The Physics arXiv Blog
-
Relativity sung to the tune of Yellow Submarine
Max Tegmark and Flora Lopis have been working hard on teaching the 8.033 course on relativity at MIT. They publish it today on the arXiv saying: “To maximize the learning experience from this technical review, the reader is encouraged to sing it to the tune of Yellow Submarine, with italicized lines going like the chorus…”…
-
Statistical evidence of drug abuse in baseball
How many major league baseball players have used performance-enhancing drugs? The answer turns out to be buried in the performance statistics of players, if you know where to look. Eugene Stanley and colleagues at Boston University have done the appropriate number crunching and say that a whopping 5 per cent of players must have been…
-
The coming blackout
On Monday, 17th December 2007, Europe narrowly avoided disaster. A cold snap had lowered the temperature across much of continent to several degrees below average and that evening, as households across the continent switched on their heating systems, the power consumption hit critical levels. France, Italy and Spain all set new records for power consumption.…
-
Buckyballs boost flash memory
There’s a problem on the horizon for memory chips called voltage scaling. It comes about because of a fundamental asymmetry in the design of nonvolatile charge-based memory. These chips need to store data for about 10^12 times longer than it takes to program or erase. That’s why it’s novolatile. This asymmetry is usally achieved by…
-
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…
-
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
-
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
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…