Published on December 10, 2022 in Planet Earth, Science This weekend’s stories include What the World’s Largest Liquid Mirror Telescope Means for Astronomy to How Mass Extinction and Evolution Are Intertwined, and much more. Consciousness may not require a brain–Are plants conscious? asks Annaka Harris, New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide …
By Shankar Das Sarma The laws of physics may not be what they seem Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images I was recently reading an old article by string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf in Quanta Magazine titled “There are no laws of physics”. You might find it a little strange for a physicist to claim that there are no …
Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of the Mass, by Frank Close On the day the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was due to be announced, University of Glasgow theoretical physicist and presumed laureate Peter Higgs stepped down from the grid. Without telling anyone where he was going, Higgs left his apartment and started …
CERN, a physics research center outside of Geneva, Switzerland, is best known for discovering some of the building blocks of our universe. But scientists there are also studying new ways to treat cancer. While current radiation therapies use beams of protons, charged particles called ions, or photons of light to kill cancer cells, another particle …
How to kill hard-to-reach tumours? Particle physics is on the case. Read More »
The sun. Image: NASA via Getty Images ABSTRACT breaks down mind-blowing scientific research, future technologies, new discoveries and major breakthroughs. Physicists have proposed a mind-boggling space mission that could finally reveal the true nature of dark matter, an enigmatic substance considered one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries, a new study reports. Dark matter is about …
“Gravitational waves will bring us extremely accurate maps of black holes – maps of their space-time. These maps will clearly indicate whether or not we are dealing with black holes as described by general relativity,” said the winner of the Nobel Prize, Caltech. Kip Thorne. Scientists at Cardiff University’s Gravity Exploration Institute are using the …
Will gravitational waves solve one of physics’ greatest mysteries? (Weekend feature) Read More »
Schematic illustration of a holonomy. Scientists from the University of Rostock in Germany have been able to recreate fundamental physical properties from the field of elementary particle physics in a photonic system. The results are published in Natural Physics. In their fundamental research, experimental physicists routinely use gigantic but complex machines: huge particle accelerators smash …
This microscope image shows rainbow colors in a flat sheet of layered liquids. Credit: David Hoffman/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory When sunlight reflects off an oily puddle in a parking lot, it creates a swirling rainbow of colors. This is because of the thin film interference principle, which explains how light reflects off different layers, or …
Shedding new light on oil slick rainbows and other thin film physics Read More »
For decades, theoretical particle physicists have struggled with tricky computational problems called Feynman integrals. They are at the heart of all the calculations they perform, from predicting the degree of magnetism of a particle called a muon to estimating the speed at which Higgs bosons should emerge at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Now theorists …
Notorious computational problem-solving method speeds up particle physics calculations Read More »
Muonium frequency sweep at 22.5 W in the range of 200 to 800 MHz. The adjusted black line is with, the gray line without the 3Scontribution. The error bars correspond to the statistical error of counting. The colored areas represent the underlying contributions of 2S−2P1/2 transitions, namely 583 MHz (blue), 1140 MHz (orange), 1326 MHz …
Studying muonium to reveal new physics beyond the Standard Model Read More »
