Category Archives: Physics

A successful measurement of the distribution of quarks that make up protons conducted at DOE’s Jefferson Lab has found that a quark’s spin can predict its general location inside the proton. Quarks with spin pointed in the up direction will … Continue reading →

An international team of physicists has proposed a revolutionary laser system, inspired by the telecommunications technology, to produce the next generation of particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The International Coherent Amplification Network (ICAN) sets out a … Continue reading →

Our good friend Phil Krause recommends this article from Wikipedia regarding Neutino Oscillation – Thanks Phil – Deskarati Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanical phenomenon predicted by Bruno Pontecorvo whereby a neutrino created with a specific lepton flavor (electron, muon or tau) can later be measured to have a different flavor. The probability of measuring a particular … Continue reading →

Physicists announced further proof Wednesday for a theory that mysterious particles called neutrinos which go “missing” on the journey from the Sun to Earth are in fact shape-shifting along the way, arriving undetected. The evidence: a muon-type neutrino dispatched from … Continue reading →

Scientists have found evidence for the existence of magnetic superatoms—small, compact clusters of atoms whose electrons occupy a set of orbitals around the entire cluster rather than around the individual atoms. If scientists can synthesize superatoms with magnetic properties, then … Continue reading →

The discovery of the Higgs boson greatly furthers our understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter, but some subatomic puzzle pieces still remain. Here are five types of bizarre particles that could turn up in atom-smashing experiments. 1. Gluinos, winos and photinos … Continue reading →

Life as we know it is based upon the elements of carbon and oxygen. Now a team of physicists, including one from North Carolina State University, is looking at the conditions necessary to the formation of those two elements in … Continue reading →

The precise methodology of Richard Feynman’s famous double-slit thought-experiment – a cornerstone of quantum mechanics that showed how electrons behave as both a particle and a wave – has been followed in full for the very first time. Although the … Continue reading →

Ever since Austrian scientist Erwin Schrodinger put his unfortunate cat in a box, his fellow physicists have been using something called quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and particles. But a new paper by physics professor … Continue reading →

The universe abounds with dark matter. Nobody knows what it consists of. University of Oslo physicists have now come up with a mathematical explanation that could solve the mystery once and for all. Astrophysicists have known for the last 80 … Continue reading →

It’s been demonstrated since the 1500s that, when falling toward a certain body, objects fall at the same rate. Everyone from Galileo in Pisa to David Scott on the moon demonstrated that. But what if they’re wrong? The Nordtvedt effect … Continue reading →

International team of physicists confirms surprisingly small proton radius with laser spectroscopy of exotic hydrogen. The initial results puzzled the world three years ago: the size of the proton (to be precise, its charge radius), measured in exotic hydrogen, in … Continue reading →

It’s not everyday that you combine weird physics with defunct medical equipment and get a success. (Although I would love to see one of those old tobacco-smoke-up-the-butt bellows filled with nitroglycerin.) The thing that looks like a pizza-cutter is a … Continue reading →

In early 2011, a pair of theoretical computer scientists at MIT proposed an optical experiment that would harness the weird laws of quantum mechanics to perform a computation impossible on conventional computers. Commenting at the time, a quantum-computing researcher at … Continue reading →