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Take one part unidentified goop. Add three parts mysterious energy. Throw in a dash of ordinary atoms. Mix. Compress. Explode. Let expand for 13.7 billion years. It's an absurd recipe, but it's one that makes cosmologists drool. Ten years ago, no one could agree on what the universe is made of, how it is shaped, or what its ultimate fate will be. But less than five years later, long-awaited measurements and one stunning discovery forever transformed our picture of the universe. The resulting model, often called the concordance model, holds that 22 percent of the universe is composed of dark...

GENEVA - A 43-foot-long magnet for the world's largest particle collider broke "with a loud bang and a cloud of dust" during a high-pressure test, and officials said Tuesday they are working to find a replacement part. The part that failed March 27 was in a super-cooled magnet designed to focus streams of protons so that they collide and allow scientists to study the results of the collision, giving them a better understanding of the makeup of matter, according to Fermilab, based in suburban Chicago, which has an accelerator of its own and is helping build one deep beneath the...

Michael Turner... the University of Chicago cosmologist had the unenviable task of trying to crown a winner in a match-up between Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss, two physics heavyweights duking it out over the merits -- or lack thereof -- of the so-called Theory of Everything... Last night's debate did little to settle the argument, but a packed house of academics, physics geeks, and just-curious laypeople seemed to enjoy themselves nonetheless. Krauss threw the first punch. A professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and an expert on black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, Krauss said he...

The speed of gravity has been measured for the first time. The landmark experiment shows that it travels at the speed of light, meaning that Einstein's general theory of relativity has passed another test with flying colours. Ed Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri in Columbia made the measurement, with the help of the planet Jupiter. "We became the first two people to know the speed of gravity, one of the fundamental constants of nature," the scientists say, in an article in New Scientist print edition. One important...

The structure is described in the form of a vast matrix An international team of mathematicians has detailed a vast complex numerical "structure" which was invented more than a century ago.Mapping the 248-dimensional structure, called E8, took four years of work and produced more data than the Human Genome Project, researchers said. E8 is a "Lie group", a means of describing symmetrical objects. The team said their findings may assist fields of physics which use more than four dimensions, such as string theory. Lie groups were invented by the 19th Century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounced "Lee"). It's as...

An international team of 18 mathematicians, including two from MIT, has mapped one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics. If written out on paper, the calculation describing this structure, known as E8, would cover an area the size of Manhattan... MIT's David Vogan, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and member of the research team, will present the work today, Monday, March 19 at 2 p.m. in Room 1-190. His talk, "The Character Table for E8, or How We Wrote Down a 453,060 x 453,060 Matrix and Found Happiness," is open to the public. E8, (pronounced...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- April 2, 2003 -- In a discovery that is likely to impact fields as diverse as atomic physics, chemistry and nanotechnology, researchers have identified a new physical phenomenon, electrostatic rotation, that, in the absence of friction, leads to spin. Because the electric force is one of the fundamental forces of nature, this leap forward in understanding may help reveal how the smallest building blocks in nature react to form solids, liquids and gases that constitute the material world around us. Scientists Anders Wistrom and Armik Khachatourian of University of California, Riverside first observed the electrostatic rotation in...

Albert Einstein might be astonished to learn that NASA physicists have applied his relativity theory to a concept he introduced but later disliked namely that two particles that interact could maintain a connection even if separated by a vast distance. Researchers often refer to this connection as "entanglement." Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have discovered that this entanglement is relative, depending on how fast an observer moves with respect to the particles, and that entanglement can be created or destroyed just by relative motion. This might change the way entanglement is used on future spacecraft that move...

"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...