Good for China.
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Category: physics – Page 304
In what appears to be the latest breakthrough in space travel technology, China claims it has made a great leap forward with its ‘reactionless’ Electromagnetic Drive, or simply, EmDrive – an engine that uses only the power of electromagnetic radiation contained within a microwave cavity.
The EmDrive flies in the face of physics – going against the law of conservation of movement; producing mechanical movement but without an exchange of matter.
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If you thought that a kid’s room, a Norwegian Nobel Laureate and a laser pointer had nothing in common, two UA physicists are about to enlighten you.
It’s hard to believe, but after having unraveled many of the laws that make the universe tick, physicists still haven’t reached an agreement on whether something as seemingly simple as “hot” or “cold” can be measured in a system under certain circumstances.
“Imagine you threw an iceberg into the sun and right before it’s melted and gone, you wanted to know, ‘How hot is that iceberg at that moment?’ Would that be a meaningful question to ask?” says Charles Stafford, a professor in the Department of Physics in the UA’s College of Science. “According to traditional physics, it wouldn’t be.”
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RIP dear friend.
A giant in the worlds of both academia and policy, Drell died Wednesday, Dec. 21, at his home in Palo Alto. He was 90 years old.
“An accomplished physicist, his contributions to improve national and international security made our world a better place,” said Tom Gilligan, director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford in a statement. “We are especially grateful for Sid’s relentless dedication to eliminating the threat posed by nuclear weapons and know that his important work will continue to frame the issue.”
Dedicated to arms control.
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Earlier this year, after 100 years of searching for them, an international team of researchers detected the presence of gravitational waves for the first time, thanks to the collision of two massive black holes, providing proof for Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Needless to say, it was a big deal, but two important questions remained: where did the two colliding black holes that created these gravitational ripples in space-time come from, and how did they get so massive?
Black holes form when a star runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself.
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Zura Kakushadze is lead author of this peer reviewed paper published by the Free University of Tbilisi. It describes an information paradox that arises in a materialist’s description of the Universe—if we assume that the Universe is 100% quantum. The observation of the paradox stems from an interdisciplinary thought process whereby the Universe can be viewed as a “quantum computer”.
The presentation is intentionally nontechnical to make it accessible to a wide a readership.
Get ready to have your mind blown. According to an experiment led by two physicists in Australia, reality doesn’t exist. Turn on, tune in, and drop out man, because the world as you know it is all kinds of weird, at least on a quantum level.
Andrew Truscott and Roman Khakimov of The Australian National University used atoms to put a John Wheeler delayed-choice thought experiment to practical use. The Wheeler thought experiments ask, in theory, at what point does an object decide to act like one thing or another.
Truscott and Khakimov’s team used what is assumed to be extremely expensive and complex scientific equipment to trap a single helium atom and then drop it through a pair of laser beams that formed a scattered grating pattern.
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