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Archive for the ‘physics’ category: Page 280

May 17, 2016

Researchers teach AI system to run complex physics experiment

Posted by in categories: physics, robotics/AI, space

ACTON, Australia, May 16 (UPI) — A pair of physicists in Australia have trained an artificial intelligence system to replicate the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize.

The experiment involves what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the trapping of an ultra-cool gas in a series of lasers.

At just a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, Bose-Einstein condensates constitute some of the coldest temperatures in the universe — colder than interstellar space.

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May 15, 2016

Wormholes could be the key to beating the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, say physicists

Posted by in categories: computing, physics, space, time travel

Time travel seems much more common in science fiction than it is in reality. We’ve never met anyone from the future, after all. But all of the physics we know indicates that wormholes — another science fiction favourite — could really be used to travel backwards in time.

And according to a paper by Chinese physicists, using wormholes for time travel might actually allow us to beat Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — described as one of the most famous (and probably misunderstood) ideas in physics — and even to solve some of the most difficult problems in computer science.

Wormholes are like portals between two places in the Universe. If you fell in one side, you’d pop out the other immediately, regardless of how far apart the two sides were. But wormholes are also like portals between two times in the Universe. As Carl Sagan liked to say, you wouldn’t just emerge some where else in space, but also some when else in time.

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May 13, 2016

Physics Experiments Take Images ‘Back in Time’

Posted by in categories: media & arts, physics

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— An international team of physicists including Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Physics Gabe Spalding has shown waves of light can seem to travel back in time.

It may seem like science fiction, but the experiment did not violate the laws of physics. Spalding, his physics student Joseph Richards ’16 and a team of scientists tackled a century-old intuition from Lord Rayleigh regarding the speed of sound. Rayleigh theorized that music being played on an object traveling faster than the speed of sound, a supersonic jet for example, would result in a listener hearing the music playing in reverse. The Spalding team simulated what an observer standing still would see when looking at a superluminal (faster than the speed of light) occurrence. The results of the scientists’ experiment, conducted last summer at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, have been published in Science Advances.

“The existence of an absolute limit, the speed of light, is the natural source of the question: what would happen if we cross this limit?” lead author Mattero Clerici told a writer for a post on IFLScience. “Light sources, however, may move faster than the speed of light when their speed is not associated with the physical motion of matter. Following this line of thought, we devised a way to experimentally investigate the [effects] of superluminal motion.”

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May 11, 2016

Finishing What Einstein Started

Posted by in category: physics

Last September, researchers detected an exceptionally weak signal that lasted for about a tenth of a second: the gentle chirp of a gravitational wave. This feat, which confirmed a prediction made by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, is worthy of the Nobel prize.

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May 10, 2016

Tiny Tests Probe for Dark Matter and Other Exotic Physics

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Experiments that can fit on a tabletop are probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy and searching for evidence of extra dimensions.

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May 7, 2016

Here’s the 411 on the EmDrive: the ‘physics-defying’ thruster even NASA is puzzled over

Posted by in categories: physics, space travel

Despite the fact that they’re still unsure of how it works exactly, NASA scientists have confirmed once again that the seemingly impossible EmDrive is legit.

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May 4, 2016

Unique nano-capsules promise the targeted drug delivery

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology, physics

Gotta luv this.


An international team of researchers including the Lomonosov Moscow State University physicists has developed a completely new type of drug carrier for targeted delivery to the sick organ — the gel nano-capsules with a double shell. The results of the study were published in Scientific Reports.

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May 3, 2016

Why is space three-dimensional?

Posted by in categories: physics, space

(Phys.org)—The question of why space is three-dimensional (3D) and not some other number of dimensions has puzzled philosophers and scientists since ancient Greece. Space-time overall is four-dimensional, or (3 + 1)-dimensional, where time is the fourth dimension. It’s well-known that the time dimension is related to the second law of thermodynamics: time has one direction (forward) because entropy (a measure of disorder) never decreases in a closed system such as the universe.

In a new paper published in EPL, researchers have proposed that the second law of thermodynamics may also explain why is 3D.

“A number of researchers in the fields of science and philosophy have addressed the problem of the (3+1)-dimensional nature of space-time by justifying the suitable choice of its dimensionality in order to maintain life, stability and complexity,” coauthor Julian Gonzalez-Ayala, at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico and the University of Salamanca in Spain, told Phys.org.

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May 3, 2016

Did WORMHOLES make gravitational waves? Black holes merging may not be the answer

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

WORMHOLES could be responsible for gravitational waves, a new study has suggested, adding more mystery to the “scientific breakthrough of the year”.

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Apr 29, 2016

Consortium sets out to build European laser plasma accelerator

Posted by in categories: innovation, physics

The result is a compact accelerator that is not much larger than the laser used to create the plasma. That means that a laser plasma accelerator can be housed in a small building, rather than stretching over hundreds of metres or even several kilometres.

High-quality beam

While laser plasma accelerators exist at several laboratories around the world, EuPRAXIA steering-committee member Carsten Welsch says that “no infrastructure exists where the quality of the accelerated beam satisfies the requirements of industry”. Welsch, who is at the UK’s Cockcroft Institute of Accelerator Science and Technology, adds that “creating such a facility would be a major breakthrough and would attract users from many different sectors”.

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