CERN’s Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Speed Of Light
Scientists making discoveries that defy the laws of physics seems to be something of a theme this month. Now the eggheads at CERN say they’ve observed subatomic particles moving faster than the speed of light, which might theoretically allow us to travel back in time. Eryn Brown and Amina Khan report for the LA Times:
Albert Einstein had the idea. A century of observations have backed it up. It’s one of the cornerstones of physics: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
But now a team of experimental physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, says that one exotic particle possibly can.
The scientists reached their conclusion after sending streams of tiny, subatomic particles called neutrinos hurtling from an accelerator at CERN outside Geneva to a detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 450 miles away.
The neutrinos seemed to get there too soon — 60 nanoseconds…
Time Travel Proved Impossible
Major disappointment, from some jerk scientists who don’t seem to know when to keep their results to themselves. Via Discovery:
Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe.”
The possibility of time travel was raised 10 years ago when scientists discovered superluminal — or faster-than-light — propagation of optical pulses in some specific medium, the team said. It was later found to be a visual effect, but researchers thought it might still be possible for a single photon to exceed light speed.
Du, however, believed Einstein was right and determined to end the debate by…
NASA: There Is A Space-Time Vortex Around Earth
Ah, now we know why the Doctor visits our planet so often. Via NASA’s website:
Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B).
“The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts,” says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.
“This is an epic result,” adds Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis. An expert in Einstein’s theories, Will chairs an independent panel of the National Research Council set up by NASA in 1998 to monitor and review the results of Gravity Probe B. “One day,” he predicts, “this will be written up in textbooks as one of the classic experiments in the history of…
The Autistic Kid Who’s More Intelligent Than Einstein
A new theory of relativity — from a twelve-year-old?!? The Daily Mail reports that young Jake Barnett has “embarked on his most ambitious project yet – his own ‘expanded version of Einstein’s theory of relativity’” Here’s a video of the little genius explaining some of the finer points of calculus, with some of the Mail’s story below:
The World’s First ‘Quantum Device’
Thanks to Greg F. for sending along this story from the Belfast Telegraph:
A device that exists in two different states at the same time, and coincidentally proves that Albert Einstein was right when he thought he was wrong, has been named as the scientific breakthrough of the year.
The machine, consisting of a sliver of wafer-thin metal, is the first man-made device to be governed by the mysterious quantum forces that operate at the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles.
Normal, everyday objects obey the laws of conventional Newtonian physics, named after Sir Isaac Newton, but these rules break down on the sub-atomic scale and a whole new branch of theoretical physics had to be invented to explain what happens on this sub-microscopic level.
Einstein was the first to embrace quantum physics but later rejected it on the grounds that it made everything unpredictable – “God does not play dice with the universe,”…
Einstein’s Brain Unlocks Some Mysteries Of The Mind
By Jon Hamilton for NPR:
In the 55 years since Albert Einstein’s death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.
But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein’s genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
In The Name Of Science
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.
The genius, Einstein, died April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, N.J. Within hours, the quiet town was swarming with reporters and scientific luminaries, and people who simply wanted to be near the great man one last time, says Michael Paterniti, a writer…
Laser War In Space To Prove Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity
This is pretty cool science! From PopSci:
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is currently the biggest science experiment in operation, but it may have to pass that mantle on soon enough. A collaboration between NASA and the ESA plans to launch three spacecraft into orbit around the sun 3 million miles apart, then have them shoot lasers at each other, all in the name of proving the existence of gravitational waves, the last piece of Einstein’s relativity theory that is as yet unproved.
Einstein’s general relativity predicts several things, such as gravity’s ability to bend time light and the constant speed at which gravity travels. But a means to prove the existence of gravitational waves — huge ripples in time and space that flow outwards from the collision of huge celestial bodies like black holes — has eluded scientists for years.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, aims to do just that. Three…
Celebrate Pi Day
Sunday March 14th is Pi Day, as well as Albert Einstein’s birthday.
Animation of the act of unrolling a circle's circumference, illustrating the ratio π. Author: John Reid (GNU)
Self-confessed geek Elizabeth Landau reports for CNN on how nerds everywhere plan to celebrate:
The sound of meditation for some people is full of deep breaths or gentle humming. For Marc Umile, it’s “3.14159265358979…”
Whether in the shower, driving to work, or walking down the street, he’ll mentally rattle off digits of pi to pass the time. Holding 10th place in the world for pi memorization — he typed out 15,314 digits from memory in 2007 — Umile meditates through one of the most beloved and mysterious numbers in all of mathematics.
Pi, the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, has captivated imaginations for thousands of years — perhaps even since the first person tried to draw a perfect circle on the ground or wondered how…
Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity On Show
By Anne Barker for ABC News Australia:
The original manuscript of Albert Einstein’s famous theory of relativity is going on display in its entirety for the first time, almost 100 years after it was written.
Einstein’s groundbreaking theory helped explain a raft of scientific questions, from black holes to the big bang.
The former Nobel prize winner donated the manuscript to Israel’s Hebrew University in 1925.
Now, Israel’s Academy of Sciences and Humanities is putting it on show, in time for the 131st anniversary of Einstein’s birth…
The First Test That Proves General Theory of Relativity Wrong
Vlad Tarko writes on Softpedia:
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists’ astonishment, it proved to be no less than one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein’s General Relativity predicts.
This gravitomagnetic field is similar to the magnetic field produced by a moving electric charge (hence the name “gravitomagnetic” analogous to “electromagnetic”). For example, the electric charges moving in a coil produce a magnetic field — such a coil behaves like a magnet. Similarly, the gravitomagnetic field can be produced to be a mass moving in a circle. What the electric charge is for electromagnetism, mass is for gravitation theory (the general theory of relativity).
A spinning top weights more than the same top standing still. However, according to Einstein’s theory, the difference…
Albert Einstein On Palestine And Zionism
By Edward Corrigan at OpEedNnews.com:
There is some controversy over Einstein’s political views, especially on the issue of Palestine and the creation of a A Jewish State. Many Zionists claim Einstein as one of their own. Einstein, however, was a pacifist, a universalist and abhorred nationalism.
The recently published book, Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East, by Fred Jerome, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009) has brought Einstein’s political views on the Middle East back into the spotlight.
The evidence of Einstein’s position on Palestine and Zionism is best seen in his own words and actions on the subject. For example, Einstein made a presentation to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was examining the Palestine issue in January 1946 and argued against the creation of a “Jewish State.”…
Rethinking Relativity: Is Time Out of Joint?
Rachel Courtland asks a deep question in New Scientist:
Ever since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation?
Everything from the concept of the black hole to GPS timing owes a debt to the theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity arises from the geometry of space and time. The sun’s gravitational field, for instance, bends starlight passing nearby because its mass is warping the surrounding space-time. This theory has held up to precision tests in the solar system and beyond, and has explained everything from the odd orbit of Mercury to the way pairs of neutron stars perform their pas de deux.
Yet it is still not clear how well…
