Seven Brief Lessons on Physics sold over a million copies around the world. Now Rovelli is back to explore the mysteries of time. He tells Charlotte Higgins about student revolution and how his quantum leap began with an acid trip.
• Extract from Carlo Rovelli’s new book: on the elastic concept of time.
What makes something red, or blue, or green? It’s all in the way light bounces off its surface. Something that primarily reflects light with shorter wavelengths will appear bluer, while something that reflects longer wavelengths will appear redder. By playing around with that principle, scientists have created a material that, much like soap bubbles and certain insect wings, displays a gorgeous iridescence—a shifting rainbow of colors they can tweak with the same surface.
Even more interestingly, the researchers made this material from common cellulose, the simple stuff that makes up paper and which can be extracted from wood, cotton, or other renewable sources. We’ve already mentioned scientists arranging cellulose fibers in a way that makes them appear incredibly white. But now instead of laying fibers, a team of physicists are molding cellulose films with tiny, regularly spaced impressions (like an upside-down Lego piece).
The outcome was a thin, single-centimeter iridescent film that reflects light based on the spacing of the dots, according to the paper published recently in Nature Photonics.
Continue reading “Scientists Create Beautiful Iridescent Material That Could Be Edible” »
One of the ultimate goals of modern physics is to unlock the power of superconductivity, where electricity flows with zero resistance at room temperature.
Progress has been slow, but physicists have just made an unexpected breakthrough. They’ve discovered a superconductor that works in a way no one’s ever seen before — and it opens the door to a whole world of possibilities not considered until now.
In other words, they’ve identified a brand new type of superconductivity.
Continue reading “Physicists Just Discovered an Entirely New Type of Superconductivity” »
Scientists have made the most precise measurement of antimatter yet, and the results only deepen the mystery of why life, the universe, and everything in it exists.
The new measurements show that, to an incredibly high degree of precision, antimatter and matter behave identically.
Yet those new measurements can’t answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why, if equal parts matter and antimatter were formed during the Big Bang, is our universe today made up of matter?
Mach Effect Gravity Assist (MEGA) drive propulsion is based on peer-reviewed, technically credible physics. Mach effects are transient variations in the rest masses of objects that simultaneously experience accelerations and internal energy changes. They are predicted by standard physics where Mach’s principle applies as discussed in peer-reviewed papers spanning 20 years and a recent book, Making Starships and Stargates: the Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes published in 2013 by Springer-Verlag.
Continue reading “Mach Effect Propellantless drive awarded NASA NIAC phase 2 study” »
