Lifeboat Foundation

Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves —ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time. If confirmed, this would be one of the most significant physics discoveries of the last century.

Move a large mass very suddenly—or have two massive objects suddenly collide, or a supernova explode—and you would create ripples in space-time, much like tossing a stone in a still pond. The more massive the object, the more it will churn the surrounding spacetime, and the stronger the gravitational waves it should produce. Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity back in 1915, but he thought it would never be possible to test that prediction.

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) is one of several experiments designed to hunt for these elusive ripples, and with its latest upgrade to Advanced LIGO, completed last year, it has the best chance of doing so. In fact, it topped our list of physics stories to watch in 2016.

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At present, scientists study gravitational fields passively. They observe and try to understand existing gravitational fields produced by large inertial masses, such as stars or Earth, without being able to change them as is done, for example, with magnetic fields.

This led Andre Fuzfa from Namur University in Belgium to attempt a revolutionary approach — creating gravitational fields at will from well-controlled magnetic fields and observing how these magnetic fields could bend space-time.

In his study, Fuzfa has proposed, with supporting mathematical proof, a device with which to create detectable gravitational fields.

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Produce and detect gravitational fields at will using magnetic fields, control them for studying them, work with them to produce new technologies — it sounds daring, but Prof. André Füzfa of Namur University has proposed just that in an article published in the scientific journal Physical Review D. If followed, this proposal could transform physics and shake up Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

At present, scientists study gravitational fields passively: they observe and try to understand existing gravitational fields produced by large inertial masses, such as stars or Earth, without being able to change them as is done, for example, with magnetic fields. It was this frustration that led Füzfa to attempt a revolutionary approach: creating gravitational fields at will from well-controlled magnetic fields and observing how these magnetic fields could bend space-time.

In his article, Füzfa has proposed, with supporting mathematical proof, a device with which to create detectable gravitational fields. This device is based on superconducting electromagnets and therefore relies on technologies routinely used, for example, at CERN or the ITER reactor.

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Star Trek is by now said to have encouraged a whole host of current devices from the iPad to the holodeck’s ‘virtual reality’. Now a famous theoretical physicist says that even its teleporter is technically possible, and it could become an actuality before the end of the century. Professor Michio Kaku said that the several breakthroughs required to transport humans rapidly have already been made, and it’s not far when we will be ‘beaming’ across the cosmos. Michio Kaku is a professor at City University in New York. Dr Michio Kaku said “You know the expression “Beam me up Scotty”? We used to laugh at it. We used to laugh when someone talked about teleportation, but we don’t laugh anymore.

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Johnny Matheny is the first person to attach a mind-controlled prosthetic limb directly to his skeleton. After losing his arm to cancer in 2008, Johnny signed up for a number of experimental surgeries to prepare himself to use a DARPA-funded prosthetic prototype. The Modular Prosthetic Limb, developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, allows Johnny to regain almost complete range of motion through the Bluetooth-controlled arm. (Video by Drew Beebe, Brandon Lisy) (Source: Bloomberg)

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Some people take the new year as an opportunity to contemplate their goals; Alan Lightman, writing in the January issue of Harper’s magazine, takes the opportunity to contemplate the creation of the universe.

It’s a topic too vast and unimaginable for most of us to wrap our brains around, but Lightman brings his considerable skills as both physicist (he teaches at MIT) and novelist (“Einstein’s Dreams”) to introduce us to a “small platoon of physicists” who focus on figuring out such things as what happened at the very first moment of the big bang, whether time or anything else existed before it, and exactly how we distinguish the future from the past.

And they expect, sometime in the next 50 years or so, to have some real answers.

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In late May, mathematician Eric Weinstein gave a talk at Oxford University about his ideas about “Geometric Unity,” a mathematical theory that purports to explain why the universe works the way it does. Weinstein He earned a 1992 Ph.D [in Mathematical Physics from Harvard University and has since held a Lady Davis Fellowship in the Racah Institute ofPhysics at Hebrew University, an NSF fellowship in the mathematics Department of MIT.

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Interstellar is one of the best sci-fi movies of the last decade, imagining a post-apocalyptic human population that needs to be saved from a dying Earth. A nearby black hole has the answers to humanity’s problems, and the brilliant script tells us we can enter a black hole and then use it to transcend space and time. In the film, the black hole also leaks out information that can save us, and it is captured by a complex computer as it’s being entered. That might seem implausible, but since we don’t know a lot about how black holes work, we can certainly accept such an outlandish proposition in the context of the movie.

In real life, however, physicists are trying to figure out how to access the secrets of a black hole. And it looks like some researchers have a theory to retrieve information from it, though it’s not quite as exciting as the complex bookcase that Interstellar proposes.

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Continue reading “Researchers say retrieving information from a black hole might be possible” »

Physicists think they’ve come up with a way to learn a bit about the interior of a black hole — an impossible procedure that shows the insanity of studying the heart of a singularity.

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