Free Republic

What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)Sabine Hossenfelder | 21:44 | 759K subscribers | 683K views | February 11, 2023

Black holes are powerful cosmic reactors. They supply the energy for quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGNs). This is due to the interplay between matter and its enormous gravitational and magnetic forces. A black hole technically lacks a magnetic field, but the dense plasma surrounding it as an accretion disc does possess a magnetic field. As plasma spirals around a black hole, the charged particles inside it create an electrical current and magnetic field. The direction of plasma flow does not spontaneously vary, hence the magnetic field is likely rather stable. Imagine the researchers’ amazement when they discovered evidence...

Most galaxies, like NGCC4414, shine across the spectrum. Dark galaxies remain in shadow. (AURA/STScI/NASA/Public Domain) Galaxies come in many different shapes and sizes, but the basic ingredients seem fairly consistent. There's usually a big black hole at the center, a bunch of stars and gas, and a generous serving of dark matter that helps glue the whole thing together. While dark matter is, well, dark, the stars, gas, and swirling core of heated material stand out with the radiant beauty of a city in the night. However, one newly discovered dwarf galaxy located a mere 94 million light-years away is...

Thanks to a new analysis technique, precision measurements of the Earth-Moon distance should improve estimates of the size of the gravitational-wave background. NASA Precise measurements of the Earth-Moon distance can allow researchers to estimate the maximum possible amplitude of the steady background “hum” of gravitational waves. (This time-lapse series of photos was taken by a satellite a million miles from Ea... Show more The barrage of all gravitational waves that continuously hit Earth in the microhertz frequency range—roughly one oscillation every few weeks—might be detected by measuring their subtle effects on the Earth-Moon system. By exploiting this decades-old idea, researchers...

University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics researchers achieved the first observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets by exploiting a loophole in 1980’s-era laser physics theorem. A research paper by CREOL and Florida Photonics Center of Excellence professor Ayman Abouraddy and research assistant Layton Hall ’22MS has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Nature Physics. Observation of optical de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets highlights the team’s research using a class of pulsed laser beams they call space-time wave packets. In an interview with Dr. Abouraddy, he provides more insight into his team’s research and what it may hold...

An orbiting star begins to eclipse its partner, a rapidly rotating, superdense stellar remnant called a pulsar. Image courtesy of Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA *************************************************************************** Jan. 26 (UPI) -- NASA made a first-of-its-kind discovery with its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, spotting the first gamma-ray eclipses from a special type of star system. The agency shared the news with Nature Astronomy on Thursday after scientists researched a decade of observations from the telescope that can detect the most astonishing celestial events from gamma bursts to black holes. Gamma-ray eclipses were observed from a special binary star system that is orbited by...

This latest experiment was performed near a telecommunications tower on the Säntis mountain in Switzerland that is frequently struck by lightning - roughly 100 times a year, although the tower itself is protected by a lightning rod. The results from the study found the lightning flowed almost in a straight line near the laser pulses, but the lightning strikes were more randomly distributed when the laser was off. While this study is not the first attempt to direct lightning paths it is the first to show it can be done. The scientists have attributed this to the high power laser...

A Colorado astrophysicist has claimed her field is steeped in white supremacy and sexism because 'hypermasculine' and 'violent' language is used to describe stars. Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor at Colorado College, takes an unconventional approach to physics by comparing stars with humans to turn science into an art. In an interview with the college newspaper she claimed she has struggled to overcome a division between art and science that is rooted in 'systemic racism

Explanation: The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events. Elements like phosphorus and copper are present...

For decades physicists have tried to rectify the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which is great at describing the behavior of particles, interactions, and quantum processes on the micro scale, with gravity...the Standard Model, as it is currently constructed, fails to account for gravity at this extremely small scale. ...a number of mathematical models have been proposed that would unify these disparate phenomena, including something called string theory [and] a number of these models feature elements that can be tested in a lab setting. One is known as the Pauli exclusion principle. Pauli exclusion basically means that no two electrons...

There’s a great article in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press that has great bearing on why consensus in science is often a bad thing, and how the consensus is enforced. Called "The Reason There’s Been No Cure for Alzheimer’s," it was written by Joanne Silberner, a former NPR reporter. What I loved about the article was its insightful reporting about how the scientific process works in practice, rather than how it should in theory. Most people have little idea how academic science works, what the incentives are, how peer review works, how money gets distributed, and all the minutia that...

The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Lab (LLL) in Northern California has recently gotten a lot of attention. It was just announced that they finally fused some hydrogen atoms and got more energy out than they put in — a net positive result. Drew Magary, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, throws a little cold water on the event by adding that the lasers causing the fusion reaction were powered by electricity generated at way less than perfect efficiency.hrowing more cold water, I was told by someone who worked on the facility in question that they already had a...

Ultrafast computer processing speeds are possible with optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies. Processing devices based on polarized light run one million times faster than current technology. Logic gates are the basic building blocks of computer processors. Conventional logic gates are electronic, working by shuffling around electrons. However, researchers have been developing light-based optical logic gates to meet the data processing and transfer demands of next-generation computing. Aalto University scientists developed new optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies, offering ultrafast processing speeds. Optical Chirality...

Since the 1970s, physicists have predicted that when pairs of heavy vector bosons Z or W are produced, typical restrictions at high energies would be violated, unless a Higgs boson was contributing to the production of these pairs. Over the past ten years, theoretical physics calculations showed that the occurrence of these Higgs boson contributions at high energies should be measurable using existing data collected by the LHC. As part of their recent study, the CMS collaboration analyzed some of the data collected between 2015 and 2018, as part of the second data collection run of the LHC. They specifically...

The practice of adding ‘leap seconds’ to official clocks to keep them in sync with Earth’s rotation will be put on hold from 2035, the world’s foremost metrology body has decided. The decision was made by representatives from governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1) will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks. Since 1972, whenever the two time systems have...

Star Spaghettification Black Hole - This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser Scientists hope to improve their understanding of the growth of supermassive black holes in massive galaxies by studying intermediate-mass black holes. After lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy, an intermediate-mass black hole revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. Known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, the violent shredding of the star produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar...

1. A cat can be dead and alive Obviously, a cat is nothing like an individual photon in a controlled lab environment, it is much bigger and more complex. Any coherence that the trillions upon trillions of atoms that make up the cat might have with each other is extremely short-lived. This does not mean that quantum coherence is impossible in biological systems, just that it generally won't apply to big creatures such as cats or a human. 2. Simple analogies can explain entanglement Quantum particles are just mysteriously correlated in ways we can't describe with everyday logic or language...

The spiral galaxy NGC 1068, also known as the squid galaxy, is a bustling 'Disneyland' of neutrino production, researchers said. At the heart of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 1068, researchers found a thriving 'factory' of ghostly particles called neutrinos. A nearby spiral galaxy is pumping out ghostly neutrinos — mysterious particles that barely interact with the matter around them, scientists have found. The elusive particles are coming from a hotspot of neutrino production in the heart of the spiral galaxy Messier 77, which is anchored by a black hole. The region is rich in dense gas and electromagnetic fields,...

Scientists discover exotic quantum state at room temperature An illustration depicting a topological insulator in action. - Shafayat Hossain and M. Zahid Hasan of Princeton University For the first time, physicists have observed novel quantum effects in a topological insulator at room temperature. Researchers at Princeton found that a material known as a topological insulator, made from the elements bismuth and bromine, exhibit specialized quantum behaviors normally seen only under extreme experimental conditions of high pressures and temperatures near absolute zero. The finding opens up a new range of possibilities for the development of efficient quantum technologies, such as spin-based,...

The smiling Sun. (NASA Sun/Twitter) Sometimes an unexpected smile is all it takes to turn your day around. Well, that kind of cheery surprise doesn't get much bigger than this. Astronomers at NASA have spotted the Sun beaming a remarkable, joyous grin, in a sunny spectacle destined to put a smile on your dial. As shared on NASA's Sun Twitter account, this incredible image reveals the Sun looking positively radiant in more ways than one. Of course, the 'smile' we see here isn't actually a real smile. What we're looking at are coronal holes (the dark patches), where fast bursts...