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Category: physics – Page 317

Site — http://goo.gl/oORnr
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Genre: docudrama
Type: documentary
Year: 2011
Director: Misha Kostrov
Creative director: Eugene Sannikov
Producer: Victor Mirsky, Sergey Sozanovsky
Creative producer: Oksana Maidanskaya
Director of photography: Vladimir Kratinov
Scriptwriter: Nataliya Doilnitsyna
Аwards: Platinum Remi Award, WorldFest Houston 2013

The film tacks together two tales: a historical account of Tesla’s eventful life and his pioneering research into physics and bold experiments with electricity.

Suffering from a fatal malady as a child the future great physicist promised his parents that he would recover under the sole condition…if they allowed him to become an engineer. And he kept his promise. Never ending yearning for knowledge, research practice, creative endeavor, discoveries that have unfixed all established notions — that’s what was the characteristic of the great physicist. Nikola Tesla would always remain a scientist whose life was a sort of mystification rather than pure reality.

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A team of physicists led by Caltech’s David Hsieh has discovered an unusual form of matter—not a conventional metal, insulator, or magnet, for example, but something entirely different. This phase, characterized by an unusual ordering of electrons, offers possibilities for new electronic device functionalities and could hold the solution to a long-standing mystery in condensed matter physics having to do with high-temperature superconductivity—the ability for some materials to conduct electricity without resistance, even at “high” temperatures approaching −100 degrees Celsius.

“The discovery of this was completely unexpected and not based on any prior theoretical prediction,” says Hsieh, an assistant professor of physics, who previously was on a team that discovered another form of matter called a topological insulator. “The whole field of electronic materials is driven by the discovery of new phases, which provide the playgrounds in which to search for new macroscopic physical properties.”

Hsieh and his colleagues describe their findings in the November issue of Nature Physics, and the paper is now available online. Liuyan Zhao, a postdoctoral scholar in Hsieh’s group, is lead author on the paper.

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It is hard, sometimes, to understand why anyone would waste time on a problem as academic as black hole information loss. And I say that as someone who spent a significant part of the last decade pushing this very problem around in my head. Don’t physicists have anything better to do, in a world that is suffering from war and disease, bad grammar even? What drives these researchers, other than the hope to make headlines for solving a 40 years old conundrum?

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Positrons are plentiful in ultra-intense laser blasts

Physicists from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin have found a new recipe for using intense lasers to create positrons — the antiparticle of electrons — in record numbers and density.

In a series of experiments described recently in the online journal Scientific Reports published by Nature, the researchers used UT’s Texas Petawatt Laser to make large number of positrons by blasting tiny gold and platinum targets.

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In one of my first articles for Lifeboat,* I provided an experimental methodology for demonstrating (or proving) the instantaneous ‘communication’ between quantum entangled particles. Even though changes to one particle can be provably demonstrated at its far away twin, the very strange experimental results suggested by quantum theory also demonstrate that you cannot use the simultaneity for any purpose. That is, you can provably pass information instantly, but you cannot study the ‘message’ (a change in state at the recipient), until such time as it could have been transmit by a classical radio wave.

Now, scientists have conducted an experiment proving that objects can instantaneously affect each other, regardless o the distance between them. [continue below]

delft quantum entanglement apparatus

[From The New York Times—Oct 21, 2015]:

Sorry Einstein.
Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ is Real

In a landmark study, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they had conducted an experiment that they say proved one of the most fundamental claims of quantum theory — that objects separated by great distance can instantaneously affect each other’s behavior.

The finding is another blow to one of the bedrock principles of standard physics known as “locality,” which states that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings. The Delft study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, lends further credence to an idea that Einstein famously rejected. He said quantum theory necessitated “spooky action at a distance,” and he refused to accept the notion that the universe could behave in such a strange and apparently random fashion.

[Read John Markoff’s full article in The New York Times]

* The original Lifeboat article—in which I describe an experimental apparatus in lay terms—was reprinted from my Blog, A Wild Duck.

The heat-death of the universe need not bring an end to the computing age. A strange device known as a time crystal can theoretically continue to work as a computer even after the universe cools. A new blueprint for such a time crystal brings its construction a step closer.

Ordinary crystals are three-dimensional objects whose atoms are arranged in regular, repeating patterns – just like table salt. They adopt this structure because it uses the lowest amount of energy possible to maintain.

Earlier this year, Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speculated that a similar structure might repeat regularly in the fourth dimension – time.

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Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach,” Hawking told El Pais. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

It’s funny how math can make you paranoid. Even if it’s entirely reasonable paranoia. The discovery of water on Mars is, for the non-mathematical at least, the first indication that something out there might be alive or might once have been alive.”

Technically Incorrect: The famed physicist says that simple math makes him believe there are aliens out there.

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Why #SETI and Warp Drive don’t necessarily mix; although, I tend to think if #ET is out there it would have long figured out a way to manipulate spacetime for interstellar #FTL travel. It’s time mainstream #physics embraced the idea that Einstein’s axioms involving #lightspeed can be overcome. We’ve nothing to lose but lots to gain. Special thanks to Erika McGinnis for allowing me to publish her artwork.

For all the hype over the idea that someday, somehow we humans will voyage to the stars — not at a measly fraction of the speed of light — but several “warp” factors beyond light speed, it’s a prospect few physicists take seriously. Even mention of “warp drive” is borderline taboo in certain academic circles.

And the idea that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and with it the axiom that the ultimate speed of light can never be violated is a tenet that most researchers who spend their time plying the nearby cosmos for artificial radio or laser beacons have taken to heart. It supports most SETI scientists’ long-held notion that Earth has never been visited by sentient extraterrestrials.

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