Researchers at the University of Sydney and Dartmouth College have developed a new way to design quantum memory, bringing quantum computers a step closer to reality. The results will appear June 19 in the journal Nature Communications.
Over the last couple of years, I've gotten rid of cable and watch most of my television online. In addition to traditional television through streaming sites like Amazon Instant Video and Hulu, I watch a lot of my programming - especially non-fiction and science - through YouTube.
Sometimes, even the fantastic world of comic books takes heed of real-world scientific discoveries.
When the Thor film came out a couple of years ago, I posted about how impressed I was by their attempt to make this fantasy story about Norse gods into something that was at least somewhat tractable within our modern scientific worldview. The trailer for the upcoming sequel, Thor: The Dark World, seems to hint at the idea that they'll continue with this trend, as it addresses the question of what existed before our universe. (The answer, it seems, is darkness ... and evil, ugly elves.)
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Last month, I posted about the release of Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin. While I found the book extremely enjoyable, I also felt that Smolin was far from making an airtight case about his central thesis: that physics needs to transform into treating time as "real" in order to resolve the "crisis" in which physical cosmology finds itself. The book concludes without it being clear that there really is a crisis, let alone that Smolin's course would resolve the crisis if it did exist.
In the recent film Star Trek Into Darkness, the crew of the Enterprise uses a warp engine to move faster than the speed of light. This would normally not be allowed by the laws of physics, specifically Einstein's theory of relativity. However, as I've discussed before in our article "Can Anything Move Faster Than the Speed of Light?", the limitations from the theory of relativity make it impossible to accelerate past the speed of light limit, but there do exist some intriguing workarounds (in theory, at least).
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In the physics community, there is no more broadly respected figure than Albert Einstein. Einstein is a transformative figure in the history of physics, comparable only to Isaac Newton in the sheer breadth of how he changed our way of thinking about the physical world. The key insight for which he is credited is his development of the theory of relativity, which allowed physicists to understand the behavior of physical objects in terms of the geometry of the spacetime that they inhabited.
I came across this intriguing video of a banana being levitated in the air. This isn't the first time I've discussed this strange new technology of quantum levitation, but it's been a while. The last time I brought it up was back in November 2011, when talk show host and comedian Stephen Colbert levitated his ice cream flavor on his show.
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Physicists like it when things crash together. Okay, not so much when they do so unexpectedly. Just like anyone else, physicists prefer to keep their cars out of the body shop.
One of the deepest questions in physics is the attempt to provide an answer to the seemingly simple questions: Does time really exist?
Though we all experience time moving in one direction (the "arrow of time" as it is called), the curious thing about the laws of physics don't actually require this. If you tried to apply the equations with time moving the opposite direction, they would actually still make sense. Why, then, do we experience such an unrelenting forward motion in time?
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If you've been paying any attention at all to astrophysics or cosmology over the last couple of decades, you'll be aware that one of the major mysteries science has been exploring is the composition of matter in the universe.
Did you know that every moment, your body is being bombarded by particles with their origin in distant galaxies? These cosmic rays, as they're called, come from supernovas in distant star systems. Upon reaching the Earth's atmosphere, these particles from the "primary cosmic ray" collide with the molecules there and emit other particles that are part of a "secondary cosmic ray." It's these secondary particles that actually reach us on the surface of the Earth.
Planet Physics is a site that is updated daily, by adding new summaries of weblogs that are concerned with Physics. Every day, you can find something new and exciting on our site. Every day, there are new summaries and new ideas, in order to reflect the Physics news and facts as soon and as accurately as possible. Read the blogs that are written by great authors, who all have the same main interest: Physics.
Updated on June 19, 2013 10:11 AM UTC. Entries are normalised to UTC time.
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