We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.
The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave. When you think of sound waves, you probably think of something like this:
But that’s not how sound waves work. A wave like that is called a transverse wave, where each individual particle moves up and down to create a snake situation. (more…)
Like the gravitational forces that are responsible for the attraction between the Earth and the moon as well as the dynamics of the entire solar system, there exist attractive forces between objects at the nanoscale. These are the so-called van der Waals forces, which are ubiquitous in nature and thought to play a crucial role in determining the structure, stability and function of a wide variety of molecules and materials.
Treating van der Waals interactions as coupling between waves is a paradigm shift for chemistry and materials science.
A group of researchers, led by Alexandre Tkatchenko, Professor at the University of Luxembourg, demonstrated that the true nature of these forces differs from conventional wisdom in chemistry and biology.The scientists showed that these interactions have to be treated as coupling between wavesrather than as mutual attraction between particles. “In the simplest case, you can think of two chains of atoms and you could identify points in these chains that are attracted to each other. Typically, you would compute the van der Waals energy by just summing up all these pairs,” explains Alexandre Tkatchenko, Professor of Condensed-Matter Physics at the Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) of the University of Luxembourg.(more…)
Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning or ending
(Phys.org) —The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.
Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.
“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.(more…)
Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years,
but the theory’s mathematical insights continue to have an alluring pull
by Brian Greene
In October 1984 I arrived at Oxford University, trailing a large steamer trunk containing a couple of changes of clothing and about five dozen textbooks. I had a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard, and I was raring to launch into graduate study. But within a couple of weeks, the more advanced students had sucked the wind from my sails. Change fields now while you still can, many said. There’s nothing happening in fundamental physics.
If IT is anything, IT is what Gian Giudice has been waiting for his entire scientific life. “We are not talking about a confirmation of an established theory, but about opening a door into an unknown and unexplored world,” says Giudice, a theoretical particle physicist based at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
That’s if it turns out to be anything. At the moment, all we have are hints emerging from the debris of collisions within CERN’s showpiece particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. But if those hints firm up in the course of the coming weeks and months, it could be the big one. Forget the Higgs Boson, forget even gravitational waves: 2016 could go down as the year when a new picture of nature’s fundamental workings was unveiled. The hopes spring from two “bumps” that have appeared independently, in the same place, in the latest data from the LHC’s two big detectors, ATLAS and CMS. They point to the existence of a particle that dwarfs even the Higgs Boson, the giver-of-mass particle discovered at CERN in July 2012. CONTINUE READING HERE
I was looking over this pdf trying to decide what would make the best article and decided that it ALL was so very interesting that decided to share the complete pdf with the reader. Very interesting book and very interesting topics on Nikola Tesla especially in light with what we know today.
Here is just one excerpt about The Truth About Mars which the author of The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla caught and found very interesting in light of what we are learning not only when his book was originally written but what is now being discovered on the surface of the planet with the rovers:(more…)
Scientists don’t always agree with each other. Yes, I know; shocking but true. In cases of collegial disagreement, it’s often fun to quantify the extent of opinion by gathering a collection of experts and taking a poll. Inevitably some killjoy will loudly grumble that “scientific questions aren’t decided by voting!”, but that misses the point. A poll of scientists isn’t meant to decide questions, it’s meant to collect data — mapping out the territory of opinion among people who have spent time and effort thinking carefully about the relevant questions.
There’s been a bit of attention given recently to one such poll, carried out by Maximilian Schlosshauer, Johannes Kofler, and Anton Zeilinger at a quantum foundations meeting (see John Preskill at Quantum Frontiers, Swans on Tea). The pollsters asked a variety of questions, many frustratingly vague, which were patiently answered by the 33 participants.
This plot gives the money shot, as they say in Hollywood:(more…)
NASA scientists are investigating how entangled particles can behave like parts of one system. Their experiment has implications for cryptography and information transmission.
Quantum Mechanics
It’s possible for particles to be so intimately linked that, even when separated at a vast distance, a change to one particle can affect the other. This intimacy is referred to as entanglement.
Entanglement is described by quantum mechanics—a branch of physics that looks at the workings of particles at the subatomic level. Quantum mechanics posits that the properties of particles at this incredibly small scale rely on probability.
Scientists have sought to study the quantum world for decades. Albert Einstein, among others, thought that there must be some hidden variables that allowed quantum systems to be more predictable. John Bell presented the idea that for such a system with hidden variables to exist, one particle must have instantaneous influence on another particle.(more…)
This still from a computer simulation depicts the shape of a theorized five-dimensional black hole, which appears as a ring instead of a sphere. In the simulation, the black-hole ring starts off smooth, but then gives rise to a series of strange bulges. Credit: Pau Figueras, Markus Kunesch, and Saran Tunyasuvunakool
Black holes are messy in four dimensions. But add a fifth, and a black hole could shatter the laws of physics, scientists have shown.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England and Queen Mary University of London have successfully simulated a black hole in five dimensions with a supercomputer. Instead of having a spherical shape, such a black hole resembles a very thin ring, which gives rise to a series of bulges. At first these bulges are connected via puny strings, but as time wears on those strings become thinner, until the bulges break off into their own mini black holes.
CONSIDERATIONS ON LIGHT, MATTER, GRAVITY AND MAGNETISM
by Josef Hasslberger
Physics, the science which should be explaining to us how the universe came about and what it consists of, seems to have arrived at the end of a blind alley. Its descriptions of the origin and the workings of our universe get more and more complex, less and less agreed-upon and they are definitely not going to accompany us into the 21st century. We are at the beginning of the space-age. In order to survive in that new age, we need clear and unequivocal descriptions of physical phenomena.
What I see as the most grave shortcoming of establishment physics is its adamant refusal to investigate or at least accept the possibility of a creative life force. There is also a one-sided emphasis on entropic, (explosive, radiative, centrifugal) phenomena in physics and consequently also in current technology, to the almost total exclusion of the constructively ordering, non-entropic phenomena such as brought about by implosion and centripetal or vortex motion.
The descriptive language used by physics is mathematics. It is adequate to describe a number of observed phenomena, but depending on what phenomenon is to be described, physicists conveniently switch mathematics, thereby changing their whole frame of reference. There is no one theory that can adequately describe all the forces known to exist and the search for a unified field theory is running into serious problems.(more…)
In a neat demonstration of E=mc 2, physicists believe they can create electrons and positrons from colliding photons.
Researchers have worked out how to make matter from pure light and are drawing up plans to demonstrate the feat within the next 12 months.
The theory underpinning the idea was first described 80 years ago by two physicists who later worked on the first atomic bomb. At the time they considered the conversion of light into matter impossible in a laboratory.
But in a report published on Sunday, physicists at Imperial College London claim to have cracked the problem using high-powered lasers and other equipment now available to scientists.
“We have shown in principle how you can make matter from light,” said Steven Rose at Imperial. “If you do this experiment, you will be taking light and turning it into matter.”(more…)
The objects may help explain why our galaxy and its neighbors are hurtling towards a seemingly blank zone called the Great Attractor.
Hundreds of galaxies have been playing a cosmic game of hide and seek, and astronomers just tagged them “it”.
Using radio telescopes to peer through the dense plane of the Milky Way, researchers have spotted huge galactic gatherings that have long been obscured from view. These galaxies lie a mere 250 million light-years away—and they will only get closer, because they appear to be pulling us towards them at breakneck speed.
Scientists had suspected that galaxies existed in this region, says study co-author Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. But seeing them with traditional telescopes presents a challenge.
“It was not really not that surprising, because the stars and dust in our own Milky Way block a not insignificant part of the sky from our view, in optical light that is,” she says. “So yes, we did expect that many galaxies would be lying behind the plane of the Milky Way, or the so-called Zone of Avoidance. However, we did not know anything about their distribution in space.”(more…)
If everything is made up of atoms and they are electric then is everything electric? The known universe is made of 99% plasma and plasma is an ionised (electrically charged) gas. Is the Universe Electric?
All the stars including our sun our made of plasma; the “vacuum” of space is plasma; lightning is plasma; the Solar wind is a solar plasma wind. Nearly EVERYTHING is plasma. So is it an Electric Universe?
Electromagnetic forces are everywhere and perhaps everything. You cannot have a magnetic field without some form of electrical energy. Its an electromagnetic force.(more…)
Have you ever wondered what this reality is made of? This atomic structure that is palpable, that seems so real? How is it that from nothingness everything emerges? Atoms are made of 99.99999% space, so it turns out that what we call reality is mostly space with a little bit of a jiggle—a little vibratory fluctuation or, as described in quantum theory, a waveform generating what we call atomic structure. One must wonder, couldn’t this fluctuation be a function of the space itself? Could space actually be full instead of empty? Couldn’t atomic structures be only the symptom of the fluctuation of space?
This is nothing new; most ancient civilizations believed in an all-prevailing soup of energy embedded within the fabric of space, and later many of the world’s great thinkers, including such scientists as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Buckminster Fuller and Walter Russell, believed in an all-prevailing energy at the base of the fabric of space. The premise of this research is simple; space is not empty, it is full! It is full of an energy that creates atomic structures themselves — reality. It is a sea of electromagnetic flux we call the zero point energy, which has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, since its mechanical effects have now been measured in laboratories, and the cosmological constant was added to the vacuum at the universal scale to accommodate for the observed acceleration of expansion.(more…)
An ancient understanding of the cosmological universe puts forth that inaudible music calculates the position of the heavenly bodies in our skies. With quintessential harmony, Mars, Neptune, Uranus, and all the other planets are held perfectly in place, with the harmonic ratios of each planet determining how they respond to one another, and how they affect all life on the planet earth, as well as sentient life elsewhere in the galaxy. The ancients understood that cosmic harmony is the state of enlightenment. Disharmony, is when the egoic nature, or false self has not been healed, and conducts the ‘show’ of our lives – the musical, as it were, of you.
The symphony of full realization, however, is sweeter than any Beethoven, Mozart or Sibelius ever wrote. Certainly, more amazing than the latest off-Broadway phenom. In fact, God-consciousness is 10 million times more blissful than sexual experience, according to Sage Ramakrishna Paramahansa. The music that soothes the savage beast is no metaphor for some outwardly creature, it is the beast within us that is soothed when our bodies and minds are in harmony.(more…)
