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<p>Edward Teller, the man who played a key role in U.S. defense and energy policies for more than half a century and was dubbed the "Father of the H-bomb" for his enthusiastic pursuit of the powerful weapon, died Tuesday, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory confirmed. He was 95.</p>

Sharp guy, that Einstein. Kinda funny looking, what with the big hair and all, but real smart. Relativity, that was his thing. That and E=mc2, right? Interesting stuff. Really nice guy too, or was there something about Mrs. Einstein getting a raw deal? Still, he was a genius, definitely a genius. You don't need to be an Einstein to know that. Nearly 50 years after his death and a century after the then unknown physicist started challenging doctrine and stretching brains with his ideas, Albert Einstein remains not just scientifically relevant but a multipurpose icon as well. If anything, his...

Quantum weirdness even stranger than previously thought.Two photons can be connected in a way that seems to defy the very nature of space and time, yet still obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart. The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication. The finding does not violate the laws...

Strange events that Einstein himself called "spooky" might happen at least 10,000 times the speed of light, according to the latest attempt to understand them.

Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all-time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the strength of the invisible glue that holds atomic nuclei together, may have been different in the past. "There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are." The observed differences are small — roughly a few parts in a...

Berkeley Lab Physicist Challenges Speed of Gravity Claim Berkeley - Jun 22, 2003 Albert Einstein may have been right that gravity travels at the same speed as light but, contrary to a claim made earlier this year, the theory has not yet been proven. A scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) says the announcement by two scientists, widely reported this past January, about the speed of gravity was wrong. Stuart Samuel, a participating scientist with the Theory Group of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, has demonstrated that an "ill-advised" assumption made...

The science blog Cosmic Variance has a great rundown of what the LHC could find. At the top of this list is the Higgs boson, which is the only particle in the Standard Model (the theory that describes the fundamental interactions between the particles that make up all matter), that hasn't yet been detected. The site thinks there is a 95 percent chance the LHC finds this particle, and that could lead to a much better understanding of how our universe works. Other notable possibilities on Cosmic Variance's list include finding extra dimensions (these could be so-called "warped" hidden dimensions...

Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, has written a book that's part insider history of science, focused on a period in the 1980s and 1990s when physicists were quarreling over the destructive capacity of black holes, and part primer on the science that explains the argument. As the subtitle makes obvious, the story contains an all-star cast of opinionated physicists: assorted Nobel laureates such as Richard Feynman, brilliant minds of the past such as Sir Isaac Newton, and, of course, Stephen Hawking, arguably the best-known theorist of black hole mechanics. Hawking is partly famous for possessing a...

The video looks a bit like a scene from a low-budget sci-fi horror film. A tiny hole slowly begins sucking in bits of the Earth in Switzerland with mountains, lakes and cities quickly falling into the growing gap. And it just keeps on growing--and growing. By the end of the 38 second movie, the entire planet has been swallowed up -- and all that's left is a shimmering ring in the inky blackness of outer space. Absurd, perhaps. But a brief look around Internet blogs, and especially YouTube, makes it clear that there are a number of people out there...

There is something strange happening in the core of the Milky Way. A space observatory measuring the energy and distribution of gamma-rays in the cosmos has made an unexpected (and perplexing) discovery. It would seem there is a very high proportion of gamma-ray photons emanating from our galactic core with a very distinctive signature; they have a precise energy of 511 keV (8×10-14 Joules), and there’s a lot of them. So what could possibly be producing these 511 keV gamma-rays? It turns out, 511 keV is a magic number; it is the exact rest mass energy of a positron (the...

Enlarge ImageIt's relative. Astronomers have been measuring spin precession in an eclipsing pair of pulsars.Credit: Daniel Cantin/McGill University As if his reputation needed cementing, astronomers have confirmed Albert Einstein's status as a supergenius once more. Studying a unique pair of pulsars--small and extremely dense leftovers from supernova explosions--researchers have measured an effect that was predicted by Einstein's 92-year-old general theory of relativity. The result, they report tomorrow in Science, is almost exactly what the famous physicist had foreseen. In Einstein's relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But...

If all goes according to plan, a massive underground facility in Switzerland will begin smashing particles together later this summer in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the physical universe than has ever before been possible. Known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the project is composed of a 17-mile circular tunnel beneath Geneva, containing thousands of magnets meant to send beams of subatomic particles hurtling toward each other. The resulting collisions are expected to release matter similar to that present at the "Big Bang" that created the universe.

That black hole that was going to eat the Earth? Forget about it, and keep making the mortgage payments — those of you who still have them. A new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go into operation this fall outside Geneva, is no threat to the Earth or the universe, according to a new safety review approved Friday by the governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider. “There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be...

Lawsuit stirs fear of 'strangelets' destroying the Earth; 100,000 chips deployed SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- If all goes according to plan, a massive underground facility in Switzerland will begin smashing particles together later this summer in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the physical universe than has ever before been possible.For companies like Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which have helped develop a system to send the resulting data surging through a sprawling network, the project is already providing a chance to test some of their most cutting-edge technologies. Video: Tech giants aid project Some of the biggest...

How did the universe begin, and how will it end? Among cosmologists, the mainstream belief is that the universe began with a bang billions of years ago, and will fizzle out billions of years from now. But two theorists have just fired their latest volley at that belief, saying there could be a timeless cycle of expansion and contraction. It’s an idea as old as Hinduism, updated for the 21st century.THE “CYCLIC MODEL,” developed by Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University’s Neil Turok, made its highest-profile appearance yet Thursday on Science Express, the Web site for the journal Science....

The question of what happened before the Big Bang long has frustrated cosmologists, both amateur and professional. Though Einstein's theory of general relativity does an excellent job of describing the universe almost back to its beginning, near the Big Bang matter becomes so dense that relativity breaks down, says Penn State physicist Abhay Ashtekar. "Beyond that point, we need to apply quantum tools that were not available to Einstein." Now Ashtekar and two of his post-doctoral researchers, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parmpreet Singh, have done just that. Using a theory called loop quantum gravity, they have developed a mathematical model that...

TIME BEFORE TIME An event like the Big Bang is about as likely as billions of coin tosses all coming up heads. Explaining why that is might take us from empty space to other universes--and through the mirror of time. by Sean Carroll • Posted August 28, 2006 11:53 AM From the SEPTEMBER issue of Seed:    The nature of time is such that the influence of the very beginning of the universe stretches all the way into your kitchen—you can make an omelet out of an egg, but you can't make an egg out of an omelet. Time, unlike...

Heads up! Tomorrow night (February 26, 2008 at 9:00 PM), the History Channel will air a new segment of their Universe series that could be very interesting. It will try to address what was before the Big Bang. This is a subject I don't see anyway of discussing without raising religious beliefs.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.