Science News

It has NO EDGE. And NO CENTER... or does it?

Physicists have teleported quantum information from one ensemble of atoms to another 150 metres away, a demonstration that paves the way towards quantum routers and a quantum Internet

If time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, how could anything happen before it? Our concept of ‘before and after’ (as we know it) relies on our understanding of time and the concept of ’cause and effect’. An analogous question would be “What’s north of the north pole?”. The question has no meaningful answer due to our understanding and definition of ‘north’. This puts the question in a strictly theoretical realm. We’re going to explore several different hypotheses on what happened before the Big Bang, put forth by a few of the world’s leading theoretical physicists.

Instead of just basic machines, the city becomes a vast interconnected system designed for turning energy into work. Seen through that lens, cities are really giant heat engines, and that makes them creatures subject to one of the most profound principles in all of physics: the omnipresent Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Physicists have worked out how to build invisibility cloaks that hide objects with the flick of a switch...

This image shows how a basic mechanical system can produce both order and chaos. The dots are actually points on a plot: each point shows the angle (x-axis) and speed (y-axis) of an imaginary rotor (like a helicopter blade spinning without friction or air resistance) at a single moment in time. This map is the result of 1,000 imaginary trials: during each one, the blade begins at a different angle and velocity, and its trajectory is mapped every second for 100 seconds. As the process repeats, the plotted points begin to form an image composed, in some areas, of highly regular patterns, and, in others, of scattered, randomly arranged dots.

Researchers propose how to realize time crystals, structures whose lowest-energy states are periodic both in time and space.

Now two physicists – James Hill and Barry Cox from the University of Adelaide in Australia – have shown that Einstein's theory of special relativity can be logically extended to allow for faster-than-light motion. They're quick to point out that their finding in no way contradicts the original theory, but simply provides a new aspect of it.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-physicists-special-relativity.html#jCp

The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases (also known as plasmas) will give scientists a new way to explore how order emerges from chaos in the cosmos. This breakthrough finding was published online in the journal,Nature Physics on Sept. 30.

There's no way to take a direct picture of something as small and fleeting as a Higgs boson. But physicists can photograph its relatives, directly imaging atomic structures and improving our understanding of atomic physics. Now comes this picture: The first-ever snapshot of a single atom's shadow.