prisonplanet--2019-02-11--Russian Satellite Registers Unknown Physical Phenomena in Earths Atmosphere

Russian Satellite Registers Unknown Physical Phenomena in Earth’s Atmosphere

An ultraviolet telescope installed on the Russian satellite Lomonosov has registered light “explosions” in the planet’s atmosphere, whose physical nature has not been explained so far, the director of the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Russian State University said in an interview with Sputnik.  “With the help of the telescope, we have obtained even more important results than we expected. It looks like we have encountered new physical phenomena… We do not yet know their physical nature… For example, during Lomonosov’s flight at an altitude of several dozen kilometres, we have registered several times a very powerful ‘explosion’ of light. But everything was clear underneath it, no storms, no clouds,” Mikhail Panasyuk said.  It was designed to observe transient phenomena in the upper atmosphere of the Earth as well as studying the radiation characteristics of the planet’s magnetosphere and for basic cosmological research. Its weight is 625 kilograms.  The satellite is equipped with a space telescope to measure the energy spectrum and chemical composition of high-energy cosmic rays from near-Earth orbit. Moreover, there are instrumental systems installed on board for studying cosmic gamma-ray bursts and the Earth’s near-magnetosphere.  This article was posted: Monday, February 11, 2019 at 6:49 am


sottnet--2019-01-31--Physicists create a flying army of laser Schrodingers cats

Physicists create a flying army of laser Schrödinger's cats

The laser pulses didn't grow whiskers or paws. But they became like the famous quantum-physics thought experiment Schrödinger's cat in an important way: They were large objects that acted like the simultaneously dead-and-alive creatures of subatomic physics - existing in a limbo between two simultaneous, contradictory states. And the lab in Finland where they were born had no limit on how many they could make. Pulse after pulse turned into a creature of the quantum world. And those "quantum cats," though they existed for only a fraction of a second inside the experimental machine, had the potential to be immortal."In our experiment, the [laser cat] was sent to the detector immediately, so it was destroyed right after its creation," said Bastian Hacker, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, who worked on the experiment.But it didn't have to be that way, Hacker told Live Science.That longevity is part of what makes these pulses so useful, he added. A long-lived laser cat can survive long-term travel through an optical fiber, making it a good unit of information for a network of quantum computers.So what does it mean to make a laser pulse like Schrödinger's cat? First of all, the cat wasn't a pet. It was a thought experiment that physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed in 1935 to point out the sheer unreasonableness of the quantum physics he and his colleagues were then only just discovering.Here's how it goes: Quantum physics dictates that, under particular conditions, a particle can have two contradictory traits at the same time. A particle's spin (a quantum measurement that doesn't quite look like the spinning we see at the macro scale) might be "up" while also being "down." Only when its spin is measured does the particle collapse one way or the other.Physicists have several interpretations of this behavior, but the most popular (called the Copenhagen interpretation) says that the particle isn't really spin up or spin down before it's observed. Until then, it's in a kind of hazy netherworld between states, and only decides on one or the other when forced to by an outside observer.Schrödinger noticed that this had some bizarre implications.He imagined an opaque steel box, containing a cat, an atom and a sealed glass vial of poison gas. If the atom decayed (a possibility, but not a sure thing, thanks to quantum mechanics), a mechanism in the box would shatter the glass, killing the cat. If the atom didn't decay, the cat would live. Leave the cat in the box for an hour, Schrödinger said, and the cat would end up in a "superposition" between life and death.The problem with that, he was implying, is that it makes no sense at all.And yet, Schrödinger's cat has become a kind of useful shorthand for macro-scale things that obey the laws of classical physics, but interact with quantum objects such that they have neither entirely one trait nor entirely another.In the new experiment, described in a paper published Jan. 14 in the journal Nature Photonics, researchers created laser pulses that are in superposition between two possible quantum states. They called the little pulses "flying optical cat states."To make them, they first confined the rubidium atom to a cavity between two mirrors just 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) wide (about the width of a grain of salt).When the light entered the cavity, it became entangled with the atom, meaning its state was fundamentally linked to the state of the atom.Then, when the light pulse hit a light detector, it had telltale signs of in-betweenness, neither entirely acting like it was entangled with one sort of atom or another. It was a flying cat made out of light.That in-betweenness had to do with the position of the light waves, Hacker said. After glancing off the atom, the light continued to move through space as a wave: hill and valley, hill and valley.But it became uncertain whether at any given moment the light's wave was reaching the top of a hill or descending down into a valley, Hacker told Live Science.(In reality, the light could have even more possible shapes: Its wave always had at least some chance of occupying every point between the top of a "hill" and the bottom of a "valley." But two mirror-image waves represented the two most likely uncertain states.)The researchers said that down the road, this ability to send moving cats from one place to anotherThat's because quantum networking will probably rely on sending light back and forth between quantum computers, Hacker said, rather than electricity."The easiest thing to send would be single photons, but when they get lost [which happens often], their carried information is gone," he said.Although every optical transmission has losses, the information can be transmitted perfectly."That said, there's still work to be done. While the researchers were able to create the cats "deterministically," meaning that a cat emerged whenever they performed their experiment, the cats didn't always survive the short trip to the light receiver. Optics are tricky, and sometimes the light winked out before getting there.Also, a reasonable person might question whether these light pulses really count as Schrödinger's cats. They're certainly classical objects - meaning they follow the deterministic laws of large-scale objects - but the researchers acknowledged in the paper thatand so they could be said to be macroscopic under only the broadest of definitions."Indeed, [a] few photons are nothing close to a real-world, macroscopic object," Hacker said. "The point of coherent optical pulses like the ones we used is, that the amplitude can be scaled up continuously without any fundamental limit."In other words, sure, these are some tiny cats. But there's no reason the same basic idea couldn't be used to make some giant Schrödinger felines.But the researchers were ultimately confident in using the term, and "optical flying cat state" does have a ring to it.


sottnet--2019-02-04--Physicists create exotic electron liquid stable at room temperatures

By bombarding an ultrathin semiconductor sandwich with powerful laser pulses, physicists at the University of California, Riverside, have created the first "electron liquid" at room temperature.The achievement opens a pathway for development of the first practical and efficient devices to generate and detect light at terahertz wavelengths-between infrared light and microwaves. Such devices could be used in applications as diverse as communications in outer space, cancer detection, and scanning for concealed weapons.The research could also enable exploration of the basic physics of matter at infinitesimally small scales and help usher in an era of quantum metamaterials, whose structures are engineered at atomic dimensions.The UCR physicists published their findings online Feb. 4 in the journal Nature Photonics. They were led by Associate Professor of Physics Nathaniel Gabor, who directs the UCR Quantum Materials Optoelectronics Lab. Other co-authors were lab members Trevor Arp and Dennis Pleskot, and Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Vivek Aji.In their experiments, the scientists constructed an ultrathin sandwich of the semiconductor molybdenum ditelluride between layers of carbon graphene. The layered structure was just slightly thicker than the width of a single DNA molecule. They then bombarded the material with superfast laser pulses, measured in quadrillionths of a second.Normally, with such semiconductors as silicon, laser excitation creates electrons and their positively charged holes that diffuse and drift around in the material, which is how you define a gas," Gabor said. However, in their experiments, the researchers detected evidence of condensation into the equivalent of a liquid. Such a liquid would have properties resembling common liquids such as water, except that it would consist, not of molecules, but of electrons and holes within the semiconductor."We were turning up the amount of energy being dumped into the system, and we saw nothing, nothing, nothing-then suddenly we saw the formation of what we called an 'anomalous photocurrent ring' in the material," Gabor said. "We realized it was a liquid because it grew like a droplet, rather than behaving like a gas.""What really surprised us, though, was that it happened at room temperature," he said. "Previously, researchers who had created such electron-hole liquids had only been able to do so at temperatures colder than even in deep space."The electronic properties of such droplets would enable development of optoelectronic devices that operate with unprecedented efficiency in the terahertz region of the spectrum, Gabor said. Terahertz wavelengths are longer than infrared waves but shorter than microwaves, and there has existed a "terahertz gap" in the technology for utilizing such waves. Terahertz waves could be used to detect skin cancers and dental cavities because of their limited penetration and ability to resolve density differences. Similarly, the waves could be used to detect defects in products such as drug tablets and to discover weapons concealed beneath clothing.Terahertz transmitters and receivers could also be used for faster communication systems in outer space. And, the electron-hole liquid could be the basis for quantum computers, which offer the potential to be far smaller than silicon-based circuitry now in use, Gabor said.More generally, Gabor said, the technology used in his laboratory could be the basis for engineering "quantum metamaterials," with atom-scale dimensions that enable precise manipulation of electrons to cause them to behave in new ways.In further studies of the electron-hole "nanopuddles," the scientists will explore their liquid properties such as surface tension."Right now, we don't have any idea how liquidy this liquid is, and it would be important to find out," Gabor said.Gabor also plans to use the technology to explore basic physical phenomena. For example, cooling the electron-hole liquid to ultra-low temperatures could cause it to transform into a "quantum fluid" with exotic physical properties that could reveal new fundamental principles of matter.In their experiments, the researchers used two key technologies. To construct the ultrathin sandwiches of molybdenum ditelluride and carbon graphene, they used a technique called "elastic stamping." In this method, a sticky polymer film is used to pick up and stack atom-thick layers of graphene and semiconductor.And to both pump energy into the semiconductor sandwich and image the effects, they used " multi-parameter dynamic photoresponse microscopy " developed by Gabor and Arp. In this technique, beams of ultrafast laser pulses are manipulated to scan a sample to optically map the current generated.Electron-hole liquid in a van der Waals heterostructure photocell at room temperature, Nature Photonics (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-019-0349-y


sottnet--2019-02-11--Russian satellite registers unknown physical phenomena in Earths atmosphere

Russian satellite registers unknown physical phenomena in Earth's atmosphere

An ultraviolet telescope installed on the Russian satellite Lomonosov has registered light "explosions" in the planet's atmosphere, whose physical nature has not been explained so far, the director of the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Russian State University said in an interview with Sputnik."With the help of the telescope, we have obtained even more important results than we expected.... We do not yet know their physical nature... For example, during Lomonosov's flight at an altitude of several dozen kilometres,," Mikhail Panasyuk said.Russian astronomic satellite Mikhailo Lomonosov of Moscow State University was launched to the Earth's orbit in 2016.It was designed to observe transient phenomena in the upper atmosphere of the Earth as well as studying the radiation characteristics of the planet's magnetosphere and for basic cosmological research. Its weight is 625 kilograms.The satellite is equipped with a space telescope to measure the energy spectrum and chemical composition of high-energy cosmic rays from near-Earth orbit. Moreover, there are instrumental systems installed on board for studying cosmic gamma-ray bursts and the Earth's near-magnetosphere.


sottnet--2019-02-26--Physicists may have solved a 35 year old quantum mystery

Here's a mysterious truth that scientists have known since 1983: Protons and neutrons act differently when they're inside an atom, versus floating freely through space. Specifically, the subatomic particles that make up those protons and neutrons, called quarks, slow down massively once they're confined to a nucleus in an atom Physicists really didn't like this, because neutrons are neutrons whether they're inside an atom or not. And protons are protons. Both protons and neutrons (which together make up the class of particles called "nucleons") are made up of three smaller particles, called quarks , bound together by the strong force "When you put quarks into a nucleus, they start to move slower, and that is very weird," said study co-author Or Hen, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's strange because the powerful interactions between quarks mainly determine their speed, whereas forces that bind the nucleus (and also act on quarks inside the nucleus) are supposed to be very weak, Hen added.And there's no other known force that should be modifying the behavior of quarks in a nucleus so intensely. Yet, the effect remains: Particle physicists call it the EMC effect, named for the European Muon Collaboration, the group that discovered it. And until recently, scientists weren't sure what caused it.Two particles in a nucleus are typically pulled together by a force of around 8 million electron volts (8 MeV), a measure of energy in particles. Quarks in a proton or neutron are bound together by about 1,000 MeV. So it doesn't make sense that the comparatively mild interactions of the nucleus are dramatically impacting the powerful interactions inside quarks, Hen told Live Science."What is eight next to 1,000?" he said.But the EMC effect doesn't look like a mild nudge from an outside force. Though it varies from one sort of nucleus to the next, "It's not like half a percent. The effect pops out of the data once you are creative enough to design an experiment to look for it," Hen said.Depending on the nucleus involved, the apparent size of the nucleons (which is a function of their speed) can change by 10 to 20 percent. In a gold nucleus, for example, protons and neutrons are 20 percent smaller than they are when they float freely.Theoreticians came up with lots of different models to explain what was going on here, Hen said."A friend of mine joked that EMC stood for 'Everybody's Model is Cool' because every model seemed like it could explain it," he said.But over time, physicists did more experiments, testing those different models, and one after another fell away."No one could explain all of the data, and we were left with a big puzzle. We have a lot of data now, measurements of how the quarks move inside all kinds of different nuclei, and we couldn't explain what was going on," he said.Instead of trying to explain all of the puzzle at once, Hen and his colleagues decided to look at a just one special case of neutron and proton interaction.Under most circumstances, protons and neutrons in a nucleus don't overlap with each other, instead respecting one another's boundaries - even though they're really just systems of bound quarks. But sometimes, nucleons get linked together within existing nucleus, and start to briefly, physically overlap with one another, becoming what scientists call "correlated pairs." At any moment, about 20 percent of nucleons in a nucleus overlap in this way.When that happens, enormous amounts of energy flows among the quarks, fundamentally changing their bound structure and behavior - a phenomenon caused by the strong force . In a paper published Feb. 20 in the journal Nature The team bombarded lots of different types of nuclei with electrons , and found a direct relationship between these nucleon pairs and the EMC effect.Their data strongly suggest, Hen said,. But those few involved in nucleon pairs change their behavior so dramatically that they skew the average results in any experiment. That many quarks packed into such a small space causes some dramatic strong force effects. The EMC effect is the result of just a minority of anomalies, rather than a change to the behavior of all protons and neutrons.From the data, the team derived a mathematical function that accurately describes how the EMC effect behaves from one nucleus to the next."They [the authors of the paper] made a prediction, and their prediction was more or less confirmed," said Gerald Feldman, a physicist at George Washington University who wrote an accompanying News & Views article in the same issue of Nature but was not involved in the research.That's strong evidence that this pairing effect is the real answer to the EMC mystery, Feldman told Live Science.After 35 years, particle physicists seem to have solved this problem with too many no-good solutions. Hen said he and his colleagues already have follow-up experiments planned to probe the issue even more deeply, and reveal new unknown truths about the behavior of paired-up nucleons inside atoms.


sottnet--2019-03-14--Time reversal achieved by physicists using quantum computer

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland andThey also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study comes out March 13 in Scientific Reports."This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time: from the past to the future," commented the study's lead author Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT."We began by describing a so-called local perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Then, in December, we published a paper that discusses the violation of the second law via a device called a Maxwell's demon ," Lesovik said. "The most recent paper approaches the same problem from a third angle: We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time."Most laws of physics make no distinction between the future and the past. For example, let an equation describe the collision and rebound of two identical billiard balls. If a close-up of that event is recorded with a camera and played in reverse, it can still be represented by the same equation. Moreover, one could not tell from the recording if it has been doctored. Both versions look plausible. It would appear that the billiard balls defy the intuitive sense of time.However, imagine that someone has recorded a cue ball breaking the pyramid, the billiard balls scattering in all directions. One need not know the rules of the game to tell the real-life scenario from reverse playback. What makes the latter look so absurd is our intuitive understanding of the second law of thermodynamics: An isolated system either remains static or evolves toward a state of chaos rather than order.Most other laws of physics do not prevent rolling billiard balls from assembling into a pyramid, infused tea from flowing back into the tea bag, or a volcano from "erupting" in reverse. But we do not see any of this happening, because that would require an isolated system to assume a more ordered state without any outside intervention, which runs contrary to the second law. The nature of that law has not been explained in full detail, but researchers have made great headway in understanding the basic principles behind it.Quantum physicists from MIPT decided to check if time could spontaneously reverse itself at least for an individual particle and for a tiny fraction of a second. That is, instead of colliding billiard balls, they examined a solitary electron in empty interstellar space."Suppose the electron is localized when we begin observing it. This means that we're pretty sure about its position in space. The laws of quantum mechanics prevent us from knowing it with absolute precision, but we can outline a small region where the electron is localized," says study co-author Andrey Lebedev from MIPT and ETH Zurich.The physicist explains that the evolution of the electron state is governed by Schrödinger's equation. Although it makes no distinction between the future and the past, the region of space containing the electron will spread out very quickly. That is, the system tends to become more chaotic. The uncertainty of the electron's position is growing. This is analogous to the increasing disorder in a large-scale system - such as a billiard table - due to the second law of thermodynamics."However, Schrödinger's equation is reversible," adds Valerii Vinokur, a co-author of the paper, from the Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. "Mathematically, it means that under a certain transformation, called complex conjugation, the equation will describe a 'smeared' electron localizing back into a small region of space over the same time period." Although this phenomenon is not observed in nature, it could theoretically happen due to a random fluctuation in the cosmic microwave background permeating the universe.The team set out to calculate the probability to observe an electron "smeared out" over a fraction of a second spontaneously localizing into its recent past. It turned out that even if one spent the entire lifetime of the universe - 13.7 billion years - observing 10 billion freshly localized electrons every second, the reverse evolution of the particle's state would only happen once. And even then, the electron would travel no more than a mere one ten-billionth of a second into the past.Large-scale phenomena involving billiard balls, volcanoes, etc. obviously unfold on much greater timescales and feature an astounding number of electrons and other particles. This explains why we do not observe old people growing younger or an ink blot separating from the paper.The researchers then attempted to reverse time in a four-stage experiment. Instead of an electron, they observed the state of a quantum computer made of two and later three basic elements called superconducting qubits Each qubit is initialized in the ground state, denoted as zero. This highly ordered configuration corresponds to an electron localized in a small region, or a rack of billiard balls before the break.The order is lost. Just like the electron is smeared out over an increasingly large region of space, or the rack is broken on the pool table, the state of the qubits becomes an ever more complex changing pattern of zeros and ones. This is achieved by briefly launching the evolution program on the quantum computer. Actually, a similar degradation would occur by itself due to interactions with the environment. However, the controlled program of autonomous evolution will enable the last stage of the experiment.A special program modifies the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it would then evolve "backwards," from chaos toward order. This operation is akin to the random microwave background fluctuation in the case of the electron, but this time it is deliberately induced. An obviously far-fetched analogy for the billiards example would be someone giving the table a perfectly calculated kick.The evolution program from the second stage is launched again. Provided that the "kick" has been delivered successfully, the program does not result in more chaos but rather rewinds the state of the qubits back into the past, the way a smeared electron would be localized or the billiard balls would retrace their trajectories in reverse playback, eventually forming a triangle.The researchers found that in 85 percent of the cases the two-qubit quantum computer indeed returned back into the initial state. When three qubits were involved, more errors happened, resulting in a roughly 50 percent success rate. According to the authors, these errors are due to imperfections in the actual quantum computer. As more sophisticated devices are designed, the error rate is expected to drop.The study reported in this story was conducted by researchers from MIPT (Gordey Lesovik, Andrey Lebedev, Mikhail Suslov), ETH Zurich (Andrey Lebedev), and Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. (Valerii Vinokur, Ivan Sadovskyy).


sottnet--2019-03-20--Non-crackpot physicist wins Templeton prize - Darwinist Jerry Coyne isnt happy

Non-crackpot physicist wins Templeton prize - Darwinist Jerry Coyne isn't happy

Marcelo Gleiser sounds as though he thinks that the great mysteries of physics are about this universe, not space aliens, computer sim universes, cyborgs, and so forth (on that score, see 2011 Templeton winner Sir Martin Rees ).More on Gleiser:Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is not pleased: But then, in Jerry's books, Templeton can do wrong just doing its job.See also (Marcelo Gleiser):


sottnet--2019-04-11--Fine-tuning in physics really is a problem

When you approach the world scientifically, you seek to gain knowledge about how it works by asking it questions about itself. You observe its behavior; you perform experiments on it; you measure specific quantities that you're interested in. If you ask the right questions in the right ways, you can begin to gain information about what physical phenomena govern the behavior that was revealed in each and every one of your investigations.Most of the time, your results will teach you something specific about the Universe. But every once in a while, you'll find something that seems too good to be true. You'll measure something that will confuse you in one of two ways:. This is known as fine-tuning, and it really is a problem in physics.You don't even need to look at physics to understand why this would be the case. Imagine, instead, you were looking at the net worths of some of the richest people in the world, as based on the Forbes Billionaires list . If you were to pick two of them at random, what would you expect to find? Sure, you'd expect that each one would be worth at least one billion dollars, but you'd also expect there would be a large difference between these two values.If the first billionaire is worth an amount A, and the second is worth an amount B, then the difference between them is C, where A - B = C. Without any further knowledge, you should be able to assume something about C: it shouldn't be much smaller than either A or B. In other words, if A and B are both in the billions of dollars, then it's likely that C will be in (or close to) a value of billions as well.For example, A might be Pat Stryker (#703 on the list), worth, let's say, $3,592,327,960. And B might be David Geffen (#190), worth $8,467,103,235. The difference between them, or A - B, is then -$4,874,775,275. C has a 50/50 shot of being positive or negative, but in most cases, it's going to be of the same order of magnitude (within a factor of 10 or so) of both A and B.But it won't always be. For example, most of the over 2,200 billionaires in the world are worth less than $2 billion, and there are hundreds worth between $1 billion and $1.2 billion. If you happened to pick two of them at random, it wouldn't surprise you terribly if the difference in their net worth was only a few tens of millions of dollars.It might, however, surprise you if the difference between them was only a few thousand dollars, or was zero. "How unlikely," you'd think. But it might not be all that unlikely after all.After all, you don't know which billionaires were on your list. Would you be shocked to learn the Winklevoss twins - Cameron and Tyler, the first Bitcoin billionaires - had identical net worths? Or that the Collison brothers, Patrick and John (co-founders of Stripe), had net worths that differed by only a few hundred dollars?No, it wouldn't be particularly surprising. In general if A is large and B is large, then A - B will also be large,. The distribution of billionaires isn't completely random, as there might be underlying reasons for two seemingly unrelated values to actually be related. (In the case of the net worths of the Winklevosses or the Collisons, there's literally a blood relationship!)In the Universe, there are many things that are finely-tuned. The expanding Universe itself is a fantastic example. At the earliest moment of the hot Big Bang, the fabric of space itself was expanding at a particular rate (the Hubble expansion rate) that happened to be enormous. At the same time, the Universe was filled with a tremendous amount of energy in the form of particles, antiparticles, and radiation.The expanding Universe is basically a race between these two competing forces:with the Big Bang serving as the starting gun. Interestingly enough, in order to wind up with the Universe we have today,This puzzle is known as the flatness problem, as a Universe where energy and the expansion rate balance so perfectly will also be perfectly spatially flat. We can also, today, measure the curvature of the Universe by a number of different methods, such as by examining the patterns of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.By comparing the observations we make with our theoretical predictions for what those fluctuations should look like in a Universe with varying amounts of curvature, we can determine that, even today. If we extrapolate back to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang based on our modern observations, we learn that the initial expansion rate and the initial energy densityWhen we're faced with a puzzle like this, we have two options for how we proceed.After all, there are many coincidences that we observe today where two things appear closely related because they were set up, long ago, with the right conditions that would lead them to appear related today.Venus, for example, orbits the Sun in an elliptical shape, similar to how all the planets orbit. But Venus has the smallest percent difference between its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) and when it reaches its farthest distance from the sun (aphelion) of any of the planets.Why is Venus more circular, and less elliptical, than any of the other planets? It's simply due to the initial conditions of the material that gave rise to the Solar System. Neptune is the second most circular, followed by Earth. The least circular planet? Mercury, followed by Mars and then Saturn. There wasn't a mechanism that caused these eccentricities; it had the outcome we observe today because of the (seemingly random) initial conditions our Solar System was born with.But this is, because it assumes that there isn't an underlying cause that gave rise to the effect we observe. The alternative option is to assume that there was somethat gave rise to the apparent fine-tuning we see today.For example, if you take a look at an enormous rock balanced precariously on a perch, you would assume that something caused it to be that way.Fine-tuning doesn'tto imply a fine-tuner, but rather that there was a physical mechanism underlying why something appears finely-tuned today. The effect may look like an unlikely coincidence, but thisbe the case if there's a cause responsible for the effect we see.Going back to the case of the flatness problem, it's easy to theorize some potential explanations for what would cause the Universe to appear flat today. It's possible that the initial expansion rate and the initial energy density of the Universe arose from the same pre-existing state, causing these two value to be related and balanced.It's also possible that a phase of the Universe existed before the Big Bang, expanding rapidly and stretching the Universe so that it's indistinguishable from perfectly flat. It's possible that the Universe really is curved, but that it's curved on a much larger scale than our observable Universe permits us to access, in the same way that you couldn't measure the curvature of Earth solely by examining your own backyard.The whole point of a fine-tuning argument isn't to declare that we have a weird coincidence, and therefore anything that explains this coincidence is likely to be right. Rather, it points us to the various ways we might think about an otherwise unexplained puzzle, to try and provide a physical explanation for a phenomenon that has no obvious cause.In science, our goal is to describe everything we observe or measure in the Universe through natural, physical explanations alone.When we see what appears to be a cosmic coincidence, we owe it to ourselves to examine every possible physical cause of that coincidence, as one of them might lead to the next great breakthrough.That doesn't mean you should credit (or blame) a particular theory or idea without further evidence, but the possible solutions we can theorize do tell us where it might be smart to look.As always, we have strict requirements for any such theory to be accepted, which includes reproducing all the successes of the previous leading theory, explaining these new puzzles, and also making new predictions about observable, measurable quantities that we can test. Until a new idea succeeds on all three fronts, it's only speculation. But that speculation is still incredibly valuable. If we don't engage in it, we've already given up on discovering new fundamental truths about our reality.


sottnet--2019-10-15--Is a fundamental force of nature out of whack? Physicists search universe for evidence

That's why scientists have for decades looked for any discrepancies in these so-called fundamental constants. Finding such a variation would rock the very foundations of modern science.Not to mention, it would guarantee at least one lucky researcher a free trip to Stockholm, a shiny new gold medal and a million bucks.Recently, a pair of astronomers turned to one of the oldest stars in the universe to test the constancy of one of the superstars of the four fundamental forces of nature — gravity. They looked back in time over the past few billion years for any inconsistencies.Not to give away the full story, but no Nobel Prizes will be awarded just yet.We take Newton's gravitational constant (denoted simply by "G") for granted, probably because gravity is pretty predictable. We call it Newton's gravitational constant because Newton was the first person to really need it to help describe his famous laws of motion. Using his newly invented calculus, he was able to extend his laws of motion to explain the behavior of everything from apples falling from a tree to the orbits of the planets around the sun. But nothing in his math told him just how strong gravity ought to be — that had to be experimentally measured and slipped in to make the laws work.And it's basically been that way for centuries — measuring G on its own and plugging it into the equations when needed. Nowadays, we have a more sophisticated understanding of gravity, thanks to Einstein's theory of general relativity , which describes how gravity arises from the distortion of space-time itself. And one of the cornerstones of relativity is that physical laws should stay the same in all reference frames.This means that if one observer in a particular reference frame — say, someone standing on the surface of the Earth, or floating out in the middle of space — measures a particular strength of gravity (Newton's G), then that same value should apply equally all throughout space and time. It's simply baked into the mathematics and fundamental working assumptions of Einstein's theory.On the other hand,— for instance, the itty-bitty particles that make up an electron or a proton — andOne of those candidates for such a theory is called string theory, and in string theory there is no such thing as numbers that just need to be tossed in.In string theory, everything we know about nature, from the number of particles and forces to all their properties, including the gravitational constant, must arise naturally and elegantly from the mathematics itself. If this is true, then Newton's gravitational constant isn't just some random number — it's an outgrowth of some complicated process operating at the subatomic level, and it doesn't have to be constant at all. And so in string theory, as the universe grows and changes, the fundamental constants of nature might just change along with it.It's time to do some tests.Over the past few years, scientists have devised very sensitive experiments of the strength of gravity on Earth and in our nearby vicinity. These experiments give some of the tightest constraints on variations in G, but only over the past few years. It could be that Newton's constant varies incredibly slowly, and we just haven't been looking carefully for long enough.On the other end of the spectrum, if you monkey around with the fundamental constants of nature, you're going to start messing up the physics of the early universe, which is visible to us in the form of what's called the cosmic microwave background . This is the afterglow light pattern from when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old. Detailed observations of that background light also place constraints on the gravitational constant, but these constraints are much less precise than those found from tests we can do in our own backyard.Recently, astronomers have concocted a test of variations in G that strikes a good middle ground between these two extremes, which they describe online in the preprint journal arXiv . It's a relatively high-precision test; not as precise as Earth-based ones but far better than the cosmic ones, and it also has the benefit of spanning literally billions of years.The Kepler space telescope is famous for hunting for exoplanets, but in general it's just really good at staring at stars for long periods of time, looking for even the slightest variation. And some of those variations just come from the fact that stars, well, vary in brightness. In fact,just like earthquakes — both are made of materials (a superhot and dense plasma in the case of the sun) that can vibrate.These quakes and quivers on the surface of the star affect its brightness and tell us about the interior structure. A star's interior depends on its mass and age. As stars evolve, both the size of the core and the dynamics of all its inner layers change; those changes affect what's going on at the surface.And if you start messing around with the constants of nature, like Newton's G, it changes how stars evolve over the course of their lifetimes.because as they burn hydrogen in their cores, they leave behind an inert lump of helium. This helium gets in the way of the fusion process, reducing its efficiency, forcing stars to burn at a faster pace to maintain equilibrium, getting hotter and brighter in the process.But these changes are really apparent only over very long time periods, so we can't really look to our own sun — which is about 4.5 billion years old — as a good example. Also, big stars don't have long lives, and they also have incredibly complicated interiors that are difficult to model.In comes KIC 7970740 to the rescue, a star only three-quarters the mass of our sun that's been burning for at least 11 billion years. A perfect laboratory.After staring at this star, astronomers took years of Kepler data and compared it with various models of the star's evolution, including those with variations in Newton's G. Then, they tied those models to observations of the seismology — the wiggles — on the surface.at least as far as they can tell, with no changes detected at the level of 2 parts in a trillion (like knowing the distance between Los Angeles and New York City to the width of a single bacterium) over the past 11 billion years.Where does Newton's constant come from and how does it remain so constant? We don't have an answer to that question, and as far as we can tell, Newton isn't going anywhere anytime soon.


sottnet--2019-10-17--'Helical engine' may violate the laws of physics

For every action, there is a reaction: that is the principle on which all space rockets operate, blasting propellant in one direction to travel in the other. But one NASA engineer believes he could take us to the stars without any propellant at all.Designed by David Burns at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama,Burns has posted a paper describing the concept to NASA's technical reports server.It has been met with scepticism from some quarters, but Burns believes his concept is worth pursuing. "I'm comfortable with throwing it out there," he says. "If someone says it doesn't work, I'll be the first to say, it was worth a shot."To get to grips with the principle of Burns's engine, picture a box on a frictionless surface. Inside that box is a rod, along which a ring can slide. If a spring inside the box gives the ring a push, the ring will slide along the rod one way while the box will recoil in the other. When the ring reaches the end of the box, it will bounce backwards, and the box's recoil direction will switch too. This is action-reaction - also known as Newton's third law of motion - and in normal circumstances, it restricts the box to wiggling back and forth ( watch video ).But, Burns asks, what if the ring's mass is much greater when it slides in one direction than the other? Then it would give the box a greater kick at one end than the other. Action would exceed reaction and the box would accelerate forwards ( watch video ).This mass changing isn't prohibited by physics. Einstein's theory of special relativity says that objects gain mass as they are driven towards the speed of light, an effect that must be accounted for in particle accelerators. In fact, a simplistic implementation of Burns's concept would be to replace the ring with a circular particle accelerator, in which ions are swiftly accelerated to relativistic speed during one stroke, and decelerated during the other.But Burns thinks it would make more sense to ditch the box and rod and employ the particle accelerator for the lateral as well as the circular movement - in which case, the accelerator would need to be shaped like a helix.It would also need to be big - some 200 metres long and 12 metres in diameter - and powerful, requiring 165 megawatts of power to generate just 1 newton of thrust, which is about the same force you use to type on a keyboard. For that reason, the engine would only be able to reach meaningful speeds in the frictionless environment of space. "The engine itself would be able to get to 99 per cent the speed of light if you had enough time and power," says Burns.Propellant-less proposals aren't new. In the late 1970s, Robert Cook, a US inventor, patented an engine that supposedly converted centrifugal force into linear motion. Then, in the early 2000s, British inventor Roger Shawyer proposed the EM drive, which he claimed could convert trapped microwaves into thrust. Neither concept has been successfully demonstrated and both are widely assumed to be impossible, due to violation of the conservation of momentum, a core physical law.Martin Tajmar at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany, who has performed tests on the EM Drive , believes the helical engine will probably suffer the same problem. "All inertial propulsion systems - to my knowledge - never worked in a friction-free environment," he says. This machine makes use of special relativity, unlike the others, which complicates the picture, he says, but "unfortunately there is always action-reaction".Burns has worked on his design in private, without any sponsorship from NASA, and he admits his concept is massively inefficient. However, he says there is potential to harvest much of the energy that the accelerator loses in heat and radiation. He also suggests ways that momentum could be conserved, such as in the spin of the accelerated ions."I know that it risks being right up there with the EM drive and cold fusion," he says. "But you have to be prepared to be embarrassed. It is very difficult to invent something that is new under the sun and actually works."


sottnet--2019-12-24--Russian astrophysicists claim there's NO DARK ENERGY in bold new theory

A pair of Russian astrophysicists have published a cosmological theory which they claim explains the expansion of the universe without the need for the mysterious "Dark Energy" proposed by so many of their peers.Dark energy has served as a placeholder to explain away gaps in our current understanding of the universe for decades but now Professor Artyom Astashenok and undergraduate Aleksander Tepliakov from the Baltic Federal University think they have cracked the mystery. Their research was published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D.The pair likened their model to the Earth, which we perceive as finite but with boundaries we can't necessarily see. In the case of the Earth we are dealing with a two-dimensional plane but, extrapolating that understanding outwards, in the case of the universe, it is three-dimensional space with its own set of boundaries that exist, but are largely imperceptible."In other words, there is actually no 'dark energy' but there is a manifestation of the limits of the Universe. This does not mean, however, that it ends somewhere but we might face some complex topology," the researchers said.


sputnik--2019-02-11--Russian Satellite Registers Unknown Physical Phenomena in Earths Atmosphere

Russian Satellite Registers Unknown Physical Phenomena in Earth's Atmosphere

"With the help of the telescope, we have obtained even more important results than we expected. It looks like we have encountered new physical phenomena… We do not yet know their physical nature… For example, during Lomonosov's flight at an altitude of several dozen kilometres, we have registered several times a very powerful 'explosion' of light. But everything was clear underneath it, no storms, no clouds," Mikhail Panasyuk said.  It was designed to observe transient phenomena in the upper atmosphere of the Earth as well as studying the radiation characteristics of the planet's magnetosphere and for basic cosmological research. Its weight is 625 kilograms.  The satellite is equipped with a space telescope to measure the energy spectrum and chemical composition of high-energy cosmic rays from near-Earth orbit. Moreover, there are instrumental systems installed on board for studying cosmic gamma-ray bursts and the Earth's near-magnetosphere.


sputnik--2019-04-07--At the Event Horizon Astrophysicists Set to Reveal First Photos of Black Holes

At the Event Horizon: Astrophysicists Set to Reveal First Photos of Black Holes

In an announcement scheduled for Wednesday, April 10, at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), the US National Science Foundation in Washington will release a "groundbreaking result from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project," according to multiple reports.  The EHT project, an international scientific collaboration, was formed in 2012 as a means of directly observing the area immediately surrounding a black hole.  Concurrent announcements are set to occur in Tokyo, Brussels, Taipei, Santiago, and Shanghai, according to the EHT website.  One of the most intriguing of spacetime environments, the region around a black hole — described as the ‘event horizon' — is also one of the most violent in the known universe, as matter inexorably hurtling into the dark maw is mangled to what scientists guess to be the subatomic level, while light itself is rendered permanently captive, leading to the celestial singularity's picturesque name.  "It's a visionary project to take the first photograph of a black hole. We are a collaboration of over 200 people internationally," asserted astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, EHT director at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in March, cited by Reuters.  The new findings will test legendary physicist Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, according to EHT project astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis.  To conduct their discoveries, the EHT looked at two supermassive black holes: Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way galaxy and M87, at the center of nearby galaxy Virgo A.  Sagittarius A* is measured as being some 26,000 light years from Earth and massing approximately 4 million times that of our sun. Virgo A is calculated to be some 3.5 billion times the mass of our sun and situated about 54 million light-years from our solar system.  The new observations will be used to detect evidence of what happens at the edge, or shadow, of a black hole, particularly as Einstein's predictions — if correct — permit accurate measurements of the object's size and shape.  "The shape of the shadow will be almost a perfect circle in Einstein's theory," Psaltis stated, adding, however, that "if we find it to be different than what the theory predicts, then we go back to square one and we say, ‘Clearly, something is not exactly right,'" cited by Reuters.


sputnik--2019-08-29--Thinking With Portals Physicists Publish Instructions to Build a Wormhole

Thinking With Portals: Physicists Publish Instructions to Build a Wormhole

From the looks of things, we’ve reached the point where a wormhole, a spacetime bridge between two points in space, can be created at will. Certainly, there are some minor difficulties involved in the process, but as soon as you get your hands on a couple of black holes and a cosmic string, everything else is just details, writes Paul Sutter of LiveScience.  According to Sutter, wormholes, which in an ideal scenario should provide us with a super-fast way of travelling between any two points in space, are remarkably unstable: even a single photon sent through these exotic structures will trigger a chain reaction that will collapse the tunnel faster than the speed of light. A theoretical solution to this problem is to introduce matter with negative mass, but negative mass supposedly does not exist. A different solution is needed and scientists now say they have one.  According to a study by a group of scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara), published in the internet journal arXiv, the first step to create a wormhole is to find two black holes and charge them. Black holes are celestial objects with such a huge mass that not even light can escape their gravitational pull. And yet, we need to electrically charge two of these beasts with opposite electrical charges.  Why? Because in charged black holes, Sutter explains, the singularity is not a tiny point that crushes matter into oblivion, but a strange, distorted space, which can form a bridge to an oppositely-charged black hole. The exact process of “building the bridge”, is unclear but we will surely come up with something.  The problem with charged black holes is that they attract each other with tremendous force until they collapse and form a single, neutral, and therefore useless (to us), black hole.  There’s one thing that can keep that from happening, the study authors say: ‘cosmic string’.  Cosmic string is an exotic object rarely talked about, whose existence has been predicted solely by mathematical equations. A linear anomaly, a crack in spacetime no wider than a proton, a single inch of cosmic string would weigh more than Mount Everest. A terrible thing to stumble upon, Sutter says, because the object would slice anything in two like a “cosmic lightsaber.” The strings also have absolute tension, which, if we somehow manage to “thread” the wormhole with this string, would act as a “tug of war” keeping the two black holes apart and preventing them from collapsing into each other.  But what about that instability problem? There’s a solution for that as well, scientists insist. We simply need to throw in another cosmic string and connect its edges in a loop, which will cause it to wiggle – “a lot,” in Sutter’s words, an obvious understatement of cosmic proportions. If tuned correctly, these vibrations would be so ferocious they would warp spacetime, creating zones of negative energy, which, according to Einstein’s famous equation, can act as negative mass, thus stabilizing the wormhole.  The scientists say that these vibrations will eventually lead to the gradual collapse of the wormhole, so these tunnels would not exist for long. Still, it is believed that the time frame would be enough to send messages and even physical objects through the wormhole, which would be convenient.  “But first we need to find some cosmic strings,” Sutter noted.


sputnik--2019-12-12--Physicists Come Up With New Model of Elementary Particles

General relativity theory (GR) says that each field, possessing energy and, therefore, mass, bends space-time; and we perceive this curvature as a gravitational field. According to Einstein’s idea and equations in general relativity, both the electromagnetic field, the field of nuclear forces, and any other field is actually gravitational.  Nevertheless, for the time being physics is usually limited to flat space in the special relativity theory (STR), and therefore is forced to consider any elementary objects point-like, in other words, structureless.  According to Khlestkov, the proton radius, with an accuracy of 0.04%, coincides with the experimental value obtained in 2010 by Randolf Pohl’s group on muonic hydrogen, the microcosm area where the gravitational influence was considered negligible.  According to scientists, such results can result in the identification of new properties of particles and fields that will help solve many of the pressing problems of energy and space exploration.


sputnik--2019-12-16--Physicists Explain the Evolution of Sub-Spaces

According to experts, today, the most common base for theoretical research in physics is the idea that, apart from the well-known three spatial and temporal dimensions, there are some extra ones. It is assumed that the size of the extra dimensions is so small that they can’t be detected with modern equipment.  Scientists at NRNU MEPhI, together with their colleagues from Kazan Federal University, have studied why the Universe has grown to gigantic size, while the sub-spaces remained microscopic. The study was based on the Big Bang theory, which resulted in the creation of our world as well as the Universe growing.  According to Rubin, the scientists will study the role of extra dimensions in the observed physical phenomena and in the early Universe, as well as study whether the size and shape of extra dimensions are the same in different areas of space.  Successive restoration of this shape is a difficult task, which will take more than a dozen years to resolve.  The scientists emphasised that, like all basic research, the study is an attempt to obtain new knowledge that will be used in the future to preserve civilization in the Universe, which is gradually cooling after the Big Bang.  The study results were published in European Physical Journal C.


theirishtimes--2019-04-06--First photo of black hole expected in astrophysics milestone

Scientists are expected to unveil next Wednesday the first photograph of a black hole, a breakthrough in astrophysics providing insight into celestial monsters with gravitational fields so intense no matter or light can escape.  The US National Science Foundation has scheduled a news conference in Washington to announce a “groundbreaking result from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project,” an international partnership formed in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole.  Simultaneous news conferences are scheduled in Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.  A black hole’s event horizon, one of the most violent places in the universe, is the point of no return beyond which anything - stars, planets, gas, dust, all forms of electromagnetic radiation including light - gets sucked in irretrievably.  While scientists involved in the research declined to disclose the findings ahead of the formal announcement, they are clear about their goals.  “It’s a visionary project to take the first photograph of a black hole. We are a collaboration of over 200 people internationally,” astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, said at a March event in Texas.  The news conference is scheduled for 9am (2pm local time) on Wednesday.  The research will put to the test a scientific pillar - physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, according to University of Arizona astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis, project scientist for the Event Horizon Telescope. That theory, put forward in 1915, was intended to explain the laws of gravity and their relation to other natural forces.  The first - called Sagittarius A* - is situated at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and located 26,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).  The second - called M87 - resides at the center of the neighboring Virgo A galaxy, boasting a mass 3.5 billion times that of the sun and located 54 million light-years away from Earth. Streaming away from M87 at nearly the speed of light is a humongous jet of subatomic particles.  Black holes, coming in a variety of sizes, are dense entities formed when large stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Supermassive black holes are the largest kind, devouring matter and radiation and perhaps merging with other black holes.  Psaltis described a black hole as “an extreme warp in spacetime,” a term referring to the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time joined into a single four-dimensional continuum.  Doeleman said the project’s researchers obtained the first data in April 2017 from a global network of telescopes. The telescopes that collected that initial data are located in the US states of Arizona and Hawaii as well as Mexico, Chile, Spain and Antarctica. Since then, telescopes in France and Greenland have been added to the network.  The scientists also will be trying to detect for the first time the dynamics near the black hole as matter orbits at near light speeds before being swallowed into oblivion.  The fact that black holes do not allow light to escape makes viewing them difficult. The scientists will be looking for a ring of light - radiation and matter circling at tremendous speed at the edge of the event horizon - around a region of darkness representing the actual black hole. This is known as the black hole’s shadow or silhouette.  Einstein’s theory, if correct, should allow for an extremely accurate prediction of the size and shape of a black hole.  “The shape of the shadow will be almost a perfect circle in Einstein’s theory,” Psaltis said. “If we find it to be different than what the theory predicts, then we go back to square one and we say, ‘Clearly, something is not exactly right.’” –Reuters


theirishtimes--2019-12-05--Particle physics gives maths potentially powerful new tool

Although abstract in character, mathematics has concrete origins: the greatest advances have been inspired by the natural world. Recently, a new result in linear algebra was discovered by three physicists trying to understand the behaviour of neutrinos.  Neutrinos are subatomic particles that interact only weakly with matter, so that they pass easily through a wall, the Earth or a star. The American poet John Updike described them beautifully in his poem Cosmic Gall: Neutrinos, they are very small. / They have no charge and have no mass/ And do not interact at all./ The earth is just a silly ball/ To them, through which they simply pass, / Like dustmaids down a drafty hall/ Or photons through a sheet of glass.  Neutrinos are produced in vast numbers within the sun, and trillions pass harmlessly through our bodies every second. Almost nothing can stop them. Dune (the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) aims to unlock the mysteries of neutrinos. This international experiment will use particle accelerators to send an intense beam of high-energy neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois 800 miles through the earth to massive detectors a mile below ground in South Dakota. The experiment may lead to life-saving applications in medicine and could change our understanding of the universe.  Neutrinos come in three “flavours”, and can switch suddenly from one form to another as they travel at close to the speed of light. Recently, three physicists, Peter Denton, Stephen Parke and Xining Zhang, studying these sudden changes, stumbled upon a new algebraic identity. The mathematical description of how neutrinos interact with matter involves square arrays of numbers called matrices. Every matrix has a set of characteristic numbers called eigenvalues; and along with each eigenvalue goes a direction in space called an eigenvector.  Eigenvalues and eigenvectors turn up in a wide range of contexts. Operations that stretch, shrink, shear, reflect or rotate objects in a linear way are described by matrices. The eigenvectors give the directions that remain unchanged under transformation, and the eigenvalues determine the change of length or angle of rotation.  The physicists noticed that the eigenvectors of their matrices could be expressed as combinations of the eigenvalues. Since the latter are much easier to calculate than the former, the new identity provides a powerful tool. It applies to symmetric matrices, known as Hermitian, after French mathematician Charles Hermite. The formula gives the eigenvectors in terms of the eigenvalues of the matrix and of sub-matrices called minors.  The background mathematics has been studied for centuries, and the physicists felt sure that the result must already be known. But they could not find it anywhere in the literature so they contacted a world-leading mathematician, Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tao responded within hours that he had never seen the result, and included in his email three independent proofs of the formula.  The result has already benefited the study of neutrinos. Tao is confident that it will be important elsewhere too. He is quoted in the online magazine Quanta as saying: “It’s so pretty that I’m sure it will have some use in the near future.”  Peter Lynch is emeritus professor at the school of mathematics and statistics at University College Dublin. He blogs at thatsmaths.com


thesun--2019-07-05--Hope for LIGHTSABERS as physicists invent new hybrid particles that give light weight

Hope for LIGHTSABERS as physicists invent new ‘hybrid’ particles that give light weight

STAR WARS fans are in luck as scientists have found a way to make particles of light behave more like matter, giving hope to the idea of a real life lightsaber.  The technology is far away from bringing lightsabers into existence but could lead to other amazing inventions.  Light particles have no mass and do not combine together to form matter so any concepts of creating objects out of light have always seemed to be science fiction.  However, physicists from the University of Chicago in the US found that they could cause light particles, called photons, to act as if they had a mass and stick together by causing them to meet inside an atom and combine with an electron.  University of Chicago physicist Logan Clark said: "Our next order of business, will be to use these colliding photons to make topological 'fluids' of light. It is a tremendously exciting time."  This electron-photon partnership is said to form a kind of 'hybrid' quasiparticle called a polariton or, as Science Alert calls it, "magic dust".  These polaritons can move quickly through space as light does but can stick together with other polaritons, giving them the potential to form an object.  However, the scientists are being constrained because they can only get photons to react with atoms that have very specific energies.  They are using a new technique of cloning atoms to overcome this, which involves a laser that makes atoms shake in the same way and produce similar energies.  Photons are then combined with these atoms to create Floquet polaritons.  These particles have properties of light with a small amount of mass provided by the electron interaction and, unlike the other polaritons, can be customised and controlled.  Clark said: "Floquet polaritons are full of surprises; we're still continuing to understand them better."  Polaritons may not be the solid beams of light of the future but they are certainly leading Physics in the right direction.  These particles are said to have huge potential for computing and encrypted communication.  For example, there is a new method of quantum cryptography that makes it possible to encode a photon with many different values, which could lead to the securest kind of communication.  This research was published in the journal Nature Letters.  In other news, a bizarre new form of matter has been discovered by physicists and its not a solid, liquid or gas.  Scientists pinpoint exact location of mysterious fast radio burst that ‘could be signal from ET’.  And, two clusters of galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars are colliding in the ‘biggest explosion since Big Bang’.  What do you think of this light particle experiment? Let us know in the comments...  We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368 . We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.


theverge--2019-03-22--A physicist explains what the science of phase transitions can teach us about nurturing innovation

A moonshot is an ambitious goal, but physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall is interested in what he calls “loonshots,” or the neglected, unhinged ideas that then go on to change the world.  In 2011, Bahcall — who has a doctorate in physics and founded a company focused on drug discovery — started working with then-President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on a project to shape the future of national research. On the first day, the chairman of the group said that the goal was to “write the next generation of the Vannevar Bush report.” Bahcall had never heard of Vannevar Bush, an engineer and inventor who led the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II and played a crucial role in setting America’s priorities in science and tech.  As Bahcall read up on the history, he became more and more interested in the question of how important ideas are nurtured or forgotten. The resulting book is Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure DIseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin’s Press) and it’s “about what an idea from physics tells us about the behavior of groups and teams, and how companies can use that to innovate faster.”  The Verge spoke to Bahcall about how the science of phase transitions can influence business, organizational trade-offs in companies, and Nokia’s doomed smartphone idea. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.  The main analogy you use throughout the book is of phase transitions. As a refresher for those who haven’t taken physics since high school, how do phase transitions work?  Imagine you have a glass of water. You stick your finger in the glass, you can swish it around. That’s always true, except as you lower the temperature, all of a sudden at the critical point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, that behavior completely changes? Why? The molecules inside are exactly the same, but suddenly they change behavior. They freeze, they become completely rigid, they go from sloshing to rigid, and in science that’s called a phase transition.  Do you want innovation? Do you want high quality? You can’t have both.  It turns out that understanding or applying that idea to groups can give you a new way to think about behaviors and why they suddenly change. Most of the books you read talk about how the change comes from the top and the CEO should be the “chief innovation officer,” but in a glass of water there’s no CEO molecule with a bullhorn checking the temperature and going, “well, it’s 33 degrees so let’s be liquid, oh it’s 31 now so everyone line up and be rigid.” There’s something about structure that causes molecules to suddenly change behavior and that has nothing to do with the top or culture. It’s what elements of structure transform the behavior of teams and companies.  I think structure can drive culture! There is a famous saying in business that culture eats strategy for breakfast and the theme here is that structure eats culture for lunch. Here’s an example. Let’s say you took 50 people and asked each one of them individually, are you excited about this early project? They’re all individually excited. You organize them into a group and then they collectively reject that idea. Why?  We want to look at underlying incentives. When you organize people into a group and the groups are small enough, people are really interested in making that project succeed. If it’s a small company, people unite around the project. But as the group gets larger and you organize into layers, you have associates and vice presidents and senior vice presidents, incentives start to shift. Instead of, “we all have a stake in this project,” incentives become more about “what do I need to do to get promoted?” Then it becomes “I want to focus on my idea and not my competitor’s idea” and you start shooting down ideas around you and emphasizing your own stuff.  It’s the exact same people, but you just increase the size or the number of layers and you’re changing the incentives. On the surface it seems like the culture changes — you’ve gone from an entrepreneurial, innovative culture to a political organization — but the people are the same. It’s not about the people changing or what the CEO does, it’s the underlying structure that drives culture.  What are some examples of this happening? Where companies went from innovative to rejecting important ideas?  Nokia is a good one. You have a conglomerate that made all sorts of stuff like rubber boots and toilet paper and over the course of 20 years they became the world’s leading smartphone company, on the cover of every magazine. And then you have this small team that developed this new idea in the early 2000s of a big phone with a big, beautiful touchscreen and a beautiful camera. The same people who led the company rejected that idea and a few years later the engineers who came up with the prototype at Nokia watched Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone, which was very similar and essentially the same idea. Within a few years, Nokia was irrelevant. That’s an example of a great team suddenly going from embracing new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just like a glass of water goes from fluid to a rigid solid.  As they grew and expanded, structure changed and it crossed that point where it became more about people’s individual incentives and politics. Once you cross that transition, it’s just a matter of time and it’s inevitable that your organization is going to harden and become rigid and you’ll start shooting down those same ideas that you embraced.  Is size the main factor that matters in these phase transitions?  There’s a handful of variables. Others are how many levels are in the organization — you can have 1000 people organized into three layers, or 1000 people organized into 10 layers. There’s no right or wrong because the number of layers achieves different objectives. If you have lots, it means you have lots of redundancy and a lot of quality control and low error rate. Fewer layers is more freedom and space to experiment, which means a higher error rate. It depends on the goal. If your goal is innovation, you want a high error rate and to try lots of stuff. If you’re building planes, you don’t want to manufacture 10 and send them flying and see which eight fall down and crash.  There’s this idea that innovation is always good, but innovation comes along with higher failure rates, so you really want to think about specific teams or groups that create what you goal. Do you want innovation? Do you want high quality? You can’t have both.  Finally, I was intrigued by your idea of the “Moses trap,” which is exploring the downside of embracing loonshots. Can you explain the trap?  You see this pattern over and over, especially in Silicon Valley, where the leader is so enamoured with new ideas. You need two conditions. Number one is an all-powerful leader where the decisions really get made from the top of the mountain. Two, you have someone who becomes infatuated with the crazy ideas and always wants to have the next one. You always hear that something is the holy loonshot that will save the company.  That will work for a while because you can have strong technologists making those bets, but it will inevitably fail because nobody is right 100 percent or even 90 or 80 percent of the time. More importantly, when you get into those traps you develop blinders and believe that the only thing that matters are the improvements in product. You miss the small changes in strategy that can transform your industry.  Look at what happened to PanAm. You had a terrifically talented leader who identified new technologies that allowed him to build bigger, faster, better planes, and he kept turning that cycle and that worked for quite a while until it didn’t. He had all these competitors and he was building bigger faster planes, but some of them were working on small changes in strategy like frequent flyer miles, things like yield management with big data, how to arrange seats. Things that sound kind of boring but actually make a big difference, and when airline deregulation hit [creating a free market for the airline industry], he had big, fast planes but no competitors. His competitors didn’t have as high-quality planes, but they had small changes in strategy that allowed them to run a much more economical business. They survived and PanAm didn’t.


upi--2019-11-01--Physicists offer theory for how the Big Bang explosion was ignited

Nov. 1 (UPI) -- Most models of the Big Bang take the ignition for granted. Researchers at the University of Central Florida wanted to explore how the birth of the cosmos was set in motion.  After analyzing supernova explosions and considering the constraints of an unborn universe, a team of engineers and astrophysicists at UCF developed a new theory for the mechanisms that could trigger a Big Bang explosion. They published their theory Friday in the journal Science.  "We defined the critical criteria where we can drive a flame to self-generate its own turbulence, spontaneously accelerate and transition into detonation," study co-author Kareem Ahmed, an assistant professor in UCF's department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said in a news release. "We're using the turbulence to enhance the mixing of the reactions to the point where it transitions into this violent reaction and essentially leads to supernovas, which is exploding stars in simple terms. We're taking a simplified flame to where it's reacting at five times the speed of sound."  Ahmed and his colleagues first happened upon a novel mechanism for ignition while analyzing supernova reactions and looking for new methods for hypersonic jet propulsion.  "When we started to dig deeper, we realized that this is relatable to something as profound as the origin of the universe," he said.  With enough turbulence, the scientists found an unconfined flame can become self-perpetuating. Once the flame is self-perpetuating, it starts to consume the energy it has ingested and a Mach 5 hypersonic supernova explosion is triggered.  The researchers tested the new ignition mechanics inside a turbulent shock tube in the labs at UCF.  "Thermonuclear combustion waves in [type Ia supernovae] are qualitatively similar to chemical combustion waves on Earth because they are controlled by the same physical mechanisms," researchers wrote in their paper.  Authors of the new new study suggest their ignition theory could be used to develop more powerful and efficient engines for faster air and space travel. Ahmed and his researcher partners hope the theory will eventually inspire a zero-emissions engine, in which all the combustion components are converted into energy.


yahoonews--2019-09-13--A turning point on UFOs Physicist Michio Kaku tells ufology conference the truth is out there

A 'turning point' on UFOs: Physicist Michio Kaku tells ufology conference the truth is out there

BARCELONA, Spain — For the often-ridiculed followers of ufology, the study of unidentified flying objects, there was a sense of validation when the celebrated physicist and author Michio Kaku took a break from his work on string field theory to address the Ufology World Congress here last weekend and offer some advice on how to behave aboard an alien spaceship.  “For God’s sake, steal something!” he exhorted the audience of 1,000 at the Hesperia Barcelona Tower hotel, famous for its spaceship bar perched off the 29th floor. Kaku said a pocketed alien paper clip, alien fork, even a bit of “alien dandruff” would yield useful chemical and genetic information to scientists.  It is, of course, a matter of speculation whether extraterrestrials have hair, let alone dandruff. Drawings based on the descriptions of people who claim to have seen them typically depict them as bald, although there is also believed to be a race of blond humanoid aliens known as “Nordics.”  Kaku, a well-known science writer, media personality and professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York Graduate Center, also spoke to Yahoo News about assorted planetary matters, including his concerns about a future traffic jam in orbits around the moon, in a separate interview.  Even without extraterrestrial dandruff to analyze, the field of astrobiology, the study of life outside Earth, has been invigorated recently by some provocative findings released over the past 20 months. Researchers have been poring over recently declassified videos shot by U.S. Navy pilots over the East Coast in 2015, showing mysterious flying objects that behave like no known aircraft. Thanks to newly updated radar systems in Navy jets, the videos have aided scientists by providing “testability” and previously unknown metrics about UFOs. “We now know they fly between Mach 5 and Mach 20 — five to 20 times the speed of sound,” Kaku said. “We know they zigzag so fast that any pilot would be crushed by centrifugal force. That they have no exhaust that we can see.” The explanations usually invoked for UFO sightings — meteors, weather balloons, even the planet Venus — can’t explain these live-action high-precision shots, said Kaku, leading to either of two possible conclusions: They are of human origin, representing a technology so cutting-edge that even leading scientists are puzzled by it. Or, he said, “maybe they are evidence of an advanced outer space civilization.”  Could they be Russian, not Martian? Perhaps, Kaku allowed, given that last year Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that “Russia had built a hypersonic flying vehicle that can zigzag.” The U.S. and China are also working on hypersonic drones. On the other hand, Kaku emphasized, “maybe they are extraterrestrial.” After all, he noted, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, while earthly science was born merely 300 years ago; on any of 4,000 recently discovered exoplanets, where life as we know it might be able to exist, alien civilizations may well have had much longer to advance their scientific and technological skills.  Even if not smoking-gun proof, the declassified videos — bolstered by confirmation of multiple sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles during 2014 and 2015, including at least one near-collision — are giving ufology new weight. “We’ve reached a turning point,” Kaku said. “It used to be that believers had to prove that these objects were from an intelligent race in outer space. Now the burden of proof is on the government to prove they’re not from intelligent beings in outer space.”  The possibility that they are vehicles from other planetary civilizations, Kaku told Yahoo, “now has to be put on the table.”  Still, in the absence of even a molecule of aliens’ DNA, if they have DNA — Kaku cautioned that pilots in alien spacecraft may be cybernetic or robotic — astrobiology remains largely a discipline without a material subject matter. Which is why Kaku wants something scientists can touch and examine in the lab, predicting that “it will end the debate right then and there.”  Whatever the state of provability, ETs and spinning discs are again the rage, as evidenced in more than just ticket prices for the three-day Ufology World Congress, which ranged up to $1,600 for premium seating and a “meet-and-greet” with Kaku.  There was a sense of change in the air, or at least the skies, in both popular culture and scientific research. In a throwback to the ’50s and ’60s, when sightings of flying saucers were front-page news and TV shows warned viewers not to shake hands with aliens should they encounter them, the media, from Fox News to the New York Times, Politico and the Washington Post, is now giving the topic more airtime and more ink. Congress is demanding more information about UFO sightings as well. New TV shows and documentaries are popping up, among them a series backed by Sony Pictures TV about the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident, when unidentified aerial vehicles near U.S. Air Force bases in the U.K. were sighted by multiple military witnesses. And there is renewed interest in the 1947 Roswell incident — when unidentifiable debris from what the U.S. military later said was a weather balloon crashed in New Mexico — and in Area 51, the classified Nevada military base that conspiracy theorists believe houses captured aliens and their vehicles. This summer, when a 21-year-old Nevada man, Matthew Roberts, posted a public Facebook page calling for a mass march on the base to uncover the truth, some 2 million Facebook users signed on, even though Roberts, as he later admitted, meant it as a joke. The substitute event, a pair of festivals nearby dubbed “Alienstock,” was canceled after Pentagon officials warned civilians to keep away from the installation.  As of last December, only 35 percent of Americans believed aliens have landed on Earth, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, but further intrigue and research into UFOs is being spurred by funding from Tom DeLonge, the frontman for the turn-of-the-millennium pop punk band Blink-182, who founded the science and media venture To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science as “a vehicle for the disclosure of the UFO phenomenon.”  DeLonge is also executive producer of “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation,” a six-part documentary on the History Channel, which also airs “Ancient Aliens” and “Project Blue Book.” DeLonge’s series explores a shadowy Pentagon initiative called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was first officially acknowledged in December 2017, when the New York Times ran a front-page article that included links to two declassified videos never before seen by the public.  The AATIP, which the Pentagon claims was shuttered in 2012, ostensibly was created in 2007 to catalogue aerial threats from foreign countries. But the titles of supplemental reports, which were listed in an unclassified letter to Sen. John McCain obtained by former British Ministry of Defense official Nick Pope (a speaker at the ufology conference), imply that the Defense Department was looking at threats much farther over the horizon than Russia: “Traversable Wormholes,” “Invisibility Cloaks,” “Space Communication Implications of Quantum Entanglement” and “Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.” The contents of the reports remain secret.  Luis Elizondo, who headed the AATIP and stars in “Unidentified,” is demanding that UFOs be taken more seriously: he marched out of his Defense Department post in October 2017 protesting that the department was ignoring “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapons platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” Now employed by the To the Stars Academy, he told Politico in April, “If you are in a busy airport and see something you are supposed to say something. With our own military members it is kind of the opposite: ‘If you do see something, don’t say something.’”  UFO believer Robert Bigelow, owner of Bigelow Aerospace, which conducted secret research for the AATIP, and who prior to that ran a hush-hush “UFO lab” on his Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, the subject of a recent documentary, despairs of the “juvenile taboo” he says attaches to research on the subject. Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who consults for To the Stars, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last year that the Pentagon’s don’t-bother-us-with-alien-spacecraft attitude is “a serious and recurring impediment to progress,” akin to “having the Army conduct a submarine search without the Navy.” “Nobody wants to be ‘the alien guy’ in the national security bureaucracy,” he wrote. “Nobody wants to be ridiculed.”  The calls to make the study of UFOs more respectable got a boost at the Barcelona conference from appearances by Kaku and other serious speakers, including researchers and a government official, but there was also a large representation of enthusiasts and eccentrics. One self-declared expert on the relationship between humans and extraterrestrials warned the audience that aliens are coming to Earth to enslave humans and eat their babies.  Even so, the general tone was upbeat. “We’re in game-changing, paradigm-busting territory,” said Pope, who for 21 years worked in the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense, including four during the 1990s when he headed Britain’s UFO program. He said that during his years there the program “never found proof you could take to the bank,” but neither did it conclude that UFOs were definitively not from outside Earth.  When the U.K. began allowing Freedom of Information requests 15 years ago, many files from the UFO program were opened up. Pope said UFOs are the topic that Brits most often ask their government about. Citing reports from European governments as well as the U.S. and accounts of sightings by “police officers, pilots and military personnel,” he said in an interview that he hopes to “bring the subject out of the fringe and into the mainstream.”  Prior to the 1990s, Pope “had no interest in the topic at all — I was simply assigned it as a government job.” Now he believes that “more likely than not,” at least some UFOs may be of extraterrestrial origin. “There’s no smoke without fire. When you put it all together, even if 99 percent are misidentification and hoaxes, you only need to prove one. The skeptics have to be right every day, but the believers only have to be right once.”  Former IBM executive Jan Harzan, executive director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), which has been cataloguing and investigating reports of UFOs for 50 years, was more emphatic: “We are definitely not alone,” he said. “It’s a fact!” He has believed this since his childhood, when he and his brother witnessed a UFO in their backyard in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where the boys played around with radio equipment and tried to conduct experiments with antimatter. Harzan said the great majority of the 500 or more reports his organization receives monthly are dismissed, but “we think about 5 percent appear to be legitimate.”  That implies around 300 genuine sightings of alien craft a year, and not even a speck of dandruff to show for it.  Or is there? Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan spoke about the possibility that three-fingered mummies from Peru contain alien DNA (if alien life is, in fact, DNA-based). J.J. and Desiree Hurtak, both social scientists, spoke about pyramids on Mars and how Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were among those who believed they’d witnessed UFOs, which they said have also been spotted near the site of the destroyed nuclear power plant at Fukushima, Japan. “We believe [extraterrestrials] are not happy with nuclear energy,” said Desiree, while J.J. explained that during a vision he had in 1973, he was given a world map that showed him precisely where to find the footprints of giants in South Africa, as outlined in his book “The Keys of Enoch.” In an interview with Yahoo, they said they “have evidence” of a number of alien corpses. “Michio Kaku says [scientists] need [alien] tissue samples,” noted J.J. “We’re suggesting there already are tissue samples. All are under top-secret control, and they won’t be available for several years.”  The conference spanned three days of lectures and workshops, exploring the diversity of UFO craft (shaped like barbells, cigars, shiny orbs or even Tic Tacs), the numerous varieties of alien races (from the lizard-like Dracos and large-eyed, hairless Greys to the tall, human-like Nordics), and the phenomena of crop circles, lucid dreaming, pineal gland stimulation and preparing for alien arrivals by learning “the language of light.” Some of the attendees said they’d seen UFOs, and one claimed to actually be from Mars, bearing the message that humans needed to love each other. Spanish media celebrities ambled about, some doing interviews, some giving impromptu talks — among them parapsychology investigator Sergio Ruiz, who broadcasts five radio shows in Spain. His reason for coming from the Basque country to the conference: demonic possession. Ruiz said he’d recently completed a Vatican course on the subject. According to him, the first thing that’s taught is that victims of possession may in fact have been overtaken by extraterrestrials.  As to why those from outer space would have any interest in Earth, most speakers said they were coming in peace and to help humanity. Harzan, MUFON’s director, said that most messages conveyed to those whose experiences MUFON believed were legitimate concerned saving the planet from destruction.  But one of the final speakers of the ufology congress, American author Alfred Webre, a self-described “international lawyer” who writes books about “exopolitics” — the politics between Earthlings and aliens — raised the most alarming possibility: that extraterrestrials are coming to Earth to recruit human slave labor. “There are some estimates that 60 million humans are enslaved in industrial facilities in the solar systems, producing products used through the galaxy,” he told Yahoo. Even worse, he said, some aliens, specifically the race known as Draco-Reptilians, believed to come from the Orion constellation, have a taste for human babies.  Webre, who said he previously worked for the Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, claimed he headed a project called the Extraterrestrial Communication Study, established early in the Carter administration but “stopped in its tracks by the Pentagon in October 1977.” The reason, he said: The project was about to expose the fact that “the United States has had secret treaties with certain extraterrestrial civilizations” — Orion Greys and Draco-Reptilians, to be specific — going back to FDR’s time. He said our world is actually being overseen by a regional galactic government of “seven or eight civilizations.”  For all his lurid depictions of extraterrestrials, Webre had come to deliver good news in his speech at the congress. “The famous Brazilian prophet Xico Xavier,” he said, made a prediction on July 20, 1969, “the same day the U.S. allegedly landed on the moon.” In 50 years from that day, said Webre, “if World War III hadn’t broken out by then,” it would never happen, and humanity “would be rejoining the galactic community of nations” — to which he hopes to be an Earthly representative.  His message was so crucial that Webre posted on his Facebook page that Hurricane Dorian was a “weather warfare event,” meant to interrupt or overshadow his talk at the conference and the impending “reunification of Earth humanity with peaceful galactic communities.”  A few hours later, Barcelona media broke the news that two tornadoes had touched down in the city, in which tornadoes are a rarity — the first about 3 miles north of the hotel, the second about 3 miles south. And they’d touched down just before Webre was to speak.  Yahoo News contributor Melissa Rossi is a U.S. journalist based in Spain.  Download the Yahoo News app to customize your experience.


eveningstandard--2019-01-22--Lev Landau Google Doodle Soviet physicistaposs groundbreaking work remembered

Lev Landau Google Doodle: Soviet physicist's groundbreaking work remembered

Soviet physicist Lev Landau is being honoured with a Google Doodle on what would have been his 111th birthday.  Here’s everything you need to know about the man who helped shape modern science:  Born in Azerbaijan in 1908, he was already destined for a future in the sciences as the son of an engineer and a physician.  Landau excelled in academics, enrolling at university at age just 13. By 21 years of age, he had finished his PhD and went on to win a Rockerfeller scholarship which helped kick start his career as a scientist.  Teaching at various universities, visiting campuses in Zurich, Copenhagen and Cambridge, Landau eventually returned to the Soviet Union and moved to the Ukrainian Physio-Technical Institute run by a group of physicists. It was here that, together with his students, he calculated the effects in quantum electrodynamics and worked on the theory of metals, ferromagnetism and superconductivity.  Lev Landau won the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics in 1962 for his development of a theory called superfluidity, which accounted for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below - 270.98 °C.  He is remembered today across all areas of modern science, with the Landau Levels, Landau damping, Landau energy and Landau diamagnetism all influenced by his work.  A crater of the moon is also named after him.


newspunch--2019-03-13--Russian Physicists Create Time Machine That Can Move Tiny Particles Into The Past

Russian Physicists Create ‘Time Machine’ That Can Move Tiny Particles Into The Past

Russian physicists have managed to achieve the same principle of time travel  A team of scientists claim that they have created a ‘time machine’ which can move tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past.  Researchers have described it as being able to move the smaller-than-atom sized objects in the opposite direction of ‘time’s arrow’.  The Mail Online reports: The experiments involved electrons – negatively charged particles that make up an atom – found in the realm of quantum mechanics, the study of sub-atomic particles.  They gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool, in which the balls are substitutes for the electrons.  After the break the ‘balls’ are scattered in what should be a haphazard way, according to the laws of physics.  But researchers managed to make them reform in their original triangle ‘break’ order – appearing as if they were turning back time – using a special quantum computer.  Researchers, from the Laboratory of the Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT), say that they have effectively defied the second law of thermodynamics with the experiment.  This is a rule within physics that governs the direction of events from the past to the future, stating that everything in our universe tends towards decay.  The ‘time machine’ is built from a basic quantum computer, which is made up of ‘qubits’.  These are units of information described by a ‘one’, a ‘zero’, or a mixed ‘superposition’ of both, that can be stored on an electron.  In the experiment an ‘evolution program’ was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.  During this process, order was lost – just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved ‘backwards’, from chaos to order.  The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.  To an outside observer, it looks as if time is running backwards, said lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, who heads the laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information.  ‘We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.’  The ‘time machine’, described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron ‘qubits’.  In the experiment an ‘evolution program’ was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.  During this process, order was lost – just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue.  Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved ‘backwards’, from chaos to order.  The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.  The scientists found that, working with just two qubits, ‘time reversal’ was achieved with a success rate of 85 per cent.  When three qubits were involved more errors occurred, resulting in a 50 per cent success rate.  The experiment could have a practical application in the development of quantum computers, the scientists said.  ‘Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors,’ said Dr Lesovik.