Tag Archives: physics

Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment is adding to evidence that the standard model is incomplete Ryan Postel/Fermilab The standard model of particle physics is beginning to show cracks. A fundamental particle called the muon has been caught behaving strangely, and new experimental results from Fermilab in Illinois have shown that it …

Earthquakes can cause cracks that propagate quickly Shutterstock/nagew1977 Thin strips of a transparent gel have been found to crack impossibly quickly. “What we found was a total surprise. This just isn’t supposed to happen,” says Jay Fineberg at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel who led the team that …

EARLY in his career, the University of Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose inspired the artist M. C. Escher to create Ascending and Descending, the visual illusion of a loop of staircase that seems to be eternally rising. It remains a fitting metaphor for Penrose’s ever enquiring mind. During his long career, …

What we call laws of physics are often just mathematical descriptions of some part of nature. Ultimate physical laws probably don’t exist and physics is all the better for it, says theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma Source link

Could cooling with a quantum fridge force us to rethink temperature itself? Oliver Burston TO IMAGINE working your way down the temperature scale into the realms of extreme cold, you might start with the inside of an industrial freezer. At about -18°C (0°F), it is uncomfortable, but bearable with some …

Wolfgang Pauli postulated a particle that he believed couldn’t be detected Shutterstock/Unwind The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we hand over the keyboard to a physicist or two to tell you about fascinating ideas from their corner of the universe. You can sign …

I RECENTLY walked by a physics department office that had a sticker on it saying something like “Heisenberg may or may not have been here”. This is in part a nod to the quantum cat, which, while it is inside a box with no observer, may be dead or alive. …

The results of proton collisions absorbed by screens at the LHC Fichet, Jacques Herve/CERN TO GET to Edda Gschwendtner’s experiment, you enter a small, brutalist building at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. You head into the lift and descend 50 metres into a vast …

Science Photo Library/Getty Images To invite as many people as possible to discover the thrill of grappling with reality at its most fundamental, we are making seven of our most popular in-depth articles on quantum mysteries free to read until 11 June. Whether you simply want to get to grips …

This setup in the lab helped researchers track motion using markers attached to the swinger and the swing Chiaki Hirata et al./APS 2023 Whether the back-and-forth arc of a playground swing becomes bigger over time depends on how the person sitting on it moves against the swing – a phenomenon …