Physics
A newly discovered system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense pulsar, all packed into a space smaller than the Earth's orbit around the sun, could allow astronomers to tackle the very nature of gravity itself.
The pulsar is 4,200 light-years from Earth and is spinning nearly 366 times per second – it was found to be in close orbit with a white dwarf star and the pair is in orbit with another, more distant white dwarf.
The three-body system is scientists' best opportunity yet to discover a violation of a key concept in Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the strong…
This blog is straight old Newtonian gravity. A goal is to understand where the three kinds of masses in Newton's Universal Law of Gravity live in the context of the action. In the force equation, there is the inertial mass (mi )which sits next to the acceleration term. There is the active gravitational mass (big M) that is the source of the gravitational field. The third amigo is the passive gravitational mass (mp) that sits right next to the active gravitational mass.
What is an action? It is every way a system can exchange energy in a breadbox (per unit volume). Integrate that…
I been having bad dreams (a little exaggeration) on trying to contemplate if the arguments stated in EPR paper may have been correct. It is not clear to me whether Bell really did disprove the hidden variables theory.Is the reality of Quantum Entanglement still an open question?
If we have two entangled particles A and B as an example, has there been any experiment measuring particle A's and freezing that state for a time and measuring B's value anytime later? Most of the experiments I see are continuous streams of photons or particles, split-ted and fed to detectors. But not two isolated…
The DZERO experiment is one of the two multi-purpose detectors that have collected 1.96 TeV proton-antiproton collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron collider until two years ago, when the machine was decommissioned.
Experiments of this kind out-live the demise of the hardware, since the extraction of precise physics measurements from the large datasets accumulated may take several years to complete. And in fact, it is not a surprise to see two new preprints in the Arxiv (here and here) which describe in detail the experimental techniques that the collaboration uses to extract jet physics…
Halliday |
I'm sorry I've been away so long: The "press of life" got the "better of me". Sometimes, life just "gets in the way". (No excuses. I simply had other "things" that needed to take priority. Unfortunately, I don't see that changing any time soon. So, unfortunately, I cannot promise to have an especially active presence here for the foreseeable future.)
[Note: Since the creation of footnotes and cross references can be so tedious on this site, I shall go ahead and publish this version of this article without such, at first. However, I shall…
Physicists at Yale and Harvard have thrown a new curve at Supersymmetry, the popular hypothesis about what lies beyond physics' reigning model of fundamental forces and particles, the Standard Model. And it involves the electron's almost perfect roundness.
The researchers have reported the most precise measurement to date of the electron's shape, improving it by a factor of more than 10 and showing the particle to be rounder than predicted by some extensions of the Standard Model, including Supersymmetry. Supersymmetry posits new types of particles that help account for ideas like…
Another year, another card inspired by what I am thinking about in physics.
Inside the card it reads...
Time is not space,
space is not time.
Space-time is a marriage,
complex and tense.
In an empty Universe,
time rotates into space,
space rotates into time,
but neither bends.
With one particle,
gravity causes a swing move:
time grows, space shrinks,
an exact inverse.
Love is not life
life is not love.
Love of life is a marriage,
rich and temporary.
In an empty house,
love looks for life,
life looks for love,
but neither connects.
With one family,
caring causes a maze of emotion.
Love…
I met George Zweig at a conference in Crete last Summer. He impressed me with the multidisciplinarity of his interests and his quite entertaining career. He has a degree in mathematics, and did quite a bit of experimental physics work before finally turning to theoretical physics; but he did not stay there for long...
But I do not want to summarize more of the interesting life of Zweig, since there is now an interview with George on the online newsletter of the physics department of CERN, which is quite detailed and fascinating, and deserves a read. Enjoy!
Since the discovery of the charm quark in 1974, physicists have postulated a rare process in which a charm particle spontaneously changes into its antiparticle. Evidence for this behavior was uncovered three decades later by experiments in the US and Japan. However, conclusive observation did not emerge until this year from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland and Fermilab in the U.S.
What is a charm quark? Protons and neutrons, the particles in an atomic nucleus, are made of smaller pieces called quarks and some types of quarks can form particles that exhibit surprising behaviors.
Mark…
[note: this blog, as written is insufficient. I will need to provide an action to clarify the nature of the proposal.]
The Spoon and the Moon
Give a baby a spoon, and the little one is likely to toss it to the floor, greatly amused. Return the spoon and the baby will gleefully demonstrate that the experiment can be repeated.
The Moon falls around the Earth. The Moon has not stopped falling toward the Earth for four billion years. It may be the greatest accomplishment of abstract scientific thought that the same law that governs the spoon falling also governs the motion…