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Category: physics – Page 269

Physicists have built a ring in which pulses of light whip circles around each other and the normal rules that govern light’s behavior no longer apply.

Under normal circumstances, light displays certain kids of physical symmetry. First, if you were to play a tape of light’s behavior forward and then backward, you would see it behave in the same way moving in both directions in time. This is called time-reversal symmetry. And second, light, which can move through the world as a wave, has what is called polarization: how it oscillates relative to the motion of the wave. That polarization usually stays the same, providing another type of symmetry.

But inside this ring-shaped device, light both loses its time-reversal symmetry and changes its polarization. Inside the ring, light waves turn circles and resonate with one another, producing effects that don’t normally exist in the outside world. [The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments].

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The ¥16.4-billion (US$148-million) observatory — Japan’s Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) — will work on the same principle as the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States and the Virgo solo machine in Italy. In the past few years, these machines have begun to detect gravitational waves — long-sought ripples in the fabric of space-time created by cataclysmic cosmic events such as the merging of two black holes or the collision of two neutron stars.

LIGO’s Asian cousin will this year deploy ambitious technology to improve sensitivity in the search for these faint, cosmic ripples — but its biggest enemy could be snowmelt.

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Just before the new year, a Washington University professor was among a group of scientists who launched a telescope from Antarctica that could observe bright, massive objects in space, like black holes.

The international team of researchers, which included Wash U physics professor Henric Krawczynski, wanted to collect data on black holes and neutron stars, a very dense collapsed core of a giant star.

Studying such celestial phenomena helps astrophysicists test the fundamental laws of physics, Krawczynski said.

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On January 5, 1921, Swiss author and dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born. Dürrenmatt was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author ‘s work included avant-garde dramas, philosophical crime novels, and macabre satire. Especially his play “The Physicists” ( 1961 ) deals with questions of scientific ethics and humanity ‘s ability to handle its intellectual responsibilities.

“A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn.” (Friedrich Dürrenmatt)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, a small town about thirteen miles from Bern in the Emmental in Switzerland, the son of a Protestant pastor. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began studies in philosophy, German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. It was here that he first became interested in playwriting after becoming a regular patron of the operettas. Among his favorite playwrights were Aristophanes and Thornton Wilder.[3] In December 1943 he was on the point of transferring from the University of Zürich to the University of Bern, where he intended to write a doctoral dissertation on “Kierkegaard and the Tragic ”, when he suddenly decided to turn to writing as a career and dropped his academic career. In 1945–46, he wrote his first play It is Written, which premiered to great controversy.

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‘’As a result, it’s nonsensical to ask what happens to space-time beyond the Cauchy horizon because space-time, as it’s regarded within the theory of general relativity, no longer exists. “This gives one a way out of this philosophical conundrum,” said Dafermos.

Mathematicians have disproved the strong cosmic censorship conjecture. Their work answers one of the most important questions in the study of general relativity and changes the way we think about space-time.

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According to a straightforward interpretation of general relativity, the Big Bang wasn’t the start of ‘everything’.

Taking Einstein’s famous equations at face value and making as few assumptions as possible, a team of researchers has rewound the clock on our Universe to find it wouldn’t lead to a stopping point at all, but would take us through a different kind of beginning into a flipped space.

To understand what all the fuss over the Big Bang is, we need to rewind a bit to understand why physicists think it may not have been the start of everything.

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