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There has been an attempt ongoing for some time to harness the respectability of science and conflate it with an increasingly popular philosophy known as scientism. But scientism and science are different things. The latter is a powerful method of obtaining and applying material facts and information. The latter creates a subjective world view using the pretense that science has the capacity to tell us objectively right from wrong, the ethical from the unethical, best from worst, etc..

A new formula allows computers to simulate how new materials behave up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible, and could drastically speed up innovation relating to electronic devices and energy-efficient cars. Princeton engineers came up with the model based on an 80-year-old quantum physics puzzle. Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi first theorized in 1927 that they could calculate the energy of electrons in motion based on how electrons are distributed in a material. Knowing that kinetic energy of electrons in a material helps researchers understand the structure and properties of new materials, as well as how...

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theory of relativity has gone on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. In the manuscript, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang and contains the famous equation of E=MC², Einstein demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time.

The weird world of quantum mechanics describes the strange, often contradictory, behaviour of small inanimate objects such as atoms. Researchers have now started looking for ways to detect quantum properties in more complex and larger entities, possibly even living organisms. A German-Spanish research group, split between the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), is using the principles of an iconic quantum mechanics thought experiment - Schrödinger's superpositioned cat – to test for quantum properties in objects composed of as many as one billion atoms, possibly including the flu virus. New research...

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theory of relativity has gone on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. In the manuscript, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang and contains the famous equation of E=MC², Einstein demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time. The academy's president Menahem Yaari said: 'We wanted something unique that would have global...

BERLIN (AFP) – A German woman fearing that Earth would be sucked into oblivion in a black hole failed on Tuesday in her court attempt to halt the world's most powerful atom-smasher. The Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman's appeal because she was "unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about." "The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers," the court added. CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the...

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A worldwide team of researchers, including 10 from Texas A&M University, have for the first time created a particle that is believed to have been in existence immediately after the creation of the universe – the so-called "Big Bang" – and it could lead to new questions and answers about some of the basic laws of physics because in essence, it creates a new form of matter. Researchers Carl Gagliardi, Saskia Mioduszewski, Robert Tribble, Matthew Cervantes, Rory Clarke, Martin Codrington, Pibero Djawotho, James Drachenberg, Ahmed Hamed and Liaoyuan Huo, all affiliated with the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute, along with numerous...

First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics.

Princeton engineers have made a breakthrough in an 80-year-old quandary in quantum physics, paving the way for the development of new materials that could make electronic devices smaller and cars more energy efficient. By reworking a theory first proposed by physicists in the 1920s, the researchers discovered a new way to predict important characteristics of a new material before it's been created. The new formula allows computers to model the properties of a material up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible and vastly expands the range of properties scientists can study. "The equation scientists were using before was inefficient...

Prior to the December shutdown, the Large Hadron Collider had set a new world record in high-energy physics by accelerating two beams of proton particles to 1.8 tera (trillion) electron volts (TeV) each and smashing them together, for a combined collision energy of 2.36 TeV... The current schedule calls for operating the machine at a level that would result in collisions with the energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) until late 2011 or early 2012. The Large Hadron Collider will then be shut down once again so superconducting hardware can be upgraded to support collisions of 14 TeV...

How do you go about pushing the frontiers of propulsion science? Tau Zero Foundation founder Marc Millis discussed the question in a just published interview with h+ Magazine. One aspect of the question is to recognize where we are today. Millis is on record as saying that it may be two to four centuries before we’re ready to launch an Alpha Centauri mission. Why the delay? The problem is not so much high-tech savvy as it is available energy, and Millis evaluates it by comparing the energy we use for rocketry today vs. the entire Earth’s consumption of energy.

Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history. The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and...

CHICAGO (AFP) – Astronomers who have long used supernovas as cosmic mile markers to help measure the expansion of the universe now have an answer to the nagging question of what sparks the massive stellar explosions. "These are such critical objects in understanding the universe," lead author Marat Gilfanov of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany said Wednesday in describing his team's study. "It was a major embarrassment that we did not know how they worked. Now we are beginning to understand what lights the fuse of these explosions." Most scientists say Type 1a supernovae are formed when...

Science fiction writers may have to rethink how their starship crews survive travel near or beyond the speed of light. Even the occasional hydrogen atom floating in the interstellar void would become a lethal radiation beam that would kill human crews in mere seconds and destroy a spacecraft's electronics, New Scientist reports. Just a few stray wisps of hydrogen gas -- fewer than two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average -- would translate into 7 teraelectron volts for a starship crew traveling at 99.999998 percent of the speed of light. That's as much fun for humans as standing in...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe. They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions -- which lasted only for milliseconds. But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed. "That temperature...

Atom smashers at a U.S. national lab have produced temperatures not seen since the Big Bang — 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior — in work re-creating the universe's first microseconds. The results come from the 2.4-mile-wide Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory. Since 2000, scientists there have hurtled gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light. These smash-ups heat bubbles smaller than the center of an atom to about 40 times hotter than the center of an imploding supernova. Scientists say the results have given them...

Protons, neutrons melt to produce 'quark-gluon plasma' at RHICUPTON, NY — Recent analyses from the [http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/] Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference "atom smasher" at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, establish that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light have created matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius — the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory, about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. This temperature, based upon measurements by the PHENIX collaboration at RHIC, is higher than the temperature needed to melt protons and...

University of Calgary researchers use quantum entanglement to stack light particlesWhile many of us enjoyed constructing little houses out of toy bricks when we were kids, this task is much more difficult if bricks are elementary particles. It is even harder if these are particles of light – photons, which can only exist while flying at an incredible speed and vanish if they touch anything. A team at the University of Calgary has accomplished exactly that: by manipulating a mysterious quantum property of light known as entanglement, they are able to mount up to two photons on top of one...

According to the Washington Post, David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior advisor, said that the president worked with “[Harvard professor] Laurence Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity.” I’ve read that paper, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space.” It’s complete nonsense.