This is a video entry in the Flame Challenge.
The Flame Challenge is a competition in which scientists across the world had to answer the question “What is a flame” such that an 11-year old could understand it.
This was one of my favorite entries.
The Higgs Boson Explained with Animation
Can’t tell your “God Particle” from your “Dog Particle”? Too many quarks making you quack? Feel like a Higgs Bozo? Here’s what CERN is looking for, and what it might mean, via an awesome animation.
A PhD Comics animation, that is.
Source: openculture.com
Physicists connect the dots on quantum computing
Researchers at Harvard and Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics make progress on scalable designs for potentially super powerful computers that harness the weird laws of quantum mechanics.
Astronomers put forward new theory on size of black holes
Professor Andrew King from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, said: “Almost every galaxy has an enormously massive black hole in its centre. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has one about four million times heavier than the sun. But some galaxies have black holes a thousand times heavier still. We know they grew very quickly after the Big Bang.”
“These hugely massive black holes were already full—grown when the universe was very young, less than a tenth of its present age.”
Black holes grow by sucking in gas. This forms a disc around the hole and spirals in, but usually so slowly that the holes could not have grown to these huge masses in the entire age of the universe. `We needed a faster mechanism,’ says Chris Nixon, also at Leicester, “so we wondered what would happen if gas came in from different directions.”
Nixon, King and their colleague Daniel Price in Australia made a computer simulation of two gas discs orbiting a black hole at different angles. After a short time the discs spread and collide, and large amounts of gas fall into the hole. According to their calculations black holes can grow 1,000 times faster when this happens.
“If two guys ride motorbikes on a Wall of Death and they collide, they lose the centrifugal force holding them to the walls and fall,” says King. The same thing happens to the gas in these discs, and it falls in towards the hole.
This may explain how these black holes got so big so fast. “We don’t know exactly how gas flows inside galaxies in the early universe,” said King, “but I think it is very promising that if the flows are chaotic it is very easy for the black hole to feed.”
The two biggest black holes ever discovered are each about ten billion times bigger than the Sun.
Neutrino retest shows that particles CANNOT travel faster than the speed of light
The previous experiment, which showed a faster-than-light neutrino, was likely flawed.
Data Hint at Hypothetical Particle, Key to Mass in the Universe
Physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., say they have found a bump in their data that might be the long-soughtHiggs boson, a hypothesized particle that is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.
The signal, in data collected over the last several years at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator, agrees roughly with results announced last December from two independent experimental groups working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, outside Geneva.
“Based on the current Tevatron data and results compiled through December 2011 by other experiments, this is the strongest hint of the existence of a Higgs boson,” said the report, which will be presented on Wednesday by Wade Fisher of Michigan State University to a physics conference in La Thuile, Italy.
None of these results, either singly or collectively, are strong enough for scientists to claim victory. But the recent run of reports has encouraged them to think that the elusive particle, which is the key to mass and diversity in the universe, is within sight, perhaps as soon as this summer.
Scientists at U.S. lab detect hints of elusive particle
Analyzing data from some 500 trillion sub-atomic particle collisions designed to emulate conditions right after the Big Bang when the universe was formed, scientists at Fermilab outside Chicago produced some 1,000 Higgs particles over a decade of work.
“Unfortunately, this hint is not significant enough to conclude that the Higgs boson exists,” said Rob Roser, a physicist at Fermilab, near Chicago, in explaining the findings being presented on Wednesday at a conference in La Thuille, Italy.
The image scientists have of the short-lived Higgs particles, which almost immediately decay into other particles, is still slightly “fuzzy,” Roser said.
The probability that what physicists detected is not a Higgs boson and is instead a statistical fluke was 1 in 250, which is near the threshold of 1 in 740 that physics has set to establish proof of a sub-atomic particle’s existence.
Replacing Electricity With Light: First Physical ‘Metatronic’ Circuit Created
The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light.
“Looking at the success of electronics over the last century, I have always wondered why we should be limited to electric current in making circuits,” said Nader Engheta, professor in the electrical and systems engineering department of Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. “If we moved to shorter wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum — like light — we could make things smaller, faster and more efficient.”
Different arrangements and combinations of electronic circuits have different functions, ranging from simple light switches to complex supercomputers. These circuits are in turn built of different arrangements of circuit elements, like resistors, inductors and capacitors, which manipulate the flow of electrons in a circuit in mathematically precise ways. And because both electric circuits and optics follow Maxwell’s equations — the fundamental formulas that describe the behavior of electromagnetic fields — Engheta’s dream of building circuits with light wasn’t just the stuff of imagination. In 2005, he and his students published a theoretical paper outlining how optical circuit elements could work.
Now, he and his group at Penn have made this dream a reality, creating the first physical demonstration of “lumped” optical circuit elements. This represents a milestone in a nascent field of science and engineering Engheta has dubbed “metatronics.”
Faster-than-light neutrino result reportedly a mistake caused by loose cable
Since September, scientists have been scratching their head over results that appear to show neutrinos traveling between Switzerland and Italy faster than light would. As far as anyone could tell, the team behind the results had done everything they could to eliminate errors, and had even released some preliminary data that had strengthened their results. But the results remained difficult to square with everything else we know about how the Universe operates.
But now, ScienceInsider is reporting that there was a good reason the measurements and reality weren’t lining up: a loose fiber optic cable was causing one of the atomic clocks used to time the neutrinos’ flight to produce spurious results. If the report is confirmed (right now, there’s only one source), then it provides a simple explanation for the fascinating-yet-difficult-to-accept results. According to the new report, researchers are preparing to gather new data with the clocks properly hooked into computers, which should definitively indicate whether the loose connection was at fault.
It’s somewhat ironic that ScienceInsider, which is part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, broke the news now. Over the weekend, the AAAS held its annual meeting, which included a discussion of the biggest news in physics, where the neutrino results were highlighted. The session indicated that five different neutrino experiments were upgrading their hardware in order to check timing, and some would have data before the year is out. So even if this report doesn’t pan out, we should know more soon.
At the AAAS meeting’s discussion, CERN’s director of research, Sergio Bertolucci, placed his bet on what the results would be: “I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time.”
UPDATE: Nature News has apparently received a statement from the Opera researchers. It indicates they have found two potential issues (one of them the optical cabling). The two issues would skew the results in opposite directions, which is why they will need new measurements to better understand whether both influence the results and, if so, what the net impact is.
Further reading
- ScienceInsider’s report (news.sciencemag.org)
If someone says something went faster than the speed of light, check for loose cables.
