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In these troubled times, enforced home-working is producing remarkable results for physicists and astronomers.
Continue reading “Room Temperature Superconductivity ‘Breakthrough’ and Other Stories” »
Shoot a rifle, and the recoil might knock you backward. Merge two black holes in a binary system, and the loss of momentum gives a similar recoil—a “kick”—to the merged black hole.
“For some binaries, the kick can reach up to 5000 kilometers a second, which is larger than the escape velocity of most galaxies,” said Vijay Varma, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and an incoming inaugural Klarman Fellow at Cornell University’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Continue reading “New method predicts which black holes escape their galaxies” »
A long-held mystery in the field of nuclear physics is why the universe is composed of the specific materials we see around us. In other words, why is it made of “this” stuff and not other stuff?
Specifically of interest are the physical processes responsible for producing heavy elements—like gold, platinum and uranium—that are thought to happen during neutron star mergers and explosive stellar events.
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory led an international nuclear physics experiment conducted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that utilizes novel techniques developed at Argonne to study the nature and origin of heavy elements in the universe. The study may provide critical insights into the processes that work together to create the exotic nuclei, and it will inform models of stellar events and the early universe.
Philip Anderson, the theoretical physicist whose ideas reshaped condensed matter physics and stretched to the forefront of other fields, died yesterday in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 96. Anderson had spent the past 45 years at Princeton University, which confirmed his death in a statement.
Combative savant made contributions—and enemies—across many fields.
Continue reading “Philip Anderson, legendary theorist whose ideas shaped modern physics, dies” »
The obvious drawback of solar panels is that they require sunlight to generate electricity. Some have observed that for a device on Earth facing space, which has a frigid temperature, the chilling outflow of energy from the device can be harvested using the same kind of optoelectronic physics we have used to harness solar energy. New work, in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, looks to provide a potential path to generating electricity like solar cells but that can power electronics at night. For more information see the IDTechEx report on Energy Harvesting Microwatt to Megawatt 2019–2029.
An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the temperature difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity.
“The vastness of the universe is a thermodynamic resource,” said Shanhui Fan, an author on the paper. “In terms of optoelectronic physics, there is really this very beautiful symmetry between harvesting incoming radiation and harvesting outgoing radiation.”
Continue reading “Electricity from the coldness of the universe” »
Any device that sends out a Wi-Fi signal also emits terahertz waves —electromagnetic waves with a frequency somewhere between microwaves and infrared light. These high-frequency radiation waves, known as “T-rays,” are also produced by almost anything that registers a temperature, including our own bodies and the inanimate objects around us.
Terahertz waves are pervasive in our daily lives, and if harnessed, their concentrated power could potentially serve as an alternate energy source. Imagine, for instance, a cellphone add-on that passively soaks up ambient T-rays and uses their energy to charge your phone. However, to date, terahertz waves are wasted energy, as there has been no practical way to capture and convert them into any usable form.
Now physicists at MIT have come up with a blueprint for a device they believe would be able to convert ambient terahertz waves into a direct current, a form of electricity that powers many household electronics.
Circa 2017 :3
The extraordinary experiment opens the door to a new generation of devices and reveals a deeper relationship between time, entropy, and entanglement.
Continue reading “Physicists have demonstrated how to reverse of the arrow of time” »
Essentially this can lead to euclidean geometry in programming essentially allowing near infinite decompression either in programming or in devices or even spaceships.
In physics and mathematics, in the area of vector calculus, Helmholtz’s theorem,[1][2] also known as the fundamental theorem of vector calculus,[3][4][5][6][7][8][9] states that any sufficiently smooth, rapidly decaying vector field in three dimensions can be resolved into the sum of an irrotational (curl-free) vector field and a solenoidal (divergence-free) vector field; this is known as the Helmholtz decomposition or Helmholtz representation. It is named after Hermann von Helmholtz.[10]
As an irrotational vector field has a scalar potential and a solenoidal vector field has a vector potential, the Helmholtz decomposition states that a vector field (satisfying appropriate smoothness and decay conditions) can be decomposed as the sum of the form − ∇ ϕ + ∇ × A {\displaystyle -\nabla \phi +\nabla \times \mathbf {A} }, where ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } is a scalar field called “scalar potential”, and A is a vector field, called a vector potential.
, where ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } is a scalar field called “scalar potential”, and A is a vector field, called a vector potential.
