Month: March 2008
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A new class of photon gun
Photons are easy to produce, at least en masse. But making them one at a time in a controlled fashion is much harder. Until recently the only trick physicists had for this was to reduce the brightness of a beam until it contained only one photon at a time, on average. Of course, the “on…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…this week’s peaches from the physics arXiv blog: The wound ballistics question How Hawking radiation may explain dark energy Rubik’s cube proof cut to 25 moves The curious case of the disappearing physicist Questioning the Big Bang
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Bang ‘n’ bucks
Other highlights from the physics arXiv: Predicting Synthetic Rescues in Metabolic Networks Dangerous Implications of a Minimum Length in Quantum Gravity Punctuated Chirality Quantum Pattern Recognition With Liquid State NMR The STARFLAG Handbook on Collective Animal Behaviour
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Questioning the Big Bang
The Big Bang dominates current thinking in cosmology. But the experimental evidence that backs it up is surprisingly thin. In fact there are only two pieces of evidence: the galactic redshift and the cosmic background radiation. The Big Bang explains these observations but only by introducing problems of their own. So are there any alternative…
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The curious case of the disappearing physicist
If you work in particle physics, cosmology or condensed matter, you’ll probably be familiar with the name Majorana, as in Majorana fermions and Majorana neutrinos. But Ettore Majorana is famous for another reason. As one of the leading lights of theoretical physics in the 1930s, he made important contributions to nuclear, atomic and molecular physics…
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Rubik’s cube proof cut to 25 moves
Last year, a couple of fellas at Northeastern University with a bit of spare time on their hands proved that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube could be solved in a maximum of 26 moves. Now Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has gone one better. He’s shown that there are no configurations that can be…
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How Hawking radiation may explain dark energy
In 1993, the Dutch Nobel prize-winning physicist Gerard t’Hooft suggested that all the information in a region of space can be represented as a hologram, an idea that implies that the laws of physics that govern our universe are somehow encoded on its (higher dimensional) boundary. This idea, known as the holographic principle, has a…
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The wound ballistics question
The gloves are off in the world of wound ballistics. The question is: how do handgun bullets do their damage? According to Martin Fackler, a retired colonel and battlefield surgeon in the US Army Medical Corp, the main cause of injury is along or close to the wound channel, the path the bullet takes through…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…the sweetmeats from this week’s physics arXiv blog: Single photons bounced off orbiting satellite Future brightens for quantum imaging New type of pulsating star discovered Do galactic cosmic rays influence global warming? Entanglement beats gravitational test
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Photons ‘n’ fermions
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: An Introduction to the Dark Energy Problem Designing Potentials by Sculpturing Wires Emergent Gravity and Dark Energy Is the CMB Cold Spot a Gate to Extra Dimensions? Evacuation Dynamics: Empirical Results, Modeling and Applications Coherent Meta-materials and the Lasing Spaser Translation of Leonhard Euler’s:…