Stop Using Quantum Mechanics as Evidence for Magic. You Know How This Experiment Ends, But You Should Watch It Anyway. Kinja is in read-only mode. We are working to restore service. First off, I have to marvel at how incredible this is to watch and admit that it made me too gawk, giggle, and grin like a child. I can't wait to show people this. That said, does anyone else wonder how much it had to cost to spend the 3 hours pumping out the air, setting up, and conducting this experiment that everyone know the result of? (Again, not wanting to rain on anyone's parade cause I'm damn glad they did it. I just have to wonder). Flagged It cost the electricity to run the pumps for a few hours. Also I'm sure that the BBC payed a fee and the staff probably enjoyed goofing off for half the day.
What's Up With That: How a Swinging Pendulum Proves the Earth Rotates. Once upon a time, you were probably on an elementary school field trip at a science museum or an observatory. Just before lunch, your teacher had the class stand in a circle around an enormous weight suspended on a string, and watch it swing back and forth, back and forth. The teacher (or maybe a tour guide) explained that if you watched the pendulum for long enough, it would seem to alter its course, swinging in a slightly different direction. And that this somehow proved the Earth was rotating beneath your feet. You probably nodded and watched the weight swing for a while. Now that you’re older, you’ll occasionally think back on that pendulum and wonder how it could have proved anything. This famous experiment, now found in museums around the world, was first demonstrated in 1851. After an hour, the line the pin drew in the sand intersected with the first line at an angle of roughly 11.25 degrees, which is exactly what Foucault had predicted.
So how does this all work? Why is the sky blue? Blue skies make the heart soar and poets rush for quill and ink. The blue dome has subtle variety. Overhead it is darker - noticeably so from mountains or airplanes. Near the horizon it pales almost to white. The best skies are after heavy rain has washed out dust and aerosol saying the colour is conjured from sunlight and pure air alone. The sun's light is a mix of violet, blues, greens through to reds. Air molecules, mostly nitrogen and oxygen, are 1000X smaller still. Air molecules individually scatter sunlight it into all directions.
At the risk of disillusioning poets, it is not a pure blue. Why is the sky whiter near the horizon? Why can't we get down to absolute zero? Weird! Quantum Entanglement Can Reach into the Past | Wacky Physics of Entangled Particles. Spooky quantum entanglement just got spookier. Entanglement is a weird statewhere two particles remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances, like two die that must always show the same numbers when rolled. For the first time, scientists have entangled particles after they've been measured and may no longer even exist. If that sounds baffling, even the researchers agree it's a bit "radical," in a paper reporting the experiment published online April 22 in the journal Nature Physics.
"Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured," write the researchers, led by Xiao-song Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Vienna. Essentially, the scientists showed that future actions may influence past events, at least when it comes to the messy, mind-bending world of quantum physics. The basic setup goes like this: But now, Victor has control over Alice and Bob's particles.
Just how small is an atom? - fun TEDEd video. These gorgeous sand patterns were created by a few sounds. Antimatter Atom Measured for the First Time. Scientists have taken the first-ever measurement of an atom made of antimatter. This measurement, though not very precise, represents a first step toward being able to study antimatter atoms in detail — a goal necessary for understanding why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, its mysterious sibling. All particles of matter are thought to have antimatter partners with the same mass but opposite charge.
When these pairs meet, they annihilate each other to become pure energy. Scientists think the universe contained equal parts of matter and antimatter just after the Big Bang, which is believed to have started everything 13.7 billion years ago. But early on, most of the matter and antimatter destroyed each other, leaving behind a slight surplus of matter that became the stars and galaxies that exist today.
Why matter won this cosmic duel is a mystery. Antimatter trap An antihydrogen atom is the analog of hydrogen, the simplest atom among the elements. Antimatter spectrum. Wacky Physics: New Uncertainty about the Uncertainty Principle | Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle | Quantum Mechanics. One of the most often quoted, yet least understood, tenets of physics is the uncertainty principle. Formulated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the rule states that the more precisely you measure a particle's position, the less precisely you will be able to determine its momentum, and vice versa.
The principle is often invoked outside the realm of physics to describe how the act of observing something changes the thing being observed, or to point out that there's a limit to how well we can ever really understand the universe. While the subtleties of the uncertainty principle are often lost on nonphysicists, it turns out the idea is frequently misunderstood by experts, too. But a recent experiment shed new light on the maxim and led to a novel formula describing how the uncertainty principle really works. Perplexing logic The uncertainty principle only applies in the quantum mechanical realm of the very small, on scales of subatomic particles.
Marbles and billiard balls. Franken-Physics: Atoms Split in Two & Put Back Together | Quantum Physics. Physicists have just upped their ante: Not only have they split atoms but, even trickier, they've put them back together. Their secret? Quantum physics. A team of scientists was able to "split" an atom into its two possible spin states, up and down, and measure the difference between them even after the atom resumed the properties of a single state.
The research wasn't just playtime for quantum physicists: It could be a steppingstone toward the development of a quantum computer, a way to simulate quantum systems (as plant photosynthesis and other natural processes appear to be) that would help solve complex problems far more efficiently than present-day computers can. The team at the University of Bonn in Germany did a variation on the famous double-slit experiment, which shows how ostensibly solid particles (atoms, electrons and the like) can behave like waves. Double slits Since this is quantum mechanics, that's not what happens. Atomic twins It's not possible to see both states at once. Leap Second Science: Earth's Longer Day Explained. Today will be one second longer than usual, and we have the moon to thank for the extra time. A "leap second" will be added to the world's official clocks this evening (June 30), to account for the fact that Earth's rotation is slowing ever so slightly — meaning our days are getting longer, at the rate of about 1.4 milliseconds every 100 years.
"At the time of the dinosaurs, Earth completed one rotation in about 23 hours," Daniel MacMillan, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. "In the year 1820, a rotation took exactly 24 hours, or 86,400 standard seconds. Since 1820, the mean solar day has increased by about 2.5 milliseconds. " It's happening because of tidal forces between the Earth and moon. June 30, 2012 will be one second longer than the typical day. Earth's rotational slowdown won't stop until it becomes tidally locked to the moon, researchers say — meaning we will always show the same face to our celestial neighbor. 0 of 10 questions complete. Newly Discovered Particle Appears to Be Long-Awaited Higgs Boson | Wired Science. Prepare the fireworks: The discovery of the Higgs boson is finally here. Early in the morning on July 4, physicists with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced they have found a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected from the Higgs.
“As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it,” said CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer. “It’s a historic milestone today. I think we can all be proud, all be happy.” Both CMS and ATLAS, the two main LHC Higgs-hunting experiments, are reporting a boson that has Higgs-like properties at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) with a 5-sigma significance, meaning they are 99.999 percent confident of its existence. At the first mention of 5-sigma by physicist Joe Incandela, who presented results from one of the main Higgs-searching efforts at the LHC, the audience burst into applause.
“It was really a magnificent moment to see the reaction from the community,” he said later in a question and answer session. But there is still hope. Científicos fotografían por primera vez la sombra de un átomo. Lo que vemos en la imagen es un hito conseguido por un grupo de investigadores de la Universidad de Griffith. Habían conseguido fotografiar la sombra de un solo átomo por primera vez en la historia, un único átomo que sitúa el límite extremo de la microscopía.
¿Cuántos átomos se necesitan para emitir una sombra? Esta pregunta es la base en la que se sustentaba la investigación de los investigadores. Y es que según Dave Kielpinski, del Centro de la Universidad de Griffith para la Dinámica Cuántica: Con lo que hemos logrado llegamos al límite extremo de la microscopía, no se puede observar nada más pequeño que un átomo utilizando la luz visible.
¿Cómo lo consiguieron? Para ello atraparon los iones atómicos individuales del elemento químico iterbio para exponerlos a una frecuencia de luz específica. PhysicsCentralAPS. Quantum Levitation–where science videos don’t get any cooler! | PsiVid. This video demonstrating the power of superconductivity has been making the rounds this week and is an example of how video is really the best way to capture and share with thousands of viewers the amazing power of science!
You will notice that the video is a demonstration without the science explained live. It was a missed opportunity in my opinion. Thankfully, Tel-Aviv University, who is responsible for the demonstration, has posted an explanation of the Meissner Effect as demonstrated by a liquid nitrogen cooled disc composed of a sapphire wafer coated thinly with yttrium barium copper oxide. Supercondutivity and magnetism are usually in opposition to each other. In this case, where the disc is extremely thin, it’s possible for the magnetic field to penetrate the disc via tiny flux tubes which somehow (biologist hand-waving here) are what’s responsible for the levitation we see over the track. The explanation from Tel -Aviv University’s website: Levitation and Field Lines. One-Minute Physics: Why GPS is just a clock in space. The Physics of Angry Birds | Wired Science You know the game, I know you know. Angry Birds.
I have an attraction to games like this. You can play for just a little bit at a time (like that) and each time you shoot, you could get a slightly different result. Oh, you don’t know Angry Birds? Well, the basic idea is that you launch these birds (which are apparently angry) with a sling shot. The goal is to knock over some pigs. Seriously, that is the game. But what about the physics?
I think for later Angry Bird analysis, I will make my own videos. How do you get the data from the bird? One more thing. Now on to the data. What does this mean? Yes, it is that simple. What about the vertical motion? Oh, I forgot to point out that the missing data in the graph is from where the bird went off the screen. The value in front of the t2 term should be 1/2 times the acceleration.
That is one big ole sling shot, 5 meters tall? See Also: One-Minute Math: Why you can't comb a hairy ball. Ultrafast Camera Records at Speed of Light. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) have developed an imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second–fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.
As Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor in M.I.T.’s Media Lab, explains in the video below, a high-speed camera can capture the image of a bullet mid-flight. The M.I.T. camera can capture the movement of photons, which travel about one million times faster than bullets. The researchers use a titanium-sapphire laser as a pulsed light source and direct the beam using mirrors to a plastic bottle that helps illuminate the light. Their camera consists of an array of 500 sensors, each triggered at a trillionth-of-a-second delay, Media Lab postdoctoral associate Andreas Velten says in the video.
Scientists create first free-standing 3-D cloak. Researchers in the US have, for the first time, cloaked a three-dimensional object standing in free space, bringing the much-talked-about invisibility cloak one step closer to reality. Whilst previous studies have either been theoretical in nature or limited to the cloaking of two-dimensional objects, this study shows how ordinary objects can be cloaked in their natural environment in all directions and from all of an observer's positions. Published Jan. 26 in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, the researchers used a method known as "plasmonic cloaking" to hide an 18-centimetre cylindrical tube from microwaves.
Some of the most recent breakthroughs in the field of invisibility cloaking have focussed on using transformation-based metamaterials -- inhomogeneous, human-made materials that have the ability to bend light around objects -- however, this new approach uses a different type of artificial material -- plasmonic metamaterials. Untitled. Wacky Physics: Why Do Particles Have Flavors? | Particle Flavor Transitions & Decays | Intensity Frontier & Flavor Physics. In this regular series, LiveScience explores some of the wildest, weirdest parts of our universe, from quantum oddities to hidden dimensions. The building blocks of matter — fundamental particles — come in many more flavors than the basic few that make up the atoms we're familiar with. Flavor is the name scientists give to different versions of the same type of particle.
For instance, quarks (which make up the protons and neutrons inside atoms) come in six flavors: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. Particles called leptons, a category that includes electrons, also come in six flavors, each with a different mass. But physicists are baffled as to why flavors exist at all, and why each flavor has different characteristics. "This is known as the flavor problem," said JoAnne Hewett, a theoretical physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. Changing flavor What's even stranger is that particles are able to switch from one flavor to another. Other mysteries. The Unusual Physics of Floating Pyramids | Wired Science. How to build a time machine. How the universe appeared from nothing.
Brian Cox and Simon Pegg explain why atoms have so much empty space. In Zero-G Static Electricity Walks On Water. Cambridge Digital Library - University of Cambridge. Quantum Entanglement Experiments Expand to Include 8 Photons. Scientists Move Closer to Creating an Invisibility Cloak. Do You Use GPS? Say “Thanks” to Norman Ramsey (1915–2011) The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things | Strange Physics of Mundane Stuff | Life's Little Mysteries. Why there is no such thing as empty space. Asteroid orbits modelled in a single atom - physics-math - 04 February 2012.
One-Minute Physics: How wings really create lift. Why Does Our Universe Have Three Dimensions? | Superstring Theory & Twisted Physics | LiveScience. Two Diamonds Linked by Strange Quantum Entanglement | Spooky Action at a Distance | Quantum Mechanics Macroscopic Objects. One-Minute Physics: Why past and future are the same. One Per Cent: Fastest ever camera captures light in a flash. What If There Was No Gravity? | What Would the Universe Be Like If There Were No Gravity? | What If Gravity Disappeared? Why are atoms mostly empty space? Are we just a 3D hologram created by 2D information stored at the edge of the universe? Physics in a Minute: The twin paradox. Seven equations that rule your world - physics-math - 13 February 2012. Optical Effects of Special Relativity. Quantum Levitation. Levitation train. Controlled Quantum Levitation on a Wipe'Out Track.
Quantum Levitation. Quantum Levitation Demonstration at North Museum. Thin Film Physics. Time Cloak Hides Very Brief Events [Animation] Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See.