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The Big Apple Circus' jugglers, clowns and high-flying acrobats provide an entertaining and engaging way to introduce basic physics concepts to high school students. Eight videos feature footage from the series and interviews with the performers to illustrate the laws of physics at work.

education physics science

There were reminders that ...results are still preliminary and might shift slightly in ways that could increase or decrease their internal consistency with each other.

... The experiments have done a fantastic job, and have squeezed the allowed mass for a Standard Model Higgs down to a very small range; the hints of a Higgs signal, in each search for a particular Higgs decay, are still very faint; and the people who actually performed the analyses, while hopeful to greater and lesser degrees, clearly do not believe that the combined case, using all the hints together, is firm evidence of anything unusual — yet.

science physics

Researchers working at the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford in England have managed to get one small diamond to communicate with another small diamond utilizing "quantum entanglement," one of the more mind-blowing features of quantum physics.

Entanglement has been proven before but what makes the Oxford experiment unique is that concept was demonstrated with substantial solid objects at room temperature.

science physics

The idea rests on the hypothesis that particles and antiparticles have gravitational charges of opposite sign. As a consequence, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs in the quantum vacuum form gravitational dipoles (having both a positive and negative gravitational charge) that can interact with baryonic matter to produce phenomena usually attributed to dark matter.

science physics

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Higgs boson. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “desperately seeking” in this context. We need it [link], but so far we can’t find it. This all might change soon...

...a guest post by Matt Strassler, who is an expert particle theorist, to help explain what’s at stake and where the search for the Higgs might lead.

physics science

Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science who has argued forcefully that time is real — and furthermore that the arrow of time is an intrinsic part of reality, not just a byproduct of the low-entropy Big Bang. (Crazy talk.) Julian Barbour is a physicist who is well known for arguing that time doesn’t really exist, we can happily eliminate it from all of our equations of physics. (Even crazier.)

So we asked them to go at it, with a twist: here Tim defends the proposition that time doesn’t exist, while Julian argues that it is real. I was not the only one to conclude that these guys were just as good at arguing this side as the one they actually believed.

video science physics philosophy

Preliminary findings from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider may have uncovered experimental evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. ...showing significant excesses of particles known as leptons...a result that could be interpreted as evidence for a theory called supersymmetry. ...

“This is clearly something to watch closely over the coming months,” ... supersymmetry [is] a theoretical model that posits the existence of a heavier partner to all known subatomic particles in order to solve certain problems with the Standard Model.

The most familiar lepton is the humble electron, though other, more exotic particles such as muons and taus also fall in this category. Producing a single one of these subatomic particles in the proton-proton collisions at the LHC is relatively rare...

...the CMS team is cautious, stressing...that there isn’t definitive proof of new physics yet.

science physics

Faster-than-light neutrinos mean Einstein is wrong! At least, that’s what some popular press articles have suggested since researchers with the OPERA experiment in Italy presented evidence of neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds earlier than thought possible.

But scientists, quite intrigued by the anomalous results, have since been busy generating more measured responses. In the three weeks after the announcement, more than 80 explanations have been posted to the preprint server arxiv. While some suggest the possibility of new physics, such as neutrinos that are traveling through extra dimensions or neutrinos at particular energies traveling faster than light, many offer less revolutionary explanations for the OPERA experiment.

One of the earliest objections to the faster-than-light interpretation came from an astrophysical observation. In 1987, a powerful supernova showered Earth with light and neutrinos. ...

science physics

Less than two weeks after the revelation that ghostly particles called neutrinos had been spotted travelling faster than the speed of light, physicists are saying they have found flaws in the analysis that would stop the claim in its tracks.

science physics

Dark energy wins out in the end: Three U.S. scientists have been honored for their observations that type 1a supernovae indicate that the expansion of the universe is accelerating

physics astronomy

...in this video, animator Henry Reich ventures into the bizarre world of quantum mechanics, where electrons and protons can flip-flop between wave and particle properties.

video physics

design typography music physics history

So the web is buzzing right now over news that scientists [CERN / OPERA] have detected some subatomic particles moving faster than the speed of light.

Yeah, well, not so fast. Let’s think about this for a sec.

science physics

Isaac Newton founded classical mechanics on the view that space is distinct from body and that time passes uniformly without regard to whether anything happens in the world. For this reason he spoke of absolute space and absolute time, so as to distinguish these entities from the various ways by which we measure them...

physics

The antimatter counterparts of protons have been detected in what appears to be a ring around Earth – one day, it could be mined to fuel spaceships

awesomesauce physics

Our modern understanding of gravity is based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but Einstein himself realized that it was incomplete. Shortly after publishing his most famous theory, he remarked that gravitational effects would cause electrons to spiral in on atomic nuclei. To stop that would take a quantum revision of general relativity.

science physics

Lise Meitner was born into an affluent Jewish family in Austria in 1878. She faced much institutionalized sexism: she was not allowed to attend any universities and had to secure a private education, was the only woman allowed to attend Max Planck’s lectures, and was forced to work without salary, as a “guest”, until the age of 35. Thirty years later, she would be passed over for a Nobel prize in favor of her two male colleagues. ...a nuclear physicist whose work led to the creation of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she spent much of her life wrestling with the moral implications of her decisions and her duties to others.

...she was the first to apply Einstein’s equation, e=mc2, to predict the massive amounts of energy that would be released by nuclear fission. Despite all her contributions, the Nazis refused to let Hahn credit the exiled, Jewish Meitner in the papers he published.

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What quantum physicist Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues have now shown, however, is that it is possible to precisely measure photons' position and obtain approximate information about their momentum, in an approach known as 'weak measurement'. ...

Intriguingly, the trajectories closely match those predicted by an unconventional interpretation of quantum mechanics known as pilot-wave theory, in which each particle has a well-defined trajectory that takes it through one slit while the associated wave passes through both slits.

science physics

If all this seems confusing, it is! This is very subtle physics and few people, even eminent physicists, understand it straight away. If you pose your questions below, I'll do my best to answer them.

science physics computers entropy

The team working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have stored atoms of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds – roughly 10,000 times longer than before. This should help reveal if antimatter and matter are true mirror images.

science physics