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Archive for the ‘physics’ category: Page 207

Apr 16, 2018

Ultra-Accurate Clocks Lead Search for New Laws of Physics

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Atomic clocks are letting physicists tighten the lasso around elusive phenomena such as dark matter.

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Apr 16, 2018

A City-Sized ‘Telescope’ Could Watch Space-Time Ripple 1 Million Times a Year

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A gravitational wave detector that’s 2.5 miles long isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A 25-mile-long gravitational wave detector.

That’s the upshot of a series of talks given here Saturday (April 14) at the April meeting of the American Physical Society. The next generation of gravitational wave detectors will peer right up to the outer edge of the observable universe, looking for ripples in the very fabric of space-time, which Einstein predicted would occur when massive objects like black holes collide. But there are still some significant challenges standing in the way of their construction, presenters told the audience.

“The current detectors you might think are very sensitive,” Matthew Evans, a physicist at MIT, told the audience. “And that’s true, but they’re also the least sensitive detectors with which you can [possibly] detect gravitational waves.” [8 Ways You Can See Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Real Life].

Continue reading “A City-Sized ‘Telescope’ Could Watch Space-Time Ripple 1 Million Times a Year” »

Apr 14, 2018

‘There is no such thing as past or future’: physicist Carlo Rovelli on changing how we think about time

Posted by in categories: futurism, physics

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics sold over a million copies around the world. Now Rovelli is back to explore the mysteries of time. He tells about student revolution and how his quantum leap began with an acid trip.

Extract from Carlo Rovelli’s new book: on the elastic concept of time.

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Apr 12, 2018

Scientists Create Beautiful Iridescent Material That Could Be Edible

Posted by in categories: food, physics

What makes something red, or blue, or green? It’s all in the way light bounces off its surface. Something that primarily reflects light with shorter wavelengths will appear bluer, while something that reflects longer wavelengths will appear redder. By playing around with that principle, scientists have created a material that, much like soap bubbles and certain insect wings, displays a gorgeous iridescence—a shifting rainbow of colors they can tweak with the same surface.

Even more interestingly, the researchers made this material from common cellulose, the simple stuff that makes up paper and which can be extracted from wood, cotton, or other renewable sources. We’ve already mentioned scientists arranging cellulose fibers in a way that makes them appear incredibly white. But now instead of laying fibers, a team of physicists are molding cellulose films with tiny, regularly spaced impressions (like an upside-down Lego piece).

The outcome was a thin, single-centimeter iridescent film that reflects light based on the spacing of the dots, according to the paper published recently in Nature Photonics.

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Apr 11, 2018

How gravitational waves might help fundamental cosmology

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

New observations could help us understand discrepancies in measurements of the expansion of the Universe.

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Apr 11, 2018

Five Years After The Higgs, What Else Has The LHC Found?

Posted by in category: physics

Sure, we found the Higgs Boson at the LHC earlier this decade. But what else has, and more importantly, hasn’t turned up?

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Apr 11, 2018

The most powerful physics machine on Earth may have found something that breaks the laws of physics as we know them

Posted by in category: physics

This has opened a whole new window to physics.


This could be big.

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Apr 10, 2018

Why a New Idea to Search for Extra Dimensions in the Pulse of Spacetime Is Turning Heads

Posted by in category: physics

If physicists do find that gravitational waves have travelled through dimensions other than the four we live in, it will be the start of a revolution in physics. But how close are we really?

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Apr 8, 2018

Physicists Just Discovered an Entirely New Type of Superconductivity

Posted by in categories: materials, physics

One of the ultimate goals of modern physics is to unlock the power of superconductivity, where electricity flows with zero resistance at room temperature.

Progress has been slow, but physicists have just made an unexpected breakthrough. They’ve discovered a superconductor that works in a way no one’s ever seen before — and it opens the door to a whole world of possibilities not considered until now.

In other words, they’ve identified a brand new type of superconductivity.

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Apr 8, 2018

How Scientists Listen to Black Holes Colliding A Billion Years Ago

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Scientists at LIGO detected billion-year-old gravitational waves, and they are expecting to detect a lot more. This is an excerpt from ‘The Little Book of Black Holes’ by Frans Pretorius and Steven S. Gubser, reprinted with permission from the publisher Princeton University Press.

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