Dark Matter: The Larger Invisible Universe | Joe Arrigo PERSPECTIVE Normal matter—you, me, oatmeal, mountains, oceans, moons, planets, galaxies—make up about twenty-percent of the universe; the other eighty-percent is dark matter—star-stuff we cannot see or detect…yet. Why are scientists so certain this enigmatic matter exists? Because the evidence permeates the universe, first observed by Fritz Zwicky, when he measured the motions of galaxies and calculated that there wasn’t enough visible matter to affect galaxies to extent they were being pulled around.WWWFirst, there isn’t enough gravitational force within galaxies to bind and hold them in their current formation; then there is an invisible element that keeps them rotating faster than scientists would expect, clusters of galaxies bend and distort light more than they should, and supercomputer simulations exhibit that clouds of ordinary matter in the early universe did not have enough gravity to create the tight formations of galaxies we now see.
What Is the Higgs? - Interactive Graphic Imagine never having seen a snowflake. Now prove one exists by probing the slush and mist of melting snow. You can’t see a Higgs boson, and no sensor can pick one out from the Higgs field that it forms. For 50 years, physicists have been building larger and more powerful accelerators to vaporize particles and sift through the debris. In the tunnels at CERN, protons are sped along a track to within a breath of the speed of light, then smashed together in a violent explosion. The protons annihilate each other, releasing a burst of energy. But Einstein tells us that mass is energy, and physics tells us that energy can’t be destroyed. An array of new particles pours from the fireball, energy spun back into tiny specks of mass. A machine surrounds and tracks the debris, bending charged particles as they plow through layers of sensors. Repeat this a million times, then tens of millions, before a second has passed. And keep going because you’re looking for something very rare. Once every few billion impacts,
The Search For The History Of The Universe's Light Emission The light emitted from all objects in the Universe during its entire history - stars, galaxies, quasars etc. forms a diffuse sea of photons that permeates intergalactic space, referred to as "diffuse extragalactic background light" (EBL). Scientists have long tried to measure this fossil record of the luminous activity in the Universe in their quest to decipher the history and evolution of the Cosmos, but its direct determination from the diffuse glow of the night sky is very difficult and uncertain. Very high energy (VHE) gamma-rays, some 100,000,000,000 times more energetic than normal light, offer an alternative way to probe this background light, and UK researchers from Durham University in collaboration with international partners used the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) gamma-ray telescopes in the Khomas Highlands of Namibia to observe several quasars (the most luminous VHE gamma-ray sources known) with this goal in mind. Source: PPARC
Quantum Computers Animated The Theory of Everything | Joe Arrigo PERSPECTIVE The above equation was written by Dr. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, who graduated first in his physics class at Harvard, and, when he was in high school built a 2.3 million electron volt atom-smasher in his parents garage. It is an equation for String Field Theory—a theory that may unite The Theory of Relativity with Quantum Theory, into a unified theory called The Theory of Everything. Theoretical physicists are those scientists who work in that twilight zone cutting edge realm between reality and science fiction. For thirty years Einstein sought a unified theory of physics that would integrate all the forces of nature into a single beautiful tapestry. Even he failed. String Theory says that at the subatomic level, there are vibrating strings—that particles like protons, electrons and quarks are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string, that all the stupendous activities in the universe are born from a sub-atomic loop of energy deep within all matter. © Joe Arrigo
Where Was The Big Bang? In a "Rainbow" Universe Time May Have No Beginning What if the universe had no beginning, and time stretched back infinitely without a big bang to start things off? That's one possible consequence of an idea called "rainbow gravity," so-named because it posits that gravity's effects on spacetime are felt differently by different wavelengths of light, aka different colors in the rainbow. Rainbow gravity was first proposed 10 years ago as a possible step toward repairing the rifts between the theories of general relativity (covering the very big) and quantum mechanics (concerning the realm of the very small). The idea is not a complete theory for describing quantum effects on gravity, and is not widely accepted. Nevertheless, physicists have now applied the concept to the question of how the universe began, and found that if rainbow gravity is correct, spacetime may have a drastically different origin story than the widely accepted picture of the big bang. Yet the concept has its critics.
The Astounding Link Between the P≠NP Problem and the Quantum Nature of Universe — The Physics arXiv Blog The paradox of Schrodinger’s cat is a thought experiment dreamed up to explore one of the great mysteries of quantum mechanics—why we don’t see its strange and puzzling behaviour in the macroscopic world. The paradox is simple to state. It involves a cat, a flask of poison and a source of radiation; all contained within a sealed box. If a monitor in the box detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison and killing the cat. The paradox comes about because the radioactive decay is a quantum process and so in a superposition of states until observed. The radioactive atom is both decayed and undecayed at the same time. But that means the cat must also be in a superposition of alive and dead states until the box is open and the system is observed. Nobody knows why we don’t observe these kinds of strange superpositions in the macroscopic world. But that mystery may now be solved thanks to the extraordinary work of Arkady Bolotin at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.
Four things you might not know about dark matter Not long after physicists on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory discovered the Higgs boson, CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer was asked, “What’s next?” One of the top priorities he named: figuring out dark matter. Dark matter is five times more prevalent than ordinary matter. Dark matter shows up periodically in the media, often when an experiment has spotted a potential sign of it. Here are four facts to get you up to speed on one of the most exciting topics in particle physics: 1. Illustration by: Sandbox Studio, Chicago At this moment, several experiments are on the hunt for dark matter. In the 1930s, astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky was observing the rotations of the galaxies that form the Coma cluster, a group of more than 1000 galaxies located more than 300 million light years from Earth. The idea of dark matter was largely ignored until the 1970s, when astronomer Vera Rubin saw something that gave her the same thought. 2. 3. 4.