physics

Chris Knight's avatar

The wacky world of quantum mechanics has claimed another victim from the world of common sense. Specifically the equivalence principle long understood to mean that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein was the first to publish about it, building on work already established by Galileo and Newton.

New kids on the block Endre Kajari and his crew at the University of Ulm in Germany have now arrived to bust that all up. They have shown that in the realm of quantum physics, there can be wild variations between gravitational mass and inertial mass.

From the article at MIT’s Technology Review…

Their thinking begins by pointing out the important distinction between kinematics, which is concerned purely with motion not how it arises, and dynamics which focuses on the origin of motion. In the classical world, this has no bearing on the effects of inertial and gravitational mass.

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It’s hard to believe now, but Theodore Maiman’s discovery was turned down from scholarly publication when he first submitted it! At the time there was a lot of work being conducted on maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) and the journal Physical Review Letters thought that Maiman’s article was a retread of too many others. But before long researchers – and soon afterward the rest of the world – agreed that the laser which Maiman created on May 16th 1960 using a ruby rod was an entirely different gimmick. Fifty years later and lasers are everywhere around us: in CD and DVD players, in your doctor’s office, maybe even in your shirt pocket.

CNN has a great retrospective about a half-century of the laser. And if you want to know how a laser differs from a flashlight, HowStuffWorks hosts a terrific ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Here’s something that’s intrigued me for quite a few years. Saturn – the second biggest planet in the solar system – has an odd feature and it ain’t them purty rings: there’s a huuuuuge hexagon-shaped cloud formation, thousands of miles to a side, surrounding its north pole. It’s a persistent phenomenon that has mystified astronomers ever since it was first discovered.

So if you’ve been baffled about Saturn’s mystery hexagon, be bebaffled no further ‘cuz Ana Claudia Barbosa Aguiar and Peter Read of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom have recreated the mechanism in their lab with little more than a bucket of water and some green dye, and set it a’spinning on a variable-speed turntable. And fun was had by all!

From the article at ScienceNow…

The faster the ring rotated, the less circular the green jet stream became. Small eddies formed along its edges, which slowly

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Someday in our foreseeable future, our children will be learning about chemistry with a periodic table that looks something like this…

…no thanks to researchers conducting experiments with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

According to this article at The Register (which reads disturbingly too much like a quantum physics essay written by Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange) the “topflight international reverse-alchemy boffins say they have managed to transmute gold into an entirely new form of ‘negatively strange’ antihypernucleic antimatter, ultra-bizarre stuff which cannot possibly occur naturally – except perhaps inside the cores of collapsed stars.”

In layman’s terms it’s a new form of matter whose strangeness is less than zero but probably not too boring.

I’m currently hopped-up on allergy medicine, and I still have no idea what the hell all of that means....

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Assuming that we could ever figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light, there may not be a heck of a lot that we could do with it. That’s what Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (dude sounds like a polymath for having a good head about medicine and high-energy physics) has determined.

The problem is hydrogen, which exists in interstellar space on average of two atoms per cubic centimeter. Which ain’t a whole lot. But if a spacecraft were to accelerate toward lightspeed those scarce atoms would start bombarding the ship like a hail of bullets…

As the spaceship reached 99.999998 per cent of the speed of light, “hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts”, which for the crew “would be like standing in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam”.

This is a very bad thing,

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Energy Tribune has a BRILLIANT essay by William Tucker about Albert Einstein’s classic equation E=mc2: the formula describing the interchangeability between mass and energy. Tucker’s essay not only lays out E=mc2 in terms that anyone can easily grasp, it also argues why current efforts at renewable energy are not sufficient. Instead, Tucker lays out a solid case – using simple mathematics – for the use of nuclear energy and why it has a far less malign impact on the environment than we have come to accept. If you want an eye-opener of a read, check it out!...

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See if you can wrap your noggin around this one: the Large Hadron Collider – that super-powered high-energy thingamabob at CERN in Switzerland that previously had been predicted would destroy the world – is now theorized to be the first observed occurrence of the “grandfather paradox” of time travel!

According to two physicists, the LHC’s mission to produce the hypothesized and long-sought Higgs boson is damned to failure by its own future. The reason? Because the Higgs boson “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”. And according to Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, this “predestination” from the Higgs particle goes far beyond screwing ...

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It’s a very rare moment when I read something for the first time that goes almost completely over the top of my head. This is one of them: researchers are building a “time telescope” that can compress data into smaller chunks of time, that is then transmitted via fiber optics. Hit the link if you want to feel your brains getting twisted.

Of course, there are going to be some who will say that time is going too fast already, but I digress… 😛...

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