gusts flowing from a type of black hole called a quasar. The wind extends about 228,000 light-years away from the galaxy that surrounds the quasar. Previously, astronomers had seen signs of these winds only about 3,000 light-years from their galaxies.The result, published November 12 at arXiv.org, could help resolve questions about how black holes can grow with their galaxies, or shut galaxies down for good.Black holes are best known for gravitationally gobbling everything that veers too close....
  • The force of the vacuum

    12/03/2018 9:56:47 AM PST · by ETL · 19 replies
    Phys.org ^ | Dec 3, 2018 | Jenny Witt, Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter
    Scientists from the Theory Department of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) in Hamburg, Germany have shown through theoretical calculations and computer simulations that the force between electrons and lattice distortions in an atomically thin two-dimensional superconductor can be controlled with virtual photons. This could aid the development of new superconductors for energy-saving devices and many other technical applications. The vacuum is not empty. It may sound like magic to laypeople but the problem has preoccupied physicists since the birth of quantum mechanics. The apparent void...
  • The Large Hadron Collider is shutting down for 2 years

    12/03/2018 11:28:30 AM PST · by ETL · 47 replies
    ScienceNews.org ^ | Dec 3, 2018 | Emily Conover
    Scientists will use the break in operations to beef up the accelerator’s energy. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator has gone quiet. Particles took their last spin around the Large Hadron Collider on December 3 before scientists shut the machine down for two years of upgrades.Located at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva, the accelerator has smashed together approximately 16 million billion protons since 2015, when it reached its current energy of 13 trillion electron volts. Planned improvements before the machine restarts in 2021 will bring the energy up to 14 trillion electron volts — the energy it was...
  • How do stellar binaries form?

    12/03/2018 9:26:27 AM PST · by ETL · 13 replies
    Phys.org ^ | Dec 3, 2018 | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
    Most stars with the mass of the sun or larger have one or more companion stars, but when and how these multiple stars form is one of the controversial central problems of astronomy. Gravity contracts the natal gas and dust in an interstellar cloud until clumps develop that are dense enough to coalesce into stars, but how are multiple stars fashioned? Because the shrinking cloud has a slight spin, a disk (possibly a preplanetary system) eventually forms. In one model of binary star formation, this disk fragments due to gravitational instabilities, producing a second star. The other model argues that...
  • Two More Women Accuse Neil deGrasse Tyson of Sexual Misconduct

    11/29/2018 2:33:11 PM PST · by sitetest · 92 replies
    Patheos ^ | November 29, 2018 | David G. McAfee
    Two more women, including a fellow astronomer, say Neil deGrasse Tyson is guilty of inappropriate sexual conduct. Dr. Katelyn N. Allers, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Bucknell University, told me that she was “felt up” by Tyson at an after-party following a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 2009. AAS didn’t have a mechanism for reporting sexual harassment at the time, but Dr. Allers says she probably would report the incident if it had happened today. --- snip -- Dr. Allers didn’t feel like she was in danger during her encounter with Tyson, but she did...
  • Einstein's Theory of General Relativity Just Survived a Massive Crash in Outer Space

    11/29/2018 11:07:34 AM PST · by ETL · 33 replies
    LiveScience.com ^ | Nov 29, 2018 | Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer
    Gravity is big and weird and difficult to study. It moves through space as a wave, sort of like how light does. But these waves are subtle and difficult to detect. They occur in measurable amounts only after massive events, like the collision of black holes. Humanity didn't spot its first gravitational wave until 2015. Then, in 2017, astronomers for the first time detected both gravitational waves and light from a single event: a neutron star collision. Now, researchers are using data from that event to confirm some basic facts about the universe. In a paper first uploaded Nov. 1...