Just because Albert Einstein said that the faster-than-light travel is impossible isn't any reason to stop trying for it, a number of Star Trek-loving theoretical physicists have declared. To achieve the starship Enterprise's fabled warp speed, they propose simply bending the rules of physics a bit.

The speed-of-light speed limit, they argue, only applies within space-time (the continuum of three dimensions of space plus one of time that we live in). While any given object can't travel faster than light speed within space-time, theory holds, perhaps space-time itself could travel. "The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving" [SPACE.com]. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of the media are saying that the Mayan Calendar predicts December 21, 2012 as the "end of the world." For those of you who are already in the know about the history of this ancient timetable, this is utter nonsense. But as we delve deeper into some of the facts and theories surrounding this date, we begin to understand the thinking behind such doomsday predictions.

The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar started 3114 BC with an end-date of December 21 or 23, 2012, spanning a time of 5125.36 years. On this date, the Long Count calendar will reach 13.0.0.0.0, with 13 units being a 144,000-day cycle. Does this date signify the end of civilization and a resetting of the calendar, or can it even continue beyond this time?
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The sun has essentially been doing nothing. And it makes the news.

Because our sun tends to have fairly regular cycles of sunspots (dark regions on the sun that indicate intense magnetic activity), whenever it deviates from normal it can adversely affect some of our earthly systems. Solar storms with extremely powerful sunspot activity can disrupt our satellites and electrical systems.

But lately, the sun has been unusually quiet with a noticeable lack of more regular sunspot activity since 2007, when it started a new 11-year cycle. The sun is the quietest — and dimmest — it's been in 100 years. Scientists have been stumped by this unpredictable behavior, but it may recently be explained by sluggish solar jet streams that flow near its poles beneath the surface, and they now note that sunspots may slowly be increasing.
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French physicist and philosopher Bernard d'Espagnat was this year's winner of The Templeton Prize, a generous award given to a living person whose outstanding contributions through their life's work define and substantiate the spiritual aspects of life.

His explorations of quantum mechanics and insights into the nature of our universe stand out for their implications about the existence of an "ultimate spiritual reality" that is veiled from us apart from our perceived everyday world. This veiled reality, according to d'Espagnat, exists beyond time and space.
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In Germany, team members of an experiment called the GEO600 Project may have accidentally stumbled upon one of the most important physics discoveries in a long time.

The project is meant to detect gravitational waves from outer space; however, some of the data recently collected by GEO600 may point to us living in a giant cosmic hologram.
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The standard model of physics got it right when it predicted where the mass of ordinary matter comes from, according to a massive new computational effort. Particle physics explains that the bulk of atoms is made up of protons and neutrons, which are themselves composed of smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons. The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks [accounts for] only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent? [AFP]

The answer, according to theory, is that the energy from the interactions between quarks and gluons accounts for the excess mass (because as Einstein's famous E=mc² equation proved, energy and mass are equivalent). Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the weirdness in the universe, the quantum mechanics phenomenon called "entanglement" may be the most mind-boggling. Physicists have long shaken their heads at the theory that two particles that become entangled will always and instantly mirror each other's properties, no matter how far they are separated, which seems to go against all other physical understanding. In the everyday world, objects can organize themselves in just a few ways. For example, two people can coordinate their actions by talking directly with each other, or they can both receive instructions from a third source…. But quantum mechanics allows for a third way to coordinate information [Nature News].
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A new study of a pair of neutron stars has proven that Albert Einstein got the details right on his theory of general relativity, which describes the interactions of gravity, space, and time in our universe. A team of astrophysicists examined two newly discovered neutron stars, the small and dense stellar bodies formed after a supernova collapses, and found that Einstein accurately predicted their movements more than 90 years before the unusual star system was first sighted.

In Einstein's relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But those are the big effects. The theory of relativity also includes some more esoteric details, one of which is called spin precession. The idea goes like this: Two massive bodies orbiting near each other will warp space enough to disturb the central axis around which both are moving, causing them to begin wobbling just like spinning tops. Strong gravity creates this so-called precession, and the more massive the objects, the easier the precession is to observe [ScienceNow Daily News].
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Well, that's a relief. After a long safety review, physicists have declared that the enormous atom smasher that's expected to go online this fall won't create tiny black holes that will "eat" our planet. So that's one less thing to worry about.

The Large Hadron Collider, which is being built near Geneva, Switzerland, will do things with subatomic particles that humans have never done before, causing some people to worry that scientists might be unwittingly building a doomsday devise. The $8 billion machine is designed to accelerate protons, the building blocks of ordinary matter, to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then bang them together to produce tiny primordial fireballs, miniature versions of the Big Bang. Physicists will comb the detritus from those fireballs in search of forces and particles and even new laws of nature that might have prevailed during the first trillionth of a second of time [The New York Times].
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