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"Wormholes are the future, wormholes are the past," said Michio Kaku, author of "Hyperspace" and "Parallel Worlds" and a physicist at the City University of New York... To punch a hole into the fabric of space-time, Kaku explained, would require the energy of a star or negative energy, an exotic entity with an energy of less than nothing... Another popular theory for potential time travelers involves something called cosmic strings.. Cosmic strings are either infinite or they're in loops, with no ends, said J. Richard Gott, author of "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe" and an astrophysicist at Princeton University. "So...

Sylvester James Gates, Jr., a string theory expert from the University of Maryland, will present "SUSY and The Lords of the Ring" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 29 in Wallenberg Auditorium in Gustavus Adolphus College's Nobel Hall of Science... Gates is the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major American research university... The March 29 lecture will focus on new ideas in the last decade including one called supersymmetry. If supersymmetry is valid, nature may begin to reveal "superpartners"...

An Indian theoretical physicist who questioned the existence of black holes and thereby challenged Stephen Hawking of Britain at last feels vindicated. But he is sad. Abhas Mitra, at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, was perhaps the first and the only scientist who had the guts to openly challenge Hawking of Cambridge University who is regarded by many as the modern-day Einstein. For over 30 years Hawking and his followers were perpetuating the theory that black holes -- resulting from gravitational collapse of massive stars -- destroy everything that falls into them preventing even light or information...

The cold, dry atmosphere above the South Pole will allow the SPT to more easily detect the CMB (cosmic microwave background) radiation, the afterglow of the big bang, with minimal interference from water vapor. On the electromagnetic spectrum, the CMB falls somewhere between heat radiation and radio waves. The CMB is largely uniform, but it contains tiny ripples of varying density and temperature. These ripples reflect the seeds that, through gravitational attraction, grew into the galaxies and galaxy clusters visible to astronomers in the sky today. The SPT's first key science project will be to study small variations in the...

Engineers at the CERN lab in Geneva spent nearly 10 hours lowing a 1,920 metric ton magnet over 320 feet into the ground on Wednesday... This giant magnet is an essential component for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled to be active in November, and be 100% functional by 2008. Similar to the well known, Illinois based, U.S. particle collider at Fermi Lab, the Large Hadron Collider is expected to be the largest and highest energy particle accelerator in existence. The LHC will use liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets to produce electric fields that will propel particles to near light...

U.S. and Australian scientists said they have discovered how a black hole in the center of the galaxy is emitting gamma rays with extraordinary energies. Scientists said they were startled when they discovered in 2004 that the center of the Milky Way galaxy is emitting gamma rays with energies in the tens of trillions of electronvolts. But now astrophysicists at The University of Arizona, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Australia's University of Adelaide said the black hole might be working like a cosmic particle accelerator, revving up protons that smash at incredible speeds into lower energy protons, creating high-energy...

String theory, the doubters say, makes no testable predictions. But this isn't exactly true... A few years ago string practitioners attempted to establish a relationship between the 10-dimensional string world and the 4-dimensional (3 spatial dimensions plus time) world in which we observe interactions among quark-filled particles like protons... This duality between string theory and the theory of the strong nuclear force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), was recently used to interpret puzzling early results from [Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider] ... Two new papers by Hong Liu and Krishna Rajagopal of (MIT) and Urs Wiedemann (CERN) address this problem. The first...

According to Stanford physics Professor Andrei Linde, one of the architects of the inflationary theory, our universe (and all the matter in it) was born out of a vacuum... In the same session, titled "Multiverses, Dark Energy and Physics as an Environmental Science," physics Professor Leonard Susskind of Stanford will talk about string theory and its relation to inflationary theory and physics Professor Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University will represent the skeptic view. The conventional theory of the Big Bang says that the newborn universe was huge, containing more than 10^80 [ten raised to the power of eighty]...

The Sacred Well Congregation, which has about 950 members across the country, prides itself on being an intellectual group. Ron Schaefer, a retired lieutenant colonel who flew F-4s and F-16s during a 26-year Air Force career, says Wicca "meshes perfectly with string theory." Dea Mikeworth, wife of an Army sergeant wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, says it reflects "archetypes in the collective unconscious." But Larsen is unabashed about the faith's central appeal. "You can't intellectually talk about witchcraft. You gotta show up," he says. "What Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a lot of us universalists think is, people...

If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated.Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present. In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind. The new model, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics, gets...

Evicting Einstein A physics experiment on the drawing board for the International Space Station could help find the grand unifying "Theory of Everything." Listen to this story via streaming audio, a downloadable file, or get help.March 26, 2004:  Sooner or later, the reign of Einstein, like the reign of Newton before him, will come to an end. An upheaval in the world of physics that will overthrow our notions of basic reality is inevitable, most scientists believe, and currently a horse race is underway between a handful of theories competing to be the successor to the throne.In the running...

Attempts to measure the size, age, and “expansion” of the universe may be a good deal less precise than advertised. But the problem is much worse if the astronomers’ assumptions are incorrect. An astronomer at Ohio State University, using a new method that is independent of the Hubble relation (which relates redshift to distance), has determined that the Hubble constant (the rate at which the universe is expanding) is 15% lower than the accepted value. His measurements have a margin of error of 6%. To “determine the Hubble constant” these six galaxy clusters are a subset of the 38 that...

Harvard University researchers have halted a pulse of laser light in its tracks and revived it a fraction of a millimeter away. Here's the twist: they stopped it in a cloud of supercold sodium atoms, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and then restarted it in a second, distinct BEC as though the pulse had spookily jumped between the two locations. "It's odd," says atomic physicist Lene Hau, the team's leader. "We can actually revive the light pulse and send it back on its way as if nothing had happened." ~snip~ BEC clouds are prized because their atoms' delicate quantum...

Nate Merrill of Old Orchard Beach was browsing through a New Yorker magazine recently when he noticed a cartoon of a man walking by a joint named "Harvey's Place." A sign in the window advertised an evening discussion titled: "Is String Theory (expletive)?" Funny? Perhaps. Offensive? Merrill thought so. "I said I think the New Yorker has taken a step back," he said. "Five years ago, there's no way they would have published cartoons like that." There are times in life when a person needs to say something a little stronger than "Oh, fudge." And "fiddlesticks" doesn't pack quite the...

A new study demonstrates that the shapes of extra dimensions can be "seen" by deciphering their influence on cosmic energy released by the violent birth of the universe 13 billion years ago. The method, published today (Feb. 2) in Physical Review Letters, provides evidence that physicists can use experimental data to discern the nature of these elusive dimensions -- the existence of which is a critical but as yet unproven element of string theory, the leading contender for a unified "theory of everything." ...According to string theory mathematics, the extra dimensions could adopt any of tens of thousands of possible...

In 2006, string theorist Allan Adams of MIT in Cambridge, US, and others offered a more promising check. They showed that some particle collisions could reveal whether certain fundamental assumptions underlying string theory are wrong. Now, another team has shown that the energies needed to reveal such effects are achievable at the LHC, which is being built in Geneva, Switzerland. The team was led by Jacques Distler of the University of Texas in Austin, US. One of string theory's assumptions comes from Einstein's theory of relativity – that the speed of light is the same for all observers, a principle...

A new cosmological model demonstrates the universe can endlessly expand and contract, providing a rival to Big Bang theories and solving a thorny modern physics problem, according to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physicists. The cyclic model proposed by Dr. Paul Frampton, Louis J. Rubin Jr. distinguished professor of physics in UNC's College of Arts & Sciences, and co-author Lauris Baum, a UNC graduate student in physics, has four key parts: expansion, turnaround, contraction and bounce. During expansion, dark energy -- the unknown force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate -- pushes and pushes until...

The subject of the debate was the Anthropic Principle, which states that the observable universe has to be as it is in order to support life. That is, the fundamental constants of the universe are precisely chosen such that if they were tweaked only slightly, then life, the earth or even our galaxy would not have formed. Thus, these values are as we observe them only because we are here to observe them in the first place. Paul Davies, director of Beyond: The Institute for Fundamental Concepts in Physics at Arizona State University, was the first to speak, arguing that...

Scientists' theories such as Einstein's relativity and string theory mock up mathematical worlds where linear and multidimensional time travel are a reality... String theory is an attempt to bring quantum physics and relativity together, according to Blondin. String theory supports the view that the universe is made of multiple dimensions and opening a porthole between these dimensions could cross time barriers... These examples focus mainly on a one-dimensional travel experience, meaning a person can only travel forward and backward in one pathway. But with the introduction of string theory became the possibility of a multidimensional universe and multidimensional time travel.

For decades, scientists have taken issue with "string theory"-a theory of the universe which contends that the fundamental forces and matter of nature can be reduced to tiny one-dimensional filaments called strings-because it does not make predictions that can be tested. But researchers at the University of California, San Diego, Carnegie Mellon University, and The University of Texas at Austin have now developed an important test for this controversial "theory of everything." Described in a paper that will appear in the January 26 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters L, their test involves measurements of how elusive high-energy particles...