00 A dense sheet of electrons accelerated to close to the speed of light can act as a tuneable mirror that can generate bursts of laser-like radiation in the short wavelength range via reflection. A team of physicists from the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitâ§t (LMU) Mâºnchen, the Queens University Belfast… Read More »
00 Is there any device to shift the spectrum of what is seen so red becomes orange, orange becomes yellow, yellow becomes green and so on, smoothly? A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 390 to 700 nm.[1] In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 430–790… Read More »
00 … Physicists have succeeded in closing the last local realistic loophole for systems of entangled photons. In everyday life it is only natural that the properties of objects exist independent of being observed or not. The quantum world on the other hand is ruled by other laws: the property of a particle may be… Read More »
00 An Iranian inventor recently claimed he created a “time machine,” according to reports. But the Internet is skeptical, and with good reason. The Telegraph caused a stir Wednesday with a story about a young Tehran-based scientist, Ali Razeghi, and an invention he calls“The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine.” Reportedly something of a mad scientist, Razeghi… Read More »
00 … scientists recently discovered something mind-bending about lightning: Sometimes its flashes are invisible, just sudden pulses of unexpectedly powerful radiation. It’s what Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology, has termed dark lightning. Unknown to Franklin but now clear to a growing roster of lightning researchers and astronomers is that… Read More »
00 As the shapes of galaxies go, the spiral disk — with its characteristic pinwheel profile — is by far the most pedestrian. Our own Milky Way, astronomers believe, is a spiral. Our solar system and Earth reside somewhere near one of its filamentous, swept-back arms. And nearly 70 percent of the galaxies closest to… Read More »
00 A new particle discovered at the Large Hadron Collider last year has been confirmed to be the Higgs boson. Here, proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider showing events consistent with the Higgs. (Credit: CERN/CMS/Taylor, L; McCauley, T) Physicists from the Atlas and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced Thursday that they… Read More »
00 In early 2007, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft observed something extraordinary around Saturn. An unusually strong blast of solar wind sent subatomic particles crashing into the ringed planet’s magnetic field, giving rise to perhaps the most tremendous shock wave ever observed emanating from the planet. But newly announced findings reveal the biggest surprise was yet to… Read More »
00 If an object traveling through spacetime can loop back in time in a certain way, then its trajectory can allow a pair of its components to be measured with perfect accuracy, violating Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. This new finding involves a particular trajectory called an open timelike curve (OTC), which is a special case of… Read More »
00 ‘Virtual particles’ can have real physical effects. A vacuum might seem like empty space, but scientists have discovered a new way to seemingly get something from that nothingness, such as light. And the finding could ultimately help scientists build incredibly powerful quantum computers or shed light on the earliest moments in the universe’s history.… Read More »
00 The best way to understand something–such as life–is to build it yourself. That’s why, determined to understand the way groups move, a team of New York University physicists set out to create particles that could imitate the way flocks of birds, schools of fish and even colonies of bacteria organize and move together.… Read More »
00 “At the level of subatomic particles the world is governed by quantum physics. Quantum theory is the most successful scientific theory ever: more successful than Newton’s laws or Einstein’s relativity! The evidence that it correctly describes reality is simply overwhelming. Yet quantum theory is very strange and goes against most of our fundamental beliefs… Read More »