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Quantum mechanics just got even stranger.There's only one way to describe the experiment performed by physicist Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues: it's unreal, dude. Measuring the quantum properties of pairs of light particles (photons) pumped out by a laser has convinced Zeilinger that "we have to give up the idea of realism to a far greater extent than most physicists believe today." By realism, he means the idea that objects have specific features and properties —that a ball is red, that a book contains the works of Shakespeare, or that an electron has a particular spin. For everyday objects, such...

Atlas holds key to scientists' map of Universe By Mark Henderson A vast cavern is the stage for tests to find the 'God particle' SCIENTISTS have taken a step closer to finding the “God particle” that is thought to shape the Universe. In a concrete cavern 130ft deep and bigger than the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, they will mimic the high-energy conditions that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang to study a beam of energy a quarter of the thickness of a human hair. The vast Atlas cavern, which was completed last week at Cern, the European...

For decades, the big guns of American science have been the U.S. Department of Energy's particle colliders, which investigate the nature of matter by accelerating subatomic particles and smashing them together. Colliders at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered exotic particles such as the top quark and revealed phenomena that hint at new laws of physics. But this great American enterprise, like so many others, is now moving overseas. While the Europeans and Japanese build new particle accelerators, the U.S. is poised to shut down its premier colliders at...

A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations. The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation. It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national...

From the masses and interactions of other particles that we know exist, physicists calculated that the Higgs is most likely to have a mass (or energy) of around 80 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). If particle accelerators smash particles together at that energy or higher, it should be possible to make one. This is what members of the Electroweak Working Group at CERN were doing for the 5 years until LEP (the Large Electron Positron Collider) closed down last year. Since then they've been sifting through the data they gathered--and found nothing. They rule out most possible masses for the Higgs, including the...

Super cool. Researchers have developed a technique to cool this dime-sized mirror (small circle suspended in the center of metal ring) to within one degree of absolute zero.Credit: Christopher Wipf/MITIf you want to really see quantum mechanics in action, you've got to turn the temperature down so low that even atoms stop moving. Physicists have come close to achieving this "absolute zero" state by using precision-tuned lasers, but the technique has only allowed researchers to freeze small groups of atoms at a time. Now members of an international team say they have managed to cool a dime-sized mirror to within...

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...