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Physics

Preprint server arXiv rejects NON-wild ideas?

If so, big problem for starter physicists From Nature: The site – where physicists, mathematicians and other researchers routinely post their articles before peer review — has previously been accused of bias for filtering out some of the wilder ideas it receives. But in a December blogpost that is now provoking debate, Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that arXiv moderators wrongly blacklisted two of his students from posting their work. Gisin notes that being unable to post to arXiv has a detrimental effect on young researchers’ careers, because it is so influential — the preprint server holds more than 1.1 million papers and receives well over 9,000 submissions each month. He is concerned Read More ›

Hawking uses black hole to split physicists

From Nature: Some welcome his latest report as a fresh way to solve a black-hole conundrum; others are unsure of its merits. … In a paper published in 1976, Hawking pointed out that the outflowing particles — now known as Hawking radiation — would have completely random properties. As a result, once the black hole was gone, the information carried by anything that had previously fallen into the hole would be lost to the Universe. But this result clashes with laws of physics that say that information, like energy, is conserved, creating the paradox. “That paper was responsible for more sleepless nights among theoretical physicists than any paper in history,” Strominger said during his talk. The mistake, Strominger explained, was Read More ›

Quantum links are fundamental structure of universe?

From Quanta: Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links — not space-time — constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. … In 2012, Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph, both physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia, laid out a procedure to encrypt data so that it can be decrypted only at a specific moment in the future. Their scheme exploits quantum entanglement, a phenomenon in which particles or points in a field, such as the electromagnetic field, shed their separate identities and assume a shared existence, their properties becoming correlated with one another’s. Normally physicists think of these correlations as spanning space, linking far-flung locations in a phenomenon that Albert Einstein famously described as Read More ›

Why “space” is hard to understand

From Dan Falk at Nautilus: In his popular book The Fabric of the Cosmos, physicist Brian Greene explains that although Einstein’s theory demolished Newton’s absolute space, it gave us something else in its place—a four-dimensional structure known as spacetime—and this, Greene argues, is absolute. You and I might disagree about the duration of a parade, or the distance that the marchers covered—but we’d agree on the total distance through spacetime between the start and end of the parade. This is hard to picture, since we can’t see in four dimensions, but it’s guaranteed by the equations in Einstein’s theory. And yet, this is not Greene’s final word on the matter. Physicists now suspect the “Higgs field,” believed to endow particles Read More ›

Roger Highfield on walking by faith and not by sight, in science

Responding to the “Buzz from the planet beyond Neptune,” (planet detected by instruments other than sighting), director of xtrnal affairs at the Science Museum, Roger Highfield tells us, In today’s science, we no longer have to see to believe Last week I met the distinguished Harvard particle physicist Lisa Randall, who has linked a mysterious cosmic source of gravity called dark matter to the most famous terrestrial cataclysm of all, the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. She has even written a book about it — Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe. We only know dark matter exists by inferring that it is real. Analyse the movements of stars and you can work Read More ›

An infinite past can’t save Darwin?

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze shares with us a passage from Robert J. Spitzer on the impossibility of infinite past time. He explains, If often happens that infinity is marshaled to prop up the notion that evolution can work via random mutations, no matter how heavily the odds are stacked against that possibility. If the finiteness of our universe limits the effectiveness of randomness in producing wonders, then infinity is offered as the handy solution. Our universe was preceded by an infinite number of other universes which rolled the dice an infinite number of times until finally our own time-bound universe happened to get it “just right.” An infinite number of universes of course entails infinite time, a concept tossed Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on the “epicycles” of today’s cosmology

Millennia ago,epicycles were introduced to astronomy to account for differences between theory and observation, thus saving the theory. Rob Sheldon writes to comment on a recent finding: New theory of secondary inflation expands options for avoiding an excess of dark matter. First, here’s the finding: Physicists suggest a smaller secondary inflationary period in the moments after the Big Bang could account for the abundance of the mysterious matter Standard cosmology — that is, the Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation — is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness. This Read More ›

Nobelist: Beauty as physics’ “secret weapon”

Further to Biology of the Baroque, in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Steve Paulson at Nautilus, Nobelist (2004) Frank Wilczek argues that Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And should. In his new book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Wilczek lays out his case for the elegance of mathematics and the coherence of nature’s underlying laws. … Was beauty important to Einstein and the other founders of modern physics? Absolutely, although they didn’t always think about it explicitly. Einstein Read More ›

Proposal to actually test cosmological ideas…

Yeah, we almost fell off our chairs too. Astrophysicist Thomas Kitching offers some ideas and a rationale at RealClearScience: A study that surveyed all the published cosmological literature between the years 1996 and 2008 showed that the statistics of the results were too good to be true. In fact, the statistical spread of the results was not consistent with what would be expected mathematically, which means cosmologists were in agreement with each other – but to a worrying degree. This meant that either results were being tuned somehow to reflect the status-quo, or that there may be some selection effect where only those papers that agreed with the status-quo were being accepted by journals. No kidding. Pigs fly backwards too? Read More ›

Does space exist without objects?

That’s a good question to ponder overnight. From science writer George Musser: Let’s Rethink Space … And in the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution in attitudes among physicists toward locality. In my career as a science writer and editor, I have had the privilege of talking to scientists from a wide range of communities—people who study everything from subatomic particles to black holes to the grand structure of the cosmos. Over and over, I heard some variant of: “Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen if for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.” To make sense of nonlocality, the first step is to invert Read More ›

Is reality information?

Wouldn’t that make information reality? From Rachel Thomas’ evaluation of the work of physicist John Archibald Wheeler at PlusMaths: Wheeler categorised his long and productive life in physics into three periods: “Everything is Particles”, “Everything is Fields”, and “Everything is Information”. (You can read more about his life and work in his autobiography, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam.) The driving idea behind the third period was spurred by his contemplation of the age-old question: “How come existence?” And his answer, first published in a brilliantly written (and very entertaining) paper in 1989, was it from bit: “It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: What’s behind the gravitational wave rumors

From Nature: Gravitational-wave rumours in overdrive … What is the gossip? Has giant LIGO experiment seen gravitational waves? The rumours suggest that the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a US laboratory with detectors in Washington and Louisiana, has spotted a signal of gravitational waves. These are ripples in the fabric of space-time that, according to Einstein’s theory, are produced by cataclysmic events such as the merging of two black holes or two neutron stars. Whispers of a possible detection were first tweeted in September by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, at Arizona State University in Tempe. The most specific rumour now comes in a blog post by theoretical physicist Luboš Motl: it’s speculated that the two detectors, which began to collect Read More ›

Physicist: We can only argue positions based on philosophy

“How real is reality?” asks theoretical physicist Adam Frank at NPR: … throughout the past 100 years, physicists have proposed a lot of different ways to interpret their mathematics and, in the process, explain what quantum theory tells us about the fundamental nature of “The Real.” These interpretations tend to fall into one of two camps. For the first camp, the mathematics directly describes a reality that is independent and objective. In this view, quantum mechanics is an ontological theory (ontology is the branch of philosophy dealing with what truly exists). For the second camp, however, the mathematics of quantum mechanics describes only our knowledge of the world. For these folks, quantum physics is an epistemological theory (epistemology is the Read More ›

String theory failed as scientific theory … ?

Are people allowed to say this in pop science venues now, like something that is just true? From physicist Tom Hartsfield at RealClearScience: String theory has been the darling of the theoretical physics community for decades. It has reigned as the dominant theory in prestigious US research institutions since the 1980s. Elegant books, TV shows, and grandiose TED talks have hyped it to the public. Brilliant theoretical physicists tell us that this theory is the best answer to the hardest problem that their field has ever attacked. All that is fine, but here’s the unequivocal truth: string theory has failed as a scientific theory. … Discussing the conference last month, he pleads for empiricism, taking evidence seriously: The fire igniting Read More ›

Quantum teleport: Top physics breakthrough 2015

From Physics World: The Physics World 2015 Breakthrough of the Year goes to Jian-Wei Pan and Chaoyang Lu of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, for being the first to achieve the simultaneous quantum teleportation of two inherent properties of a fundamental particle – the photon. Pan and Lu’s team has now simultaneously transferred a photon’s spin (polarization) and its orbital angular momentum (OAM) to another photon some distance away. … Although it is possible to extend Pan’s method to teleport more than two properties simultaneously, this becomes increasingly difficult with each added property – the likely limit is three. To do this would require the ability to experimentally control 10 photons, while the current record Read More ›