Physics

Here: Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being untestable: string theory. It involves looking for particles that were around 14 billion years ago, when a very tiny universe hit a growth spurt that used 15 billion times more energy than a collision in the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists can’t crank the LHC up that high, not even close. But they could possibly observe evidence of these particles through cosmological studies, with the right technological advances. More. All such claim fly in the face of the main point: If everything is true somewhere, tests are meaningless. Tests belong in universes where only some things are true, not a multiverse where everything is. But Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Subatomic particles could defy standard model? The researchers looked at B meson decays, processes that produce lighter particles, including two types of leptons: the tau lepton and the muon. Unlike their stable lepton cousin, the electron, tau leptons and muons are highly unstable and quickly decay within a fraction of a second. According to a Standard Model concept called “lepton universality,” which assumes that leptons are treated equally by all fundamental forces, the decay to the tau lepton and the muon should both happen at the same rate, once corrected for their mass difference. However, the team found a small, but notable, difference in the predicted rates of decay, suggesting that as-yet undiscovered forces or particles could be Read More ›

From the BBC: What is our Universe made of? Billions of dark matter particles pass through us every second. “They are in your office, in your room, everywhere,” says Frenk. “They are crossing through your bodies at a rate of billions per second and you feel nothing.” There have been some false alarms along the way In theory we should be able to spot the little flashes of gamma rays from these collisions. The trouble is, lots of other things are also passing through, including radiation in the form of cosmic rays, and this swamps the signal from the dark matter. Hence the underground experiments: the rocks above block most radiation, but allow dark matter through. So far, most physicists Read More ›

From Nature: Quantum ‘spookiness’ passes toughest test yet It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world. … In quantum mechanics, objects can be in multiple states simultaneously: for example, an atom can be in two places, or spin in opposite directions, at once. Measuring an object forces it to snap into a well-defined state. Furthermore, the properties of different objects can become ‘entangled’, meaning that their states are linked: Read More ›

From New Scientist: Stephen Hawking says he has a way to escape from a black hole What you may not know is that physicists have been arguing for 40 years about what happens to the information about the physical state of those objects once they fall in. Quantum mechanics says that this information cannot be destroyed, but general relativity says it must be – that’s why this argument is known as the information paradox. Now Hawking says this information never makes it inside the black hole in the first place. “I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” he said today. The Read More ›

We thought everyone knew that, but no matter. A reviewer for the Spectator, introducing Christophe Galfard’s The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond thinks he is surprising us by telling us that: Physicists have a nerve. I know one (I’ll call him Mark) who berates every religious person he meets, yet honestly thinks there exist parallel universes, exactly like our own, in which we all have two noses. He refuses to give any credit to Old Testament creation myths and of course sneers at the idea of transubstantiation. But, without any sense of shame, he insists in the same breath that humans are made from the fallout of exploded stars; that it is theoretically possible Read More ›

Pions? There’s been a long-running question as to why most of the universe’s matter remains unaccounted for. According to Live Science, Now, a team of five physicists has proposed that dark matter might be a kind of invisible, intangible version of a pion, a particle that was originally discovered in the 1930s. A pion is a type of meson — a category of particles made up of quarks and antiquarks; neutral pions travel between protons and neutrons and bind them together into atomic nuclei. Most proposals about dark matter assume it is made up of particles that don’t interact with each other much — they pass through each other, only gently touching. The name for such particles is weakly interacting Read More ›

From the New Statesman: To support Minkowski’s proposal, a 2014 paper published in arXiv, says the universe had no beginning and will have no end (a “block universe”), according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory general relativity. The model also helps solve the problem of dark matter and dark energy. What some cosmologists now believe is that rather than matter collapsing, causing a “Big Bang”, the matter bounced (“the Big Bounce”). Ie, they believe the universe has energy levels and goes through a cycle of collapses and bounces. “[The Big Bounce] is actually in doubt because we now know that our universe is not going to re-collapse. It is actually going to expand Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: RE: Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time:At the risk of making the waters muddier, I think the problem we are all addressing by different methods is that of Dualism–the incompatibility of material and spiritual existence. When the Enlightenment put the emphasis of the objective experience, it produced an explosion of scientific and technological progress that misled the inte lligentsia into embracing Materialism. The 20th century showed the fruit of a materialist, atheistsociety, which wasn’t pretty. But the solution–attempted many times, for example by Romanticism in the 19th century– of grafting a spiritual dimension onto the material, never really took. The graft just never got enough sustenance to survive, and so Romanticism, Gnosticism, Liberalism Read More ›

From Frank Wilczek, How Physics Will Change-and Change the World -in 100 Years: Unification VI: Mind and Matter Although many details remain to be elucidated, it seems fair to say that metabolism and reproduction, two of the most characteristic features of life, are now broadly understood at the molecular level as physical processes. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, put forward the “astonishing hypothesis” that it will be possible to bring understanding of basic psychology, including biological cognitive processing, memory, motivation, and emotion, to a comparable level. One might call that “reduction” of mind to matter. But mind is what it is, and what it is will not be diminished for being physically understood. I’d be thrilled to understand how Read More ›

From physicist Jon Butterworth at The Guardian: Jan Conrad, an astroparticle physicist, claims that “The field has cried wolf too many times and lost credibility” and he worries that false discoveries are undermining public trust in science. He lists some dubious results which have caused a stir amongst physicists and the general public over the past couple of years, including the faster-than-light-neutrinos that weren’t, the primordial gravitational waves that are probably just dust, and several Dark Matter candidates which remain shrouded in uncertainty and contradiction. His argument has some merit; in some cases there is an apparent rush to release, and especially to over-interpret, provisional and sometimes incorrect data. This is sometimes done because because of rivalries and competition, the Read More ›

Because we just haven’t found the dark matter that the theory seems to require. Further to Human languages must be irreducibly complex (Can someone help us understand what this translation from German means?)—maybe it was something about how cosmology needs to change, which Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute in Canada said plainly earlier this year. Something like: Hi, Nonsense, meet Budget: From PBS: Do We Need to Rewrite General Relativity? Astronomical observations show that there isn’t enough ordinary matter to account for the behavior of galaxies and other objects. The fix is dark matter, particles invisible to light but endowed with gravity. However, none of our detectors or experiments have ever seen a dark matter particle directly, leading some Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s Chasing shadows: How long can we keep looking for dark matter?, curiously, New Scientist has been asking the same question: We’ve known we need dark matter since the 1930s, but still haven’t found it. The search can’t go on forever Even CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, our best and by far most expensive tool for finding it, has so far drawn a blank. How much longer can we keep looking? … Perhaps we have simply been looking for the wrong thing. Perhaps dark matter particles are very massive, rather than fairly light, as many assume. The first experiments are now under way to detect any such “superheavy” dark matter that might have been created when the universe Read More ›

To ask that question is to answer it. World Mag here: After decades of being touted for its mathematical elegance and adored for its explanatory power, supersymmetry was finally ready for experimental verification at Switzerland’s famous particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While the LHC made some important discoveries, most notably the Higgs boson particle (sometimes called the God particle), scientists found nothing at all to confirm supersymmetry. After many a particle was smashed, crashed, accelerated, and spun, no supersymmetric “partners” could be found—a bitter blow for physicists ready to leap to the next frontier. In the ashes of disappointment, “the specter of evidence-independent science” arose, according to Gleiser and Frank. They note that while some scientists are prepared Read More ›

From the Dark Matter Deniers. At Discover: Exploring a blasphemous alternative to one of modern physics’ most vexing enigmas. We’d have to pay to read the article, but the language intended to draw us in is surely interesting. A second career for Torquemada? Or is the whole “denialism” sturm-und-flapdoodle beginning to attract well-deserved mockery? Denialism these days usually means a willingness to address inconvenient facts. Just as quote mining usually means quoting Darwin’s followers when they let down their guard and speak honestly with each other. Follow UD News at Twitter!