Physics | Futurismic

Death threats over Large Hadron Collider

Tom Marcinko @ 06-09-2008

frankenstein It’s not quite pitchfork-bearing mobs, but still.

Scientists working on the world’s biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up….

Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t—.”

Fermilab plans a pajama party to celebrate the start of the experiment.

[Photo: Fuzzy Gerdes]

Light buffet: Entanglement, warp drives, and slower beams

Tom Marcinko @ 14-08-2008

Researchers in Geneva are trying to figure the speed of quantum entanglement, aka “the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another…” Experiments with photons 18 km apart suggest that entanglement “moves” at least 10,000 times the speed of light. “I think there’s probably much deeper issues,” comments one of their British colleagues. [SciAm]

Meanwhile, to propel your starship by real-life warp drive, two Baylor U. physicists say you can too change the laws of physics. Just bend the space around the ship by recreating conditions that existed when the universe was expanding, and light moved faster than it does today. All we need is 11 dimensions a la string theory, and a mass the size of Jupiter to convert to pure energy. And we thought an invisibility cloak was impressive. [io9; Discovery News; preprint]

Back in this millennium, bulky, expensive, and complicated electronic routers are slowing down the Internet. A possible solution: slow down light itself, through the use of “metamaterials” to do away with all that tedious mucking about during the switching process.

“With these materials, you could imagine something more like a single chip with the metamaterial handling the routing—all the capability of one of these big filtering systems, but the size of your fingernail,” says Dr [Chris] Stevens [of Oxford].

[image: Star Gate by Imbecillsallad]

Does science need art to answer fundamental questions?

Edward Willett @ 24-06-2008

That’s the question posed in this fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer at SEED Magazine. Riffing on the possibility that Niels Bohr may have been influenced by his interest in Cubism when he came up with his new model of the atom, Lehrer argues that science needs art in order to answer the most fundamental questions:

Physicists study the fabric of reality, the invisible laws and particles that define the material world. Neuroscientists study our perceptions of this world; they dissect the brain in order to understand the human animal. Together, these two sciences seek to solve the most ancient and epic of unknowns: What is everything? And who are we?
But before we can unravel these mysteries, our sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings. The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress.

(Via Idea Festival.)

What do you think? Is he on to something, or is this just a romantic plea to an unromantic world to put art back on the pedestal of importance it once occupied?

(Image: “Juan Gris: Violin and Playing Cards (1995.403.14)”. In Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.)

Entangled Up in Blue: Quantum Images

Tom Marcinko @ 14-06-2008

quantum-cats Researchers at the Commerce Department’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and the University of Maryland have used laser beams to produce less “noisy” images, according to Science Express via Science Daily. The experiment could lead to better computers and information-storage. The images are born in pairs, “like twins separated at birth,” at slightly different frequencies. None of that is necessarily weird, but:

Look at one quantum image, and it displays random and unpredictable changes over time. Look at the other image, and it exhibits very similar random fluctuations at the same time, even if the two images are far apart and unable to transmit information to one another. They are “entangled”–their properties are linked in such a way that they exist as a unit rather than individually.

The photo-montage of quantum cats is made from color-treated images used in the experiment. The lines suggest how entanglement occurs. What else could we do with quantum entanglement? It would be fun to make entangled drawings or paintings.

[Image: Vincent Boyer/JQI]

Got Change for an Electron?

Tom Marcinko @ 04-06-2008

Ella at the whiteboard Israeli scientists have sliced electrons into “quasiparticles,” each with a quarter charge of the electron.

Although electrons are indivisible, if they are confined to a two-dimensional layer inside a semiconductor, chilled down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero and exposed to a strong magnetic field that is perpendicular to the layer, they effectively behave as independent particles, called quasiparticles, with charges smaller than that of an electron.

Quasis have been known for 20 years, but they were “odd fractionally charged” — one third of an electron, one fifth, etc. The quarter-charges behave differently and may be useful for computing.

Those of us who have trouble wrapping our heads around quantum stuff might sympathize with astronomers, who, the New York Times tells us, are finding cosmology just as puzzling.

As far as astronomers can tell, there is no relation between dark matter, the particles, and dark energy other than the name, but you never know.

Nevertheless, string theorist Brian Greene, promoting the World Science Festival, reminds us of something most readers of this site would probably find a truism, but is probably a new idea to a lot of people:

We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.

[Ella Delivers Her Lecture on String Theory by Phillip C]

CERN brings supergrid internet to the world

Tomas Martin @ 09-04-2008

The CMS detector at CERN will process huge volumes of data every second In addition to searching for the ‘God’ particle that is the Higgs, CERN have been making a vast ’supergrid’ to transfer the vast volumes of data created by the LHC supercollider every second to the universities studying it around the world (currently including myself). The sheer amount of data at the LHC - around 15 Petabytes a year - means a whole new system has been made to spread it to other institutions outside of the collider in Switzerland.

The grid still has some issues to work out but is showing signs of real potential to blow the current internet out of commission in a few years. The grid uses fibre-optic connections and high speed routers to transfer data. It could be as much as 10,000 times as fast as current broadband, allowing movie-sized files to transfer in seconds. Of course, this technology is currently only in use in the world of High Energy Particle Physics but, like the World Wide Web before it, what is invented at CERN tends to propagate out to the rest of us before too long.

[via The Times, image via CERN]

Black holes and litigations*

Paul Raven @ 31-03-2008

In a world replete with frivolous and silly lawsuits, the two guys pressing a lawsuit (in Hawaii) to stop the CERN Large Hadron Collider being turned on are surely leading the pack. They’re allegedly worried that the LHC will create a miniature black hole that will OMG SWALLOW TEH URTH!!1! [image by Spadger]

It appears that their fears are at least partly founded in reality, though. Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait explains the potential risks of colliding subatomic particles … but he goes on to point out that the scientists in charge of the LHC project have already looked into the possibilities and concluded that the risk is so small as to be negligible.

Of course, they might be wrong. But given the choice of going with either the scientific method or the opinion of two guys who made a beeline for a Hawaiian courtroom, my money’s on the fellows wearing the lab-coats.

*See, Tomas - it’s not just you who can sneak obtuse references to British rock bands into Futurismic posts!

Probing the six degrees of separation

Tomas Martin @ 26-02-2008

Discover has a good article this week about a couple of social scientists and their attempts to confirm Milgrim’s infamous ’six degrees of separation’ experiment. Milgrim gave a number of people a letter and asked them to get it to a person they didn’t know directly though people they did know, then a person that person knew, etc. He found the chains averaged at 6 people, leading to the urban myth and the game ‘Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon’, in which people link up actors in a similar way (from personal experience, it almost always seems to go via Dan Ackroyd). Kevin Bacon even has a website called Six Degrees, linking celebrities and people with charitable organisations.

The scientists found that in both Milgrim and their follow-up studies, the six degrees often held up but people only completed their chain of connections a small amount of the time. They found that although often the six degree connection was about right when the link was completed, the likelihood of them reaching their target usually depended on the willingness or hostility of the people inbetween. For instance, for someone like Morgan Spurlock looking for Osama Bin Laden the last couple of chains are probably extremely resistant to taking part, so it’ll be hard to find him! I’d be interested to see if, as internet networks grow in popularity and sophistication, whether the number of degrees actually decreases in a hyper-connected future.

Discover also has a look at six physicists who could be considered ‘the next Einstein’. Personally I think Richard Feynman should hold that title and anyone now should be considered ‘the next Richard Feynman’ but the article is a nice brief overview of some leading lights in theoretical physics all the same.

[story via Discover, image via Wikipedia Commons]

And the Oscar for "Best Short Film of a Sub-Atomic Particle" goes to…

Edward Willett @ 22-02-2008

…this video of a single electron’s motion.

The movie, made at Lund University, Sweden, shows how an electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom. This is the first time an electron has ever been filmed. (Via EurekAlert.)

How do you film something that circles the nucleus of an atom once every 150 attoseconds? And how long is an attosecond, anyway?

To answer the second question first, an attosecond is 10 to the -18 of a second, or, as Johan Mauritsson, an assistant professor in atomic physics at the University, puts it, “an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe.”

By using attosecond pulses created from intense laser light using recently developed technology, the researchers were able to guide the motion of an electron and capture a collision between it and an atom on film.

As you might guess, the encounter has been slowed down enormously so our slow-poke eyes and brains can register it.

OK, so it probably won’t win an Oscar at this Sunday’s Academy Awards, but it’s still pretty darn cool.

You can read the original scientific paper from Physical Review Letters here, and additional discussion of the achievement here.

(Image: Lund University.)

The monsters at the bottom of black holes!

Paul Raven @ 21-01-2008

No, it’s not the title of some best-forgotten B-movie, but some high-brow astrophysics that - in all honesty - I can’t say I fully understand. But it’s something to do with quantum physics, entropy and super-massive black holes:

“Although Hawking radiation implies that black holes contain all this disorder, scientists have been puzzled as to where it all comes from. The collapsing stars that turn into black holes do not start out with nearly enough. How does the matter become so scrambled?
Frampton’s team argues that the extra entropy is generated by the random nature of quantum physics. This should sometimes allow a collapsing ball of matter to spontaneously transform into something called a “monster” – an arrangement of matter that has maximum disorder, with particles travelling at high speed in random directions.”

These “monsters” could help explain our way to a quantum theory of gravity, apparently. It’s times like this I wish I’d stuck with science instead of engineering. [Image courtesy NASA]

Scientist creates dark matter in the lab!

Edward Willett @ 14-01-2008

No, not that dark matter, but rather the darkest known material, about four times darker than the previous record holder. (Via PhysOrg.)

It’s a carpet of carbon nanotubes that only reflects 0.045 percent light, making it, as the Houston Chronicle puts it, “100 times darker than a black-painted Corvette,” (which seems like a fairly imprecise measurement standard, but never mind). The previous darkest known material was a nickel and phosphorus alloy that reflected about 0.16 percent of light.

The material’s ability to absorb light could be beneficial to solar panels and, since it minimizes the scattering of light, it could also benefit telescope manufacturers.

It also minimizes the scattering of light, making it a potential boon to telescope manufacturers.

(And, yes, you’re absolutely right: I posted this just so I could use that headline. The photo was a bonus.)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Inaudibility cloaks, like invisibility cloaks, theoretically possible

Edward Willett @ 10-01-2008

It’s remarkable how often science advances by one scientist hear some other scientist say, “Such-and-such is impossible!”, responding, “Oh, yeah?” and then proving the first scientist wrong.

That seems to be what’s happened at Duke University, where Steven Cummer read a research report suggesting that it was impossible to build a 3-D acoustic cloak, a device that would make whatever was inside it disappear from sound waves. (Via ScienceBlog.)

Cummer and associate David Schurig had already reported a theory showing that a two-dimensional cloak as possible, and Cummer refused to believe that a 3-D cloak couldn’t also be built, especially considering researchers already know that a cloak invisible to electromagnetic waves is possible, and in fact have built one that operates at microwave frequencies.

“In my mind, waves are waves,” he said. “It was hard for me to imagine that something you could do with electromagnetic waves would be completely undoable for sound waves.”

So he sat down and figured out how such a cloak would work, and has shown that, in theory at least, it’s entirely possible to create an inaudibility cloak that allows sound waves to travel seamlessly around an object and continue on their way without distortion. With such a thing (which would have to be built from exotic metamaterials), you could build a stealth submarine that couldn’t be detected by sonar, or improve the acoustics of a concert hall by removing distortion caused by pillars or support beams.

And if you can build cloaks for electromagnetic and sound waves, what about other waves? How about structures unaffected by seismic waves, or boats unaffected by ocean waves?

The researchers’ full paper will be published in the January 11 Physical Review Letters.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

The LHC on track for summer launch

Tomas Martin @ 03-01-2008

As a Physics student doing a masters project on a computer simulation of CERN’s new particle supercollider, I’ve got a vested interest in the progress of the real thing. CERN is reporting good progress on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and thinks it is on track to start producing results this summer.

The LHC accelerates two beams of protons in opposite directions around its 27-kilometre diameter ring, until the two beams meet and collide with huge amounts of energy. From this energy, particle physicists hope new particles will form that we haven’t seen before. Chief among those prospective discoveries is the Higgs Boson, which would explain why the other particles have mass.

The Guardian’s weekly science podcast talks about the prospects of finding new science at the LHC, whilst Fermilab has a good summary of the other potential new things the LHC might find when it begins colliding later this year.

[via Science Daily, image by poluz]

Laser fusion makes important steps

Tomas Martin @ 06-12-2007

The quote physicists often say when asked about nuclear fusion is that ‘commercial fusion is 40 years away, but we’ve been saying that for 40 years’. Two main types of fusion are in development - ‘tokamaks’ like JET and ITER that use magnets to fuse hydrogen in a torus of plasma and those that shoot high powered lasers at pellets of hydrogen a few times a second, making bursts of energy.

Neither process is currently producing more energy than is put in to start the reaction but there have been some developments in laser technology that may help the latter approach. The EU has recently decided to fund a new high energy laser research project to build a working reactor. Laser fusion may ‘ignite’ and provide energy before the magnetic fusion research reaches the same point but the pulses of laser energy need to come much faster and more efficiently for this to be economically viable. Without considerable funding, the technological challenges of getting hydrogen to fuse will be insurmountable. However, fusion offers a real hope in the long term (30 years+) of providing clean energy.

[via the guardian, image of UCLA tokamak by r_neches]

Recordings found of physicist who predicted Multiverse (and fathered indie legend)

Tomas Martin @ 26-11-2007

Hugh Everett was a quantum physicist. In 1957, as a 24 year old graduate student at Princeton, Everett produced a theory that there was a multiverse made up of many universes. In Quantum Physics a particle can be in two places at once, until it is observed (the famous Schrodinger’s Cat problem). Everett supposed that instead of the other option disappearing, the universe splits into two.

Nowadays the idea is fairly well accepted, with multiple universes popping up in science fiction like ‘Sliders’ and Ian McDonald’s excellent latest novel, ‘Brasyl’. Back when Everett first came up with it, the theory was widely ignored for two decades.

Recently, new tapes have been found of Everett talking about his theory in 1977. BBC found the tapes whilst making a documentary with Everett’s son, who also happens to be rather famous - Mark Everett is ‘E’, lead singer of eclectic indie band Eels. The documentary follows ‘E’ trying to understand better his father’s work. It premieres on BBC4 tonight.

[via the Guardian, image of Eels album cover via Wikipedia]

Oops, our bad: by observing the universe, we may have doomed it

Edward Willett @ 22-11-2007

One of the weirdest aspects of quantum theory is the role of the observer: particles exist only as probabilities until they are observed, at which point they become definite. (Schrödinger’s neither-alive-nor-dead cat is the most famous thought experiment along these lines.) (Via EurekAlert!)

Now New Scientist is reporting that a pair of physicists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, suggest that when, in 1998, astronomers observed the light from supernovae and from that deduced the existence of dark energy, we may have reset the clock of the ~~university~~ universe to the state it was in early in its history, when it was more likely to just as suddenly cease to exist as it suddenly sprang into existence in the first place. (Image: NASA via Wikimedia Commons.)

We’re still here, so the universe hasn’t winked out of existence just yet. But any second now…

Professor Hawking writes cosmic adventure for kids

Paul Raven @ 04-09-2007

Cover art for George's Secret Key To The Universe by Stephen Hawking et al Already a widely published man in his chosen field, Stephen Hawking is branching out into authordom of a different kind. In partnership with his daughter and a French scientist who wrote a thesis on his ideas, Hawking has written George’s Secret Key To The Universe - a space adventure story for children that explains the physics of the universe while (presumably) entertaining younger readers at the same time. I think we can safely assume that’s one science fiction story whose physics will never be questioned by hard sf purists … well, at least for a good few decades. [Image from Random House]

Cooking up supernovae in the lab

Paul Raven @ 27-08-2007

A detailed study of a supernova could tell scientists an awful lot of useful things … but there are obvious reasons why, even if we were able to travel the distances involved, we’d not want to just blast on over to check one out up close and personal. So, we do the next best thing - we recreate a some of the phenomena of a supernova under laboratory conditions.

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