A Break in the Quest for the Quantum Speed Limit

“When you see that, you know you’re touching on something very, very deep and fundamental.”

By NATALIE WOLCHOVER

A ubiquitous quantum phenomenon has been detected in a large class of superconducting materials, fueling a growing belief among physicists that an unknown organizing principle governs the collective behavior of particles and determines how they spread energy and information. Understanding this organizing principle could be a key into “quantum strangeness at its deepest level,” says Subir Sachdev, a theorist at Harvard who was not involved with the new experiments.

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We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time

Strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down

By  Jon Cartwright

In the Antarctic, things happen at a glacial pace. Just ask Peter Gorham. For a month at a time, he and his colleagues would watch a giant balloon carrying a collection of antennas float high above the ice, scanning over a million square kilometres of the frozen landscape for evidence of high-energy particles arriving from space.

When the experiment returned to the ground after its first flight, it had nothing to show for itself, bar the odd flash of background noise. It was the same story after the second flight more than a year later.

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By Fiona MacDonald

In an incredible first, scientists have captured the world's first actual photo of quantum entanglement - a phenomenon so strange Einstein famously described it as 'spooky action at a distance'.

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A new moon for Neptune

Hippocamp, a previously undetected moon of Neptune, has a peculiar location and a tiny size relative to the planet’s other inner moons, which suggests a violent history for the region within 100,000 kilometres of the planet.

By Anne J. Verbiscer

In 1989, the NASA spacecraft Voyager 2 detected six moons of Neptune that are interior to the orbit of the planet’s largest moon, Triton1. In a paper in Nature, Showalter et al.2 report the discovery of a seventh inner moon, Hippocamp. Originally designated as S/2004 N 1 and Neptune XIV, this moon was found in images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2004–05 and 2009, and then confirmed in further images captured in 2016. Hippocamp is only 34 kilometres wide, which makes it diminutive compared with its larger siblings, and it orbits Neptune just inside the orbit of Proteus — the planet’s second largest moon.

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Experiments Show The Effects of a Fourth Spatial Dimension

Wow.

By David Nield

We're used to dealing with three physical dimensions and one extra dimension of time as we move through the Universe, but two teams of scientists have shown that a fourth spatial dimension could reach beyond the limits of up and down, left and right, and forwards and backwards.

As you might expect given this is bending the laws of physics, the experiments involved are partly theoretical and very complex, and touch on our old friend quantum mechanics.

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Your cells are constantly being shed and replaced—so is your body ever completely refreshed? Does anything remain of the body that existed on Jan. 1, 2017? 2007? The day you were born?

The Universe Began With a Big Melt, Not a Big Bang

The cosmological constant and the creation of the universe.

By Thanu Padmanabhan

There are two tantalizing mysteries about our universe, one dealing with its final fate and the other with its beginning, that have intrigued cosmologists for decades. The community has always believed these to be independent problems—but what if they are not?

The first problem has to do with the existence of something called “dark energy,” which is today accelerating the expansion of the universe and will determine its final fate. Theorists tell us that the effects of dark energy can be explained by introducing a term into Einstein’s equations of gravity called the cosmological constant. But, for this explanation to work, the cosmological constant must have a very specific—and tiny—value. In natural units, the cosmological constant is given by 1 divided by a number made of 1 followed by 123 zeros! Explaining this value is considered one of the greatest challenges faced by theoretical physics today.

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Lawrence Krauss on "Seeing" the Early Universe

By Stephen Johnson

At a 2016 convention hosted by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss spoke about scientists' attempts to look back to when the universe was just fractions of a second old. A few highlights from Krauss' talk are listed below, and his full presentation can be seen at the bottom of this article.

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Astronomers Have Detected Strange Signals Coming From a Star 11 Light Years Away

Insert standard clause "not saying it's aliens, but ..."

Dave Mosher

Astronomers say they have detected "strange signals" coming from the direction of a small, dim star located about 11 light-years from Earth.

Researchers picked up the mysterious signals on May 12 using the Arecibo Observatory, a huge radio telescope built inside of a Puerto Rican sinkhole.

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For First Time, Einstein’s Relativity Used to Weigh a Star

Scientists employ ‘gravitational lensing’ to measure the mass of a white dwarf

By Calla Cofield

The mass of Stein 2051 B, a white dwarf star located about 18 light-years from Earth, has been a subject of some controversy for over a century. Now, a group of astronomers has finally made a precise measurement of the star's mass and settled a 100-year-old debate, using a cosmic phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein. 

The researchers calculated the star's mass using carefully timed observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope, which studied Stein 2051 B when it eclipsed another, more distant star, as seen from Earth. During this transit, the background star appeared to change its position in the sky, moving ever so slightly to the side, even though its actual position on the sky had not changed at all.

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Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity?

The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.

By Corey S. Powell

Illustration by Nicholas Garber

It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbiting planets, colliding galaxies, the dynamics of the expanding universe as a whole. That’s big. Then there is quantum mechanics, which handles the other three forces—electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. Quantum theory is extremely adept at describing what happens when a uranium atom decays, or when individual particles of light hit a solar cell. That’s small.

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We've Been Underestimating How Many Black Hole Collisions Are Terrorising The Universe

Staring into the void.

By David Nield

Astronomers have found what looks to a fresh trove of supermassive black hole pairs, increasing the number of known pairs by about 50 percent, after new image analysis techniques were used to study two of our most detailed sky surveys.

Finding these black hole pairs is crucial to understanding more about how they form and how galaxies eventually collide, with the new findings giving astronomers five new pairs to analyse.

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Supernova Fail: Giant Dying Star Collapses Straight into Black Hole

By Elizabeth Howell

It appears the path to becoming a black hole is more complex than astronomers thought. Rather than exploding into a supernova before collapsing into a black hole, as expected, one giant star skipped the pyrotechnics and went straight to the collapse. 

This so-called "massive fail," spotted in a nearby galaxy, could explain why so few massive stars have been observed going supernova, researchers conducting a new study explained. As many as 30 percent of these massive stars may instead quietly collapse into a black hole.

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