Nothing can go faster than light. It’s a rule of physics woven into the very fabric of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The faster something goes, the closer it gets to its perspective of time freezing to a standstill.
Go faster still, and you run into issues of time reversing, messing with notions of causality.
But researchers from the University of Warsaw in Poland and the National University of Singapore have now pushed the limits of relativity to come up with a system that doesn’t run afoul of existing physics, and might even point the way to new theories.
More energy out than in. For 7 decades, fusion scientists have chased this elusive goal, known as energy gain. At 1 a.m. on 5 December, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California finally did it, focusing 2.05 megajoules of laser light onto a tiny capsule of fusion fuel and sparking an explosion that produced 3.15 MJ of energy—the equivalent of about three sticks of dynamite.
“This is extremely exciting, it’s a major breakthrough,” says Anne White, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work.
Mark Herrmann, who leads NIF as the program director for weapons physics and design at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says it feels “wonderful,” adding: “I’m so proud of the team.”
A team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin and another from Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, has found evidence of ripe conditions for planet formation in the vicinity of two closely orbiting protostars.
In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their observations and outline what might be learned from future study of the star system.
The work by the team on this new effort came on the heels of work done by another team that discovered a pair of protostars still in the very early stages of their development—in their first 500,000 years of existence. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a closer look at the two protostars and also the environment in which they exist.
We now know of thousands of planets orbiting other stars. But we know of only planet that hosts life – the Earth. Most scientists think that life elsewhere in the Universe is likely to exist, but so far there is no evidence that extra-terrestrials exist or that they have visited us. However, we can search for signs of life on distant planets and we are even using radio telescopes to look for messages sent to us by extra-terrestrial civilisations. In this talk Tim will discuss the latest science behind the search for alien life.
Tim is a Professor of Astrophysics and an Associate Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at The University of Manchester.
Tim’s research concentrates on the study of exploding stars using telescopes around the world and in space, working across the spectrum from radio waves to X-rays.
Tim is passionate about astrophysics and its power to inspire. Well known for his regular contributions to science on TV and radio, he is Jodrell Bank’s host for the hugely popular BBC TV Stargazing Live series and has a monthly space discussion programme on BBC Radio 5 Live.
In 2014, jointly with Professor Teresa Anderson, he was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for innovative public engagement, and in 2016 he was elected as President of the UK’s Society for Popular Astronomy.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
Researchers have finally succeeded in building a long-sought nanoparticle structure, opening the door to new materials with special properties.
Alex Travesset does not have a sparkling research lab stocked with the most cutting-edge instruments for probing new nanomaterials and measuring their unique properties.
Instead of using traditional laboratory instruments, Alex Travesset, a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University and an affiliate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory, relies on computer models, equations, and figures to understand the behavior of new nanomaterials.
Trans-light speed vessels should give off gravitational waves.
This discovery confirmed a prediction made a century before by Einstein and his Theory of General Relativity and opened the door to a whole new field of astrophysical research.
Nearly 70 years after having his security clearance revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) due to suspicion of being a Soviet spy, Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer has finally received some form of justice just in time for Christmas, according to a December 16 article in the New York Times. US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm released a statement nullifying the controversial decision that badly tarnished the late physicist’s reputation, declaring it to be the result of a “flawed process” that violated the AEC’s own regulations.
Science historian Alex Wellerstein of Stevens Institute of Technology told the New York Times that the exoneration was long overdue. “I’m sure it doesn’t go as far as Oppenheimer and his family would have wanted,” he said. “But it goes pretty far. The injustice done to Oppenheimer doesn’t get undone by this. But it’s nice to see some response and reconciliation even if it’s decades too late.”
Oppenheimer was born in New York City to German Jewish immigrants and studied physics under Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge, before earning his PhD from the University of Gottingen in 1927 under Max Born. He eventually joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the Manhattan Project and tapped Major General Leslie R. Groves to head it, Groves in turn chose Oppenheimer to lead the secret weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. True, Oppenheimer had left-wing political views, and hadn’t won a Nobel Prize (although he was nominated several times). But Groves felt the physicist had the breadth of knowledge to bring together physicists, chemists, engineers, and metallurgists, among other disciplines whose expertise would be crucial to the success of the project.
Theoretical physicists from Warsaw and Oxford universities argue that a superluminal world possessing three temporal dimensions and one dimension in space could potentially change our concept of time, according to a new paper.
The researchers involved say they have developed “an extension of special relativity” that incorporates three individual time dimensions with a single space dimension, which helps explain how observations made by “superluminal” observers—inertial observers moving faster than the speed of light—might appear.
Within such a framework, the researchers argue that spontaneous events that can occur in the absence of a deterministic cause and other strange phenomena would be experienced by observers moving faster than the speed of light within a vacuum, concepts that potentially transform our concept of time as we know it.
