"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today."
GREAT BALL OF FIRE Pictured is an an exploding star, known as Type 1a supernova — the type used by physicists Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt to measure the expansion of the universe. The trio were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics and will share a $1.4 million prize. (Photos via the New York Times)
Physics Nobel Explainer: Why Is Expanding Universe Accelerating?
More than a decade after prize-worthy find, dark energy still baffles.
What goes up must come down. Few on Earth would argue with the fundamental law of gravity. But today the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who uncovered a dark side of the force.
The finding led to the now widely accepted theory of dark energy, a mysterious force that repels gravity. Measurements show that dark energy accounts for about 74 percent of the substance of the universe.
When you look at a hologram—for example, the one on your credit card—you’ll notice that it is a seemingly three-dimensional image mapped onto a two-dimensional surface. Proponents of the holographic principle suspect that information normally thought to be “lost” after falling into black hole, is merely transcribed onto its surface. Physicists believe that, like holographic film viewed under a microscope, this information is indecipherable, but there. Leonard Susskind explains.
Image courtesy of Dominic Alves; Recorded June 2011; Posted September 2011
The field of quantum mechanics all fundamental forces are carried by particles. For instance, light is made up of massless particles called photons that carry the electromagnetic force. Likewise, the graviton is the theoretical particle that would carry the force of gravity. Scientists have yet to detect gravitons, which are tricky to find because they interact so weakly with matter.
“It was only two years ago that IBM showed us an image of a complete molecule, atomic bonds and all, but today’s news does that one infinitesimally-sized breakthrough better. Ladies and gents, behold the first image of an electron’s path.
Utterly amazing stuff! The IBM breakthrough was amazing enough, but now we have images of the electron’s orbital path around a nucleus! This is good, good news, because until now physicists only had models and hypotheses to work with.
As was the case with the pentacene molecule with IBM (top left in the image), an atomic force microscope was used to capture the electron pathways, presented as darker gray bands in the other two images at center and upper left. As a quick refreseher on AFMs, they’re the microscopes that use atom-sized needles to measure individual atoms that pass underneath the pointy end.
Understand matter and you’ll understand the Universe. Heady stuff!”
Astrophysicists report first simulation to create a Milky Way-like galaxy
by Tim Stephens
After nine months of number-crunching on a powerful supercomputer, a beautiful spiral galaxy matching our own Milky Way emerged from a computer simulation of the physics involved in galaxy formation and evolution. The simulation by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich solves a longstanding problem that had led some to question the prevailing cosmological model of the universe.
“Previous efforts to form a massive disk galaxy like the Milky Way had failed, because the simulated galaxies ended up with huge central bulges compared to the size of the disk,” said Javiera Guedes, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and first author of a paper on the new simulation, called “Eris.” The paper has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
The Eris galaxy is a massive spiral galaxy with a central “bar” of bright stars and other structural properties consistent with galaxies like the Milky Way. Its brightness profile, bulge-to-disk ratio, stellar content, and other key features are all within the range of observations of the Milky Way and other galaxies of the same type. “We dissected the galaxy in many different ways to confirm that it fits with observations,” Guedes said…
(read more: PhysOrg) (image: J. Guedes and P. Madau)
As if the idea ideas of quantum entanglement and time travel weren’t difficult enough to wrap one’s head around separately, two physicists at the Universtiy of Queensland in Australia have further compounded the headache by merging the two ideas via a new kind of quantum entanglement that links particles not across space, but across time.
Quantum entanglement is that “spooky action” (Einstein’s words, not ours) that links two particles such that a measurement on one immediately influences the state of the other, even if the two particles are separated by miles, or even light years. Entanglement defies the intuitive way we understand the universe to work (as does most of quantum mechanics). The idea of “time teleportation,” as described by S. Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph, doesn’t add clarity but it does introduce some interesting questions about the fundamentals of the universe.
“The idea is that a detector acts on a qubit and then generates a classical message describing how this particle can be detected. Then, at some point in the future, another detector at the same position in space, receives this message and carries out the required In a sense, everyone and everything is time traveling, moving forward in time at a given rate. What Olson and Ralph propose is that it’s possible to take a shortcut into the future without being present in the interim. How? Tech Review’s KFC explains: