Physicists urge caution over apparent speed of light violation. Scientists around the world reacted with shock yesterday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light.
If true, the finding breaks one of the most fundamental laws of physics and raises bizarre possibilities including time travel and shortcuts via hidden extra dimensions. Scientists at the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, found that neutrinos sent through the Earth to its detectors from Cern, 450 miles (730km) away in Geneva, arrived earlier than they should have.
The journey would take a beam of light around 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the Opera experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists have calculated the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. What has been discovered? What are neutrinos? Personal and Historical Perspectives of Hans Bethe. Imagining the Tenth Dimension - A Book by Rob Bryanton - StumbleUpon. Physics Flash Animations - StumbleUpon.
We have been increasingly using Flash animations for illustrating Physics content. This page provides access to those animations which may be of general interest. The animations will appear in a separate window. The animations are sorted by category, and the file size of each animation is included in the listing. Also included is the minimum version of the Flash player that is required; the player is available free from The categories are: In addition, I have prepared a small tutorial in using Flash to do Physics animations. LInks to versions of these animations in other languages, other links, and license information appear towards the bottom of this page. The Animations There are 99 animations listed below. Other Languages and Links These animations have been translated into Catalan, Spanish and Basque: En aquest enllaç podeu trobar la versió al català de les animacions Flash de Física.
Many animations have been translated into Greek by Vangelis Koltsakis. Physics - StumbleUpon. The Official String Theory Web Site. The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov. By Isaac Asimov I received a letter from a reader the other day.
It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, however low on the social scale, so I read on.)
It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, here and elsewhere, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the Universe straight. These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. No one knows nothing. Meaning of Halflife - StumbleUpon. I'd like to illustrate what this really means.
If living creatures had halflives the way radioactive atoms do, the world would be a very different place. What do you mean? Suppose there's an alien species with a halflife of, say, 70 years. You randomly pick out 16 baby aliens and track them to see how long they live. After 70 years, of course, 8 of them will still be alive. That doesn't sound so weird. True...but remember that the halflife is always the same, regardless of how old the aliens are. That is kind of strange. It gets stranger. Methuselah isn't going to make it, though. Methuselah has just as much chance of surviving the next 70 years as any one of the 15 babies.