The new particle accelerators are being designed and tested as part of the BELLA program, which use a series of lasers to accelerate particles over a span of inches, rather than the miles needed in traditional particle accelerators. Though the "big boy" particle accelerators are still much more powerful, using the BELLA-style accelerators in serial (one after the other) could get particles going nearly as fast in a much shorter period of time, allowing for some similar tests to be run in a much smaller facility.
Other proposals have been made in the past, such as desktop plasma-based accelerators. It remains to be seen which of these proposals will prove most viable.

This strange black hole phenomenon is achieved within the curious form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this rare state of matter, the flow of sound through the material is expressed the same way that the movement of light in a gravitational field is expressed, which has led the scientists to realize that they could create this analog of a black hole for sound. Multiple groups were working to achieve this, but the success seems to have come from Oren Lahav, Jeff Steinhauer, and colleagues at the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa.
Sound waves created within the "black hole" (which, I think, would more appropriately be called a "black noise hole" or maybe a "quiet hole," but neither have a catchy ring to them) are unable to escape, because when they attempt to reach the event horizon, they can't pass that barrier because they are pulled in at supersonic speeds. In other words, they are pulled into the black hole faster than they can travel out, like someone trying to swim against rapids or a waterfall.
But things get stranger ... because it's possible that these black holes for sound will also exhibit Hawking radiation. Quantum physics indicates that pairs of "virtual phonons" are constantly being created and destroyed. If one of these pairs forms near the event horizon of the sound black hole, one of the phonons may end up getting pulled into the black hole while the other escapes. This means that the sound black hole could emit phonons, which is exactly what one expects for light instead of sound in regular black holes.
With the successful creation of a black hole for sound, it appears that the race is on to detect Hawking radiation for sound.
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I previously discussed the benefits of FIRST back in April, around the time of their national competition in Atlanta, Georgia.
For more about actually creating robots, check out the "Robotics and Robots" section of About.com Inventors...
Though technically allowed, the closed timelike curves in relativity do create all sorts of problems for physics, because the initial conditions are no longer static. All predictivity seems to be lost. David Deutsch was able to describe a way to avoid this in 1991, by explaining how the particles begin traveling in a loop that causes them to interact in the initial conditions in exactly the same way they "originally" did, creating sort of a "Groundhog Day" effect.
According to a new paper in Physics Review Letters, it looks like there's a new addition to the problems caused by closed timelike curves: they can be used to break potential quantum encryption techniques. These systems involve using a quantum-mechanical system to encrypt information in a computer system. Here's how the Physics Review Focus newsletter describes the new findings:
Todd Brun of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and his colleagues have now found a way to use states defined by the Deutsch formulation to decode quantum-encrypted messages. Such a message could be sent as a series of particles, each in quantum state "zero," quantum state "one," or a combination state called a superposition. The intended recipient measures each particle but needs additional information after-the-fact from the sender to distinguish the superpositions from the non-superpositions. But a spy who could distinguish "on the fly" between, say, a zero and a superposition state could intercept the message and also send particles to the recipient that mimic the originals, thereby avoiding detection.For the spy to accomplish this, the researchers imagine a particle entering a CTC so that it travels around and back in time, allowing it to interact with its future self, so to speak, before going on its way again. They describe an interaction that, in the simplest example, leaves a particle in the zero state unchanged but transforms a superposition of zero and one into a pure one state. A standard measurement by the spy that distinguishes one from zero can then reveal with complete certainty whether the initial state was zero or a superposition.
Ordinarily such a transformation wouldn't be possible without advanced knowledge of the incoming state. The trick, Brun explains, is that the particle interacts with the transformed version of itself that comes back from the future. Brun says the scheme doesn’t violate any laws of physics, but he admits that the logic is hard to grasp. Compared with regular chronological reasoning, he says, "it's definitely cheating."
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What do you think of their list? Are these the physical laws that have had the greatest impact on humanity? Leave a comment with what physics concept you think has been most influential.
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Are you attending the World Science Festival? What events are you especially looking forward to? What events do you wish you could attend?
Even among those who bring up the role of consciousness, however, an even deeper early controversy is often glossed over - these questions were viewed, among many of the most prominent founders of quantum physics, as profoundly mystical questions. This viewpoint is tackled in a paper published in the European Journal of Physics by Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin ('Mysticism' in quantum mechanics: the forgotten controversy - abstract only).
Lisa Zyga covers the topic quite well in her article, Quantum Mysticism: Gone but Not Forgotten over at PhysOrg.com. Basically, Marin doesn't weigh in on the role of consciousness itself (being a historian rather than a physicist), but instead points out that the very fact that this controversy once existed shows that there are many different ways that science and religion can interact, instead of the "all or nothing" tug of war which seems so prevalent today. Marin suggests that, in part, this is a transition from the early 20th century Germanic worldview (which dominated theoretical physics of the early quantum era) with the Anglo-American viewpoint that has dominated physics since the Manhattan Project.
Apparently, weighing in on the science side of the science/religion split is the recent book by Victor J. Stenger, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness, written with the (seemingly) express purpose of debunking the mis-application of quantum physics to pseudo-religious hokum. I won't question the validity of Stenger's argument, having not yet read his book (it's sitting right here and I promise I'll get to it!), but I do think that Marin makes a valid point that physicists today are too quick to dismiss the entire debate over consciousness without really giving the complexities due intellectual credit.
What is without a doubt important, in an age where new age mysticism seeks to co-opt quantum physics as part of its support structure, is for scholars such as Marin and Stenger to clearly delineate the limits of this discussion. Even in the most extreme formulations, quantum physics interactions with consciousness do not grant anyone the ability to summon vast amounts of wealth just by thinking about it.