Huzzah! Another scientific mystery bites the dust! Scientists have finally cracked a problem that has "perplexed humanity since Leonardo da Vinci pondered it 500 years ago."

Learn all about the Rapunzel Number, which provides a key ratio needed to calculate the effect of gravity on hair relative to its length. In the right hands, this dangerous number can predict the shape of any ponytail:

Cambridge Professor Raymond Goldstein told Reuters that he and his colleagues took account of the stiffness of individual hairs, the effects of gravity and the average waviness of human hair to come up with their formula. [...]

"That determines whether the ponytail looks like a fan or whether it arcs over and becomes nearly vertical at the bottom," Goldstein said in a telephone interview.

The research also took into account how a bundle of hair is swelled by the outward pressure that arises from collisions between the component hairs.

Oh, he also mentioned how the Rapunzel Number would also help scientists deepend their understanding of fibers, as well as be useful in computer graphics and animation, but we all know that the real reason for the study is to break the stronghold of the hair stylist mafia on ponytail-wearing populace.

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Artist Scott Garner gives us a depiction of a bowl of fruit on a table, named “Still Life.” But this interactive artwork is anything but still! Link -via The Daily What Geek

While some scientists are working on an invisibility cloak to hide things, Cornell postdoctoral researcher Moti Fridman and his colleagues have been working on a “temporal cloak,” to hide events in time.

A physical object or even another beam of light in the laser beam’s path could create a change in the laser light that the detector would register. But with some clever optics, Fridman and his colleagues were able to open up a brief time gap in the beam and then close it back up as if the beam had gone undisturbed, and such that the detector did not register the interruption. The gap allows anything that would have otherwise affected the beam to instead slip right through [see animation below], leaving no trace for the detector to pick up.

The events that can slip through the cloak have to be very fast: the gap is only 50 trillionths of a second. The video at the link explains the process much more clearly. Link -via Monkeyfilter

Here’s a simple physics game in which you release a little red block by rotating the fence holding it. Or multiple fences. And please avoid the force field! Oh yes, it starts out easy, but gets more challenging. The level you see here gave me fits, but I breezed through the next couple easily -go figure. Link

Sascha Mehlhase built a model of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider out of LEGO bricks! It contains around 9,500 bricks and took 33 hours to assemble, in addition to 48 total hours of work just designing it. Read more about and see more pictures at his site. Link -via reddit

No, not from a pint of Guinness - though the perfect foam does hail from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland:

‘Perfect’ here means the lowest-energy configuration of packed bubbles of equal size. This is a compromise between the surface area of the bubbles and the stability of the many interlocking faces of the polyhedral bubbles in the foam.

Read all about it over at Nature's newsblog: Link

The International Space Station (ISS) occasionally has to boost itself into a higher altitude to counteract the effects of microgravity drag. Recently, the ISS boosted itself about two miles up, and video cameras caught what happened inside to Commander Mike Fossum and Flight Engineers Satoshi Furukawa and Sergei Volkov. The physics of the process are explained at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -Thanks, Phil!

One-Minute Physics explains how to break the speed of light by pointing a laser at the moon. I think this boils down to appearance vs. reality, but I may be mistaken. Anyway, it sounds fun to try! -via The Daily What Geek

The Physics Book is a large, substantial book, but don’t let that fool you! It’s a treat to read, whether you have a background in physics or not. I don’t, so I was delighted to see how interesting and accessible The Physic Book is. The 500 pages are broken down into 250 subjects, with a one-page explanation plus a gorgeous, full-page illustration for each. This means that each of those 250 physics topics can be consumed in bite-size pieces at your leisure. They are laid out in somewhat chronological order -”somewhat” meaning that the order is either when something happened, when it was discovered, or when it was particularly meaningful. So you can start at the beginning if you like and get a good overview of the timeline of physics or you can browse topics that interest you anywhere in the book. Of course, there’s an alphabetical index so you can easily find any of them.

The topics range from simple everyday subjects to higher concepts you’ve heard of, but don’t (yet) understand. In the simpler subjects, Pickover gives us a short explanation of scientific milestones and basic concepts that make the mundane into something fascinating. For example, for the hourglass, a mundane yet ingenious device, you get both history and science in one page.

Interestingly, the sailing ships of Ferdinand Magellan retained 18 hourglasses per ship as he attempted to circumnavigate the globe. One of the largest hourglasses -39 feet (11.9 meters) in height- was built in 2008 in Moscow. Through history, hourglasses were used in factories and to control the duration of sermons in church.

In 1996, British researchers at the University of Leicester determined that the rate of flow depended only on the few centimeters above the neck and not on the bulk of sand above that. They also found that small glass beads known as ballotini gave the most reproducible results. “For a given volume of ballotini,” the researchers write, “the period is controlled by their size, the size of the orifice, and the shape of the reservoir.”

Read the rest on page 68. My younger children didn’t realize that gears had anything to do with physics until they saw page 57.

Rotating gears, with their intermeshed teeth, have played a crucial role in the history of technology. Not only are gear mechanisms important for increasing the applied twisting force, or torque, but gears are also useful for changing the speed and direction of force. One of the oldest machines is a potter’s wheel, and primitive gears associated with these kinds of wheels probably existed for thousands of years. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle wrote about wheels using friction between smooth surfaces to convey motions. Built around 125 B.C., the Antikythera Mechanism employed toothed gears for calculating astronomical positions. One of the earliest written references to toothed gears was made by Hero of Alexandria, c 50 A.D. Through time, gears have played a crucial role in mills, clocks, bicycles, cars, washing machines, and drills. Because they are so useful in amplifying forces, early engineers used them for lifting heavy construction loads. The speed-changing properties of gear assemblies were put to use when ancient textile machines were powered by the movement of horses or water. The rotational speed of these power supplies was often insufficient, so a set of wooden gears was used to increase the speed for textile production.

And then Pickover goes on to explain exactly how gears do these things. Other basic concepts covered include the invention of the telescope, the discovery of planets (which is, of course, related), and how things like boomerangs and pulleys and atomic bombs work. But it’s not only simple physics concepts. Interested readers can select puzzlers like the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, proposed by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 and explained on page 376.

Schrödinger had been upset about the the recently proposed Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that stated, in essence, that a quantum system (e.g. an electron) exists as a cloud of probability until an observation is made. At a higher level, it seemed to suggest that it is meaningless to ask precisely what atoms and particles are doing when unobserved; in some sense, reality is created by the observer. Before being observed, the system takes on all possibilities. What could this mean for our everyday lives?

***
Schrödinger said that his experiment demonstrated the invalidity of the Copenhagen interpretation, and Albert Einstein agreed.

Which just goes to show that all those who say it’s silly to think a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time until observed were actually agreeing with Schrödinger himself!

The Physics Book lays out some of the more difficult concepts in relatively simple terms, like chaos theory, the Fermi paradox, time travel by wormhole, the universe as a computer simulation, and antimatter (page 364). Antimatter is real and has been observed since 1932. It even has practical applications. And it also leads us to further speculation on the nature of the universe.

Modern physicists continue to offer hypotheses to explain why the observable universe appears to be nearly entirely composed of matter and not antimatter. Could regions of the universe exist in which antimatter predominates?

Upon casual inspection, antimatter could be almost indistinguishable from ordinary matter. Physicist Michio Kaku writes, “You can form antiatoms from antielectrons and antiprotons. Even antipeople and antiplanets are theoretically possible. [However], antimatter will annihilate into a burst of energy upon contact with ordinary matter. Anyone holding a piece of antimatter in their hands would immediately explode with the force of a thousand hydrogen bombs.”

Oh my. I’ll make a note not to do that. The Bose-Einstein condensate sounds like a difficult concept, but that’s mainly because I was unfamiliar with it -until I read Pickover’s explanation on page 496.

The cold matter in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) exhibits an exotic property in which atoms lose their identity and merge into a mysterious collective. To help visualize the process, imagine an ant colony with 100 ants. You lower the temperature to a frigid 170 billionths of a Kelvin -colder than the deep reaches of interstellar space- and each ant morphs into an eerie cloud that spreads through the colony. Each ant cloud overlaps with every other one, so the colony is filled with a single dense cloud. No longer can you see individual insects; however, if you raise the temperature, the ant cloud differentiates and returns to the 100 individuals who continue to go about their ant business as if nothing untoward has happened.

Which, like all these excerpts, is only a partial explanation. Each page takes only a few minutes to read, but you’ll come away with a better understanding of the overall idea of physics as well as the particular topic on each page. And there are some lighthearted yet still interesting entries, like “Stephen Hawking on Star Trek” on page 494.

According to surveys, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is considered to be “the most famous scientist” at the start of the twenty-first century. Because of his inspiration, he is included in this book as a special entry. Like Einstein, Hawking also crossed over into popular culture, as he has appeared on many TV shows as himself, including Star Trek: The Next Generation. Because it is extremely rare for a top scientist to become a cultural icon, the title of this entry celebrates this aspect of his importance.

If Hawking and Einstein did it, what is to stop other physicists from becoming pop culture icons? Physics is cool, and The Physics Book is a great way to get yourself up to speed. It will make a great Christmas gift for a student, a family, or anyone with a bit of curiosity -and if you give it to someone who doesn’t think physics is cool, this will likely change their opinion! The Physics Book by Clifford A. Pickover is available now from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Visit the author at his website Clifford Pickover’s Reality Carnival.

Question: How do you summarize 10 pages and 1 figure of high energy physics?
Answer: Very well, thank you.

Here's the best abstract of a science paper I've ever read (and, having studied biochemistry in college and grad school, boy have I read a lot of science papers): Link - via reddit

When you drop a slinky, which part of it moves faster? When you get a good look at it in slow-motion, it only raises more questions, which physics professor Rod Cross explains. See the rest of the experiment at The Daily What Geek. Link -via mental_floss

Now, scientists have found a new way that electric and magnetic properties can be coupled in a material. The group used extremely bright beams of x-rays at Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) to examine the electronic structure of a particular metal oxide made of yttrium, manganese, and oxygen. They determined that the magnetic-electric coupling is caused by the outer cloud of electrons surrounding the atom.

“Previously, this mechanism had only been predicted theoretically and its existence was hotly debated,” [Brookhaven physicist Stuart] Wilkins said.

In this particular material, the manganese and oxygen electrons mix atomic orbitals in a process that creates atomic bonds and keeps the material together. The researchers’ measurements show that this process is dependent upon the magnetic structure of the material, which in this case, causes the material to become ferroelectric, i.e. have an electric polarization. In other words, any change in the material’s magnetic structure will result in a change in direction of its ferroelectric state. By definition, that makes the material a multiferroic.

You’ll find more technical information at the Brookhaven National Laboratory site.

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When I was in high school we actually built giant sling shots in our physics class. These days though, kids are learning from sling shots in video games. Really though it was only a matter of time before Angry Birds entered the public school system.

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When I visit northern Minnesota, I always encounter a road that in midsummer becomes classically “washboard.”  The county sends out a road grader to smooth it and give it a new crown, and a few weeks later it’s a washboard again.

Minnesotastan looked up the physics of why this happens. The explanation includes a video that led to the discussion of the word “widdershins” in the comments. Link

(Image credit: David C. Mays)

Although some television shows demonstrate an obvious departure from scientific realism (e.g. Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica), you may be surprised that the highly-rated cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is not an accurate presentation of physics — at least as it is currently understood. For a class project, YouTube user beatledude64 explained, in great physical and mathematical detail, how My Little Pony bends good science for the sake of storytelling.

via Boing Boing

“Fano flow” is a term used for some of the strange ways non-Newtonian fluids move. From the YouTube page:

In the so-called ”tubeless” syphon, a fluid can be made to flow up through an unsupported liquid column above the free surface of the liquid. One way to achieve this is by slowly withdrawing and raising a syringe from a pool of the liquid below.

In the so-called ”open channel” syphon, after initially commencing the
flow of an elastic fluid from say a beaker, the fluid will continue to
flow up the side and over the lip of the beaker for sometime despite the level of its free surface having fallen considerably below the top of the beaker. In this way the slightest spill will cause the beaker to partly empty in what is commonly refereed to as a ”self-syphoning” effect.

-via TYWKIWDBI

We know that a piece of toast, if dropped, will fall butter-side down. We also know that a cat, if dropped, will land on its feet. What happens when you strap a piece of buttered toast to a cat’s back and drop them both is called the Buttered Cat Paradox, and there’s an extensive amount of research on the internet devoted to just this conundrum. Find out more about it at mental_floss, including possible uses for the energy produced from such a venture, and ways it could go wrong. Link

This was a period when the question of whether the curve ball actually curved was hotly debated. Among the true believers was St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean. “Ball can’t curve?” he famously declared during the 1930s. “Shucks, get behind a tree and I’ll hit you with an optical illusion.” But anecdotes aren’t a substitute for scientific data. So once Briggs officially retired, he decided to do the experiments to settle the matter. And he was well-connected enough to enlist the aid of the pitching staff of the Washington Senators and their manager, Cookie Lavagetto, to do so. It wasn’t just a question of baseball, either: the question related to NIST’s ongoing research into ballistics and projectiles: the rate of spin is related to how much the ball (or projectile) is deflected at different speeds. Apparently the NSB (now NIST) conducted lots of experiments with golf balls and baseballs; one of Briggs’ publications was a 1945 paper entitled, “Methods for Measuring the Coefficient of Restitution and the Spin of the Ball.”

Read how Briggs designed experiments to find out exactly how much of a curve there is to a curveball at Cocktail Physics. Link

Which branch of science is the deadliest? Alex "Sandy" Antunes of Science 2.0 compared the three most murderous fields of science: physics, chemistry, and biology.

Pulling out real world statistics, we look to the Center for Disease Control (CDh). In 2007 (their most recent complete survey), we find that the bulk of the 2,423,712 US deaths were due to three causes: heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

Damn, looks like Biology takes an early lead. Those 3 causes alone cover over half of all deaths (54.2%) In fact, of the 15 leading causes, 9 of them are simple biology, causing 68.2% of all deaths. Disease and infection rule the land of the dead.

Link – via Holy Kaw

Video Link

Einstein’s famous Twin Paradox in which a twin makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find he has aged less than his identical twin who stayed on Earth is a mind boggling concept at first glance.  This clever animation produced by Yuanjian Luo interprets the theory in a way that makes it easier to understand, even for those of us who have never heard of time dilation or nonequivalent reference frames.

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Undoubtedly that has been hammered into your brain since grade school. So, how do you explain this neat little video from the clever folks over at MIT:

Two wood boards are connected by a hinge. A small cup is mounted near one end of the upper board with a tee for a ball on the end. The board is lifted to a certain height, and when released the ball ends up in the plastic cup. This shows that the board has moved farther than the ball in the same period of time.

To see the video, visit the MIT News Multimedia website: Link – via Science2.0

So, the hinged plank has to travel in an arc, which is longer than the straight path that the ball falls through in order for the ball to fall into the cup. Notice that the plank hits the tabletop before the ball. Assuming air resistance doesn’t come into much play (after all, the plank has more surface area than the ball) Does this mean that gravity affects the plank more than the ball? Is Galileo wrong?

The tiny sliver of metal above, measuring as long as the human hair is wide, may be barely visible to the naked eye, but its implication to science is so staggering that it is hailed as the greatest scientific breakthrough of 2010.

Behold, the world’s first quantum machine:

It’s not much to look at. In fact, you can barely see it with the naked eye, and it doesn’t work unless it’s cooled down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. But when researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara created their tiny vibrating "springboard," that represented "the first time that scientists have demonstrated quantum effects in the motion of a human-made object," said Adrian Cho, a news writer for Science.

"On a conceptual level, that’s cool because it extends quantum mechanics into a whole new realm," he said. "On a practical level, it opens up a variety of possibilities ranging from new experiments that meld quantum control over light, electrical currents and motion to, perhaps someday, tests of the bounds of quantum mechanics and our sense of reality."

One of the more bizarre principles of quantum mechanics is that something can be in two states simultaneously: both on and off, both 1 and 0. Under just the right conditions, UCSB’s aluminum nitride oscillator took on a single quantum of motion, so that it vibrated both a little and a lot at the same time.

UCSB’s Aaron O’Connell, John Martinis and Andrew Cleland reported their results in March in the journal Nature. At the time, Cleland told me that "we were just trying to demonstrate quantum effects in a big thing."

"But a possible application would be if you try to detect these acoustic vibrations at the quantum level," he said. "You could do it with this. You could use it as a quantum microphone, or a quantum loudspeaker." Such devices might also be used to read out the results of a quantum computer’s calculations.

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No word on whether Schroedinger’s cat is jumping for joy/already dead, but you can celebrate this achievement with the NeatoShop‘s latest physics T-shirt:

Look Out Schroedinger’s Cat, It’s a Trap! by Mike Jacobsen – $14.95

by Frederick B. Reitz, Ph.C.
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington Illustrations by Marian Parry

I report here the first evidence that domestic cats exhibit quantum tunneling.

Subatomic particles can make seemingly impossible, instantaneous “jumps” from one place to another. This has been known in theory for well over half a century. Numerous examples of it have been observed and meticulously documented. Known as “quantum tunneling,” this strange phenomenon had previously been thought to occur only on very small scales.

In this paper I report instances of the spontaneous relocation of entire cats. Though cats are arguably quantal to the extent that they tend to exist as discrete entities, the appreciable magnitude of some of the cats in question constitutes a novel aspect of the tunneling phenomenon.

Quantum Tunneling

The physical literature contains many reports of electrons and similar particles spontaneously jumping or “tunneling” from one place to another via so-called “forbidden” routes. This phenomenon has enjoyed much attention since the advent of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). In all reports to date, the particles in question have ranged in size from extremely small to very, very small, with rare cases involving particles that are merely quite small.

House Pets

House pets have also frequently been observed to exhibit unusual behavior. Dogs circle many times before sitting down. Cats forget to retract their tongues after bathing, and hamsters sleep in their food dishes.

Non-Newtonian House Pets

Pets are rarely attributed with exotic, non-Newtonian physical behavior. However, cats and dogs that are especially long-haired can exhibit a wavelike appearance. Furthermore, animals clearly interfere with each other, sometimes destructively (as with cats and dogs, or with cats and humans that are attempting to read a newspaper), sometimes constructively (as with rabbits and rabbits).

Quantum Petting

Erwin Schr?dinger alluded, in a famous thought experiment, to the general question of the quantum behavior of cats. However, I believe that my report presents the first documented instances of the spontaneous tunneling of cats, and also the first documented reports of related quasi-electromagnetic cat phenomena.

Cat Tunneling: Case 1

In my own residence, I and several other party guests personally observed the case of Chloe, a large black Himalayan. Though the extent of the cat’s fur decreased the certainty with which one could specify the cat’s position and momentum (c.f., the Himalyan Uncertainty Principle), and our garage door is only a few inches thick, the tunneling event was no less remarkable in light of her prodigious girth (she weighed 15 pounds, frequently intimidating our German Shepherd into sharing his dinner). The cat was initially observed sleeping in the driveway. When next observed several minutes later, the cat was nowhere to be seen. We opened the garage door, at which point Chloe left the garage, obviously having tunneled through the closed door. We marveled at this phenomenon, and, as we closed the side door to the garage, discussed plans for further study.

Cat Tunneling: Case 2

The next such instance brought to my attention was one Snuggles Jr. of Lansing, Michigan, who was found on June 10, 1995, at 10:31 AM resting comfortably amidst a fresh batch of clothing, inside an automatic clothes dryer. As the dryer door was closed, and the owners did not remember having let the cat in, the transition was judged to be spontaneous. Discussion with the owners, regarding house policies pertaining to where the cat was and was not allowed to go, established the forbidden nature of this transition. Given that the cat was not even allowed in the laundry room, the span of the forbidden transition of the 6 pound cat was at least than 7 linear feet-clearly this constitutes tunneling on an unprecedented scale.

Cat Tunneling: Case 3

Finally, there is the case of “Giggles,” a largish calico of uncertain dimensions who was remarkable for his repeated and unsuccessful attempts to violate the Pauli Exclusion Principle with the neighbor’s tabby (who in turn might have been more cooperative had she not been spayed). Though arguably the tunneling that Giggles did to get under the fence between his yard and the neighbor’s was of a conventional sort, his consistent failure to include any other similar cat in his proximity and same state of excitation is compellingly consistent with previous results found on smaller scales.

Summary

Given these data, I am led to the following conclusions:

1. Cats do exhibit the sort of tunneling behavior previously attributed only to subatomic particles, car keys, and socks;
2. Despite the finite probability of a cat tunneling spontaneously through a door, the probability of this event is low enough that leaving the cat closed in one’s bedroom for a prolonged period of time is inadvisable; and
3. One’s cat should indeed be blamed for the majority of stools found in inappropriate locations.

Copyright © 1998 The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). All rights reserved.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the March-April 1998 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Christoph Neimann illustrated the laws of physics as they apply to our daily lives. I can really relate to this one.

But back to Newton: he discovered that any two objects in the universe attract each other, and that this force is proportional to their mass.

The Earth is heavier than the Moon, and therefore attracts our bodies with a much greater force.

This explains why an empty refrigerator administrates a much smaller gravitational pull than, say, one that’s stacked with 50 pounds of delicious leftovers.

He also explains physics as it relates to waking up, subway crowding, and hair loss. Link -via The Daily What

Possible evidence for this model appeared last year in the unaccountable “noise” plaguing the GEO600 experiment in Germany, which searches for gravitational waves from black holes. To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon the lower limit of the spacetime pixels’ resolution.

Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist at all. In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth. If this is true, the illusion can only be maintained until equipment becomes sensitive enough to find its limits.[...]

“So we want to build a machine which will be the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself,” says Hogan. “That’s the holometer.”[...]

In the holometer, this loss of sync looks like a shaking or vibrations that represent jitters in spacetime itself, like the fuzziness of radio coming over too little bandwidth.

The holometer’s precision means that it doesn’t have to be large; at 40 meters in length, it is only one hundredth of the size of current interferometers, which measure gravitational waves from black holes and supernovas. Yet because the spacetime frequencies it measures are so rapid, it will be more precise over very short time intervals by seven orders of magnitude than any atomic clock in existence.

Link via The Agitator | Image: Paramount

Shaun the Sheep stars in a cute physics game in which you guide the sheep home. You have obstacles to cross, and three sheep of different mass. While you figure out a strategy, enjoy the artwork and sound effects. Link -via Metafilter

The game Flabby Physics is so simple it will drive you crazy! Just use your space bar to hit the star. That’s it. Good luck! Link -via b3ta

Congratulations to Andre Geim, new Nobel Prize winner in physics. He becomes the first to win, as an individual, both a Nobel Prize (this year, together with Konstantin Novoselov, for experiments with the substance graphene) and an Ig Nobel Prize (in the year 2000, shared with Sir Michael Berry, for using magnets to levitate a frog).

You can see a video of the levitating frog at Improbable Research. Link

The NIST experiments focused on two scenarios predicted by Einstein’s theories of relativity. First, when two clocks are subjected to unequal gravitational forces due to their different elevations above the surface of the Earth, the higher clock—experiencing a smaller gravitational force—runs faster. Second, when an observer is moving, a stationary clock’s tick appears to last longer, so the clock appears to run slow. Scientists refer to this as the “twin paradox,” in which a twin sibling who travels on a fast-moving rocket ship would return home younger than the other twin. The crucial factor is the acceleration (speeding up and slowing down) of the travelling twin in making the round-trip journey.

NIST scientists observed these effects by making specific changes in one of the two aluminum clocks and measuring the resulting differences in the two ions’ relative ticking rates, or frequencies.

In one set of experiments, scientists raised one of the clocks by jacking up the laser table to a height one-third of a meter (about a foot) above the second clock. Sure enough, the higher clock ran at a slightly faster rate than the lower clock, exactly as predicted.

The second set of experiments examined the effects of altering the physical motion of the ion in one clock. (The ions are almost completely motionless during normal clock operations.) NIST scientists tweaked the one ion so that it gyrated back and forth at speeds equivalent to several meters per second. That clock ticked at a slightly slower rate than the second clock, as predicted by relativity. The moving ion acts like the traveling twin in the twin paradox.

So if you want to age more slowly, you should run as fast as you can on a beach or a valley below sea level. The time you gain would not offset the difference in the time you put in, but you might live longer due to the benefit of the physical exertion. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Loel Barr)

At a 1997 soccer match, Roberto Carlos scored a goal against the French national team that seemed physically impossible. The ball seemed to curve around the French players. Physicists couldn’t explain the ball’s movement:

A group of French scientists, perhaps desperate to prove that at least the laws of physics weren’t actively rooting against their national team, have been able to figure out the trajectory of the ball and, with it, an equation to describe its unusual path.

It all comes down to the fact that, when a sphere spins, its trajectory is a spiral. Usually, gravity and the relatively short distance the ball travels cover up this spiral trajectory, but Carlos was a mere 115 feet away and kicked the ball hard enough to reveal its true spiral-like path. As you can see in the diagram above, the ball would have kept spiraling if gravity (and the netting) hadn’t gotten in the way.

At the link, you can see a video of the kick.

Link | Image: New Journal of Physics

John's post about scientists measuring the shortest interval of time ever inspired me to actually Google a question that I've pondered for quite some time: is time quantized?

For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of quantization, one of the fundamental things ever discovered in physics occurred in 1900 when Max Planck worked out that energy is not infinitely divisible - there's a minimum unit of energy that is indivisible. That unit of energy (a "quantum") is so small that for us humans, it seems like energy (say, how hot something is) is a smooth gradient.

So, back to my original question: is there a fundamental unit of time, which is not further divisible into smaller units? In other words, is there a quantum of time?

Some physicists pegged the smallest unit of time that have any physical meaning as Planck time, the amount of time for a photon to travel the distance of 1 Planck length (a unit of length, equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m, where gravity, space time and "regular" physics cease to be valid and the effects of quantum mechanics dominate). 1 Planck time is about 10^-43 seconds).

The closest answers that I found was provided by Scientific America circa 1999:

"The brief answer to this question is, 'Nobody knows.' Certainly there is no experimental evidence in favor of such a minimal unit. On the other hand, there is no evidence against it, except that we have not yet found it. There are no well-worked-out physics theories incorporating a fundamental unit of time, and there are substantial obstacles to doing so in a way that is compatible with the principles of General Relativity. Recent work on a theory of quantum gravity in which gravity is represented using loops in space suggests that there might be a way to do something roughly along these lines--not involving a minimum unit of time but rather a minimum amount of area for any two-dimensional surface, a minimum volume for any three-dimensional region in space and perhaps also a minimum 'hypervolume' for any four-dimensional region of space-time."

The article describes 3 more answers (tldr: "dunno") to the question: Link

Do we have any physicists in the audience that can provide a better answer? Say that there is a quantum of time - what does that mean to our understanding of reality?

"Maybe the huge black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies are bridges to different universes," Poplawski says. If that is correct – and it’s a big "if" – there is nothing to rule out our universe itself being inside a black hole. [...]

How would we know if we are living inside a black hole? Well, a spinning black hole would have imparted some spin to the space-time inside it, and this should show up as a "preferred direction" in our universe, says Poplawski. Such a preferred direction would result in the violation of a property of space-time called Lorentz symmetry, which links space and time. It has been suggested that such a violation could be responsible for the observed oscillations of neutrinos from one type to another.

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Featuring a group of friends running on top of the water, "Liquid Mountaineering" was an international sensation on YouTube, getting more than 4.5 millions hits in just over a month. But this week it was confirmed a hoax by the shoe company prominently featured in the video. It’s a viral advertisement. But it looked so real! Popular Mechanics takes a look at the biomechanics of walking on water and why the Jesus Lizard can do it and we can’t.

Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, the current world record holder for the 100-meter sprint, ran 10.4 meters per second. But J.W. Glasheen and T.A. McMahon, two Harvard biologists who studied how the basilisk runs on water, found that in order to mimic the lizard, a human would need to run at almost 30 meters per second, “a velocity beyond human ability.” A man would also need “an average power output almost 15 times greater than the maximum sustained power output for humans.”

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by telegraph.

This is a physics-based game in which you design your own tools to accomplish tasks and collect cogs (which help you accomplish more tasks). At first, I thought it might be difficult to understand, but there are hints, prompts, and do-overs along the way. Before long, I was really into it and had to force myself to get back to work! From Aardman Studios, the folks behind Wallace and Gromit. Link -Thanks, Evan Duval!

Teleportation over distances of a few hundred meters has previously only been accomplished with the photons traveling in fiber channels to help preserve their state. In this particular experiment, researchers maximally entangled two photons using both spatial and polarization modes and sent the one with higher energy through a ten-mile-long free space channel. They found that the distant photon was still able to respond to changes in state of the photon they held onto even at this unprecedented distance.

However, the long-distance teleportation of a photon is only a small step towards developing applications for the procedure. While photons are good at transmitting information, they are not as good as ions at allowing manipulation, an advancement we’d need for encryption. Researchers were also able to maintain the fidelity of the long-distance teleportation at 89 percent— decent enough for information, but still dangerous for the whole-body human teleportation that we’re all looking forward to.

Link via DVICE | Journal Article | Image: Paramount

Geekspeak is an essential tool that will help you exercise your brain and solve the unsolvable, make you sound intelligent so you can impress your friends, and enable you to better understand the fascinating world in which we live in ways never thought possible before.

This is one of those books that makes being a geek fun (which geeks already knew) and makes real-world math accessible to those who might avoid it otherwise. To give you a taste of Geekspeak, we have obtained permission to reprint a chapter for your perusal. Fly Wheels looks at measuring biological power in mechanical terms in order to compare the two.

One of the key technologies for personal transportation is a way of storing energy in something that doesn’t weigh very much. A gallon of gas will keep your car going for about an hour, with the engine developing an average power of, say, 30hp (20kW). The gas effectively stores 20 kilowatt-hours of energy in each gallon.

Gasoline is an amazingly compact way of carrying a lot of energy. A gallon of it weighs only about 6 pounds. A figure of merit for gasoline as a portable fuel might be the amount of useful energy for each pound of fuel-its energy density. On this count gasoline is rated at nearly 2 kilowatt-hours per pound (kWh/pound).

I once made an electric bike powered by a pair of lead-acid car batteries carried in baskets. Together they weighed about 50 pounds and could deliver a total energy of only 2kWh. That’s a puny energy density of 0.04kWh/lb, just one-fiftieth as effective as gasoline.

This, of course, is the curse of electric cars. There is no cheap battery technology that allows anywhere near as much energy to be stored per pound of battery as per pound of gas.

Pedaling the bike, plus its 50 pounds of batteries, back from work yet another day when the charge had run out, I made a calculation: 2 pounds of sugar digested by a human would give more muscle energy than both batteries combined.

The energy in a 2-pound bag of sugar is almost 4kWh. Muscles can convert that energy into mechanical work with an efficiency of up to 20 percent. That’s an output energy density of 0.4kWh/lb-not as good as gasoline, but, amazingly, in the same ballpark.

A muscle engine in a car would be a winner; the emissions would be just carbon dioxide, water, and maybe a bit of wind, depending on the food of the engine. And this may not be just the science-fiction dream that it sounds. There is a lot of academic research into so-called molecular motors, the power source of our muscles.

The molecular motors inside your body are built from a particular kind of protein molecule, the shape of which can be distorted, rather like scrunching up a piece of rubber band in your fist. The scrunching is done by a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is supplied to the muscle in the bloodstream. ATP is itself synthesized from the sugars in your food.

At a signal from your brain, the chemical fist of the ATP is unclenched-the molecule rearranges its shape into a more relaxed form, providing mechanical force as it goes. There are billions of these molecules acting together, making the muscle pull. Synthetic proteins, which act in a similar way, might provide the basis of future power plants.

Flying insects can do even better. They use similar molecular motors to make the wing beat repetitively with a very high energy efficiency, up to 40 percent. But could harnessing the power of houseflies be the way forward for car travel? If so, how many would you need to pull your car along at, say, a respectable 40 miles per hour?

First you need an idea of how much power a single fly can generate. A very rough estimate of 1 fly-power can be made if you know the fly’s weight and how long it takes to rise a certain distance into the air after taking off from a tabletop.

When the fly takes off, it uses energy to lift its weight. Some of that energy is used to accelerate its body and lift it into the air, and some will go into heating its body and warming the air. But as the fly rises, it also increases its energy in another way. This newly acquired energy is called potential energy. The higher the fly flies, the more potential energy it gains.

The energy is “potential” because it doesn’t come into play until something happens. If a fly stopped moving its wings, its potential energy would change into speed energy as it fell back down and would finally be released as a small amount of heat energy when it crash-landed on the table.

It’s a fair approximation to say that the energy expended by the fly in rising to its cruising height is the same as the potential energy it will have once it’s there. (It’s actually a bit more, but for the purpose of our armchair arithmetic we can let that go.) So if we can work out our fly’s potential energy, we can work out the value of 1 fly-power. We just need to divide this energy by the time it takes the fly to reach cruising height, and we have its power in watts.

The formula for potential energy is this:

Energy = g x Mass x Height

The g here is the acceleration due to gravity: the rate at which the speed of a falling object increases. Its value is 9.81 meters per second per second. Call it 10 to make life easier.

But what about mass-what does a fly weigh? Think of something of a similar weight that you can conveniently measure. For example, suppose that a housefly weighs about the same as a grain of rice. It could be half as much, or twice as much, but it is unlikely to be either a tenth, or ten times as much. A grain of rice will do nicely.

Count how many grains of rice you can scoop up with a teaspoon, and put ten teaspoonfuls of rice onto the kitchen scales. Divide the weight by ten, and then by the number of grains per teaspoonful. You now have the weight of one rice grain-and the approximate weight of a fly. It’ll come out as about 50 mg. That’s fifty-thousandths of a gram, which is the same as fifty-millionths of a kilogram.

Next, have a look at some flies as they take off. How long do they take to rise to their cruising height? That’s a tricky one.

You can make several rough timings and average them to get a more accurate final value. But even one timing is hard, because the time is so short. One way if to hold a ticking clock against your ear as you watch the flies rise. Older clocks have a tick-tock time of one second, but the ticks on some modern clocks are much more rapid. Count the number of ticks per second from your clock to calibrate your “audio timer”.

My clock does five ticks per second, and the fly rises to about 1 meter in the time of one tick-that’s one-fifth of a second. Now the fly-power can be calculated. So, to put into the formula above we have values 10 (for g), 0.00005 kg and 1 meter:

Energy = 10 x 0.00005 x 1 = 0.0005 joules

Power is energy per second, and our fly has taken 0.2 seconds to rise 1 meter, so its power is 0.0005 divided by 0.2. That makes 0.0001 watts-one-tenth of a milliwatt. That’s enough to make an LED glow dimly in the dark. A small battery-powered torch gives out about 1 watt-that’s 10,000 fly-power. Flies aren’t very bright.

A typical car engine running on the flat at 40 mph will be generating around 20,000 watts, or 200 million fly-power. So 200 million flies, attached by silken threads to the front of your car and suitably trained, could pull it along at up to 40 mph. Whether that’s a green alternative depends on the flies.

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Geekspeak is available from publisher HarperCollins, at Amazon, and at a bookstore near you.

The 120 lead ingots, each weighing about 33 kilograms, come from a larger load recovered 20 years ago from a Roman shipwreck, the remains of a vessel that sank between 80 B.C. and 50 B.C. off the coast of Sardinia. As a testimony to the extent of ancient Rome’s manufacturing and trading capacities, the ingots are of great value to archaeologists, who have been preserving and studying them at the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, southern Sardinia. What makes the ingots equally valuable to physicists is the fact that over the past 2,000 years their lead has almost completely lost its natural radioactivity. It is therefore the perfect material with which to shield the CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) detector, which Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) is building at the Gran Sasso laboratory.

Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

(image credit: INFN/Cagliari Archeological Superintendence)

Here are some of my favorites:

Destroy The Village

Demolition Dude

Multiball

If you try one, come on back and let me know what level you got up to! I have yet to finish any of them, but am really close on Demolition Dude.

A team led by Yuri Oganessian of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, reports smashing together calcium-48 — an isotope with 20 protons and 28 neutrons — and berkelium-249, which has 97 protons and 152 neutrons. The collisions spit out either three or four neutrons, creating two different isotopes of an element with 117 protons.[...]

The researchers briefly spotted signs of element 117 during two runs of collisions lasting 70 days each. In their paper, the researchers report observing the heavier isotope of element 117 decay with a half-life of 78 milliseconds; they measured the lighter one’s half-life at 14 milliseconds.

The new element, which has yet to be named, slips into a place on the periodic table between elements 116 and 118, both of which have already been discovered. Such superheavy elements are usually very radioactive and decay away almost instantly. But many researchers think it is possible that even heavier elements may occupy an “island of stability” in which superheavy atoms stick around for a while.

Link via Wired | Image: NASA

Atlanta-based photographer Erik Dixon got a tattoo illustrating the inverse square law, which “…is the physics equation for the fall off rate of light radiating from a source point. Something I use every time I shoot. This also applies to gravity and sound.”

If you were to get an intellectual tattoo, what would it be?

Link | Photo: Erik Dixon/Geeky Tattoos

Following two false starts due to electrical failures, protons whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece around a 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack outside of Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building sized detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the world.

The soundless blooming of proton explosions was accompanied by the hoots and applause of scientists crowded into control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built the collider.

Link -via Boing Boing

See the video. Link

Particle physicists, cosmologists, and even string theorists are all trying to understand why quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons (which in turn build atoms), behave this way at such high temperatures. Why doesn’t the mixture turn into a gas, like water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius? How hot would it have to be to vaporize? And if the universe was filled with this liquid goop shortly after the Big Bang, how did it eventually turn into stars, planets, and people?

“We get giant discussions and even some vociferous arguments,” says Jacak. “The big question for us is what is going on inside [this substance] and how does it work. On the experimental side we’re trying to measure its properties, and one of the first properties you could measure is its temperature.”

The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

Link via reddit | Photo: NASA

Imagine that we have been appointed Guardian of the Gate, and our job is to keep vigilant watch over who passes through. One day, as we are standing off to the side, we see a person walk out of the rear side of the gate, emerging from one day in the future. That’s no surprise; it just means that you will see that person enter the front side of the gate tomorrow. But as you keep watch, you notice that he simply loiters around for one day, and when precisely 24 hours have passed, the traveler walks calmly through the front of the gate. Nobody ever approached from elsewhere. That 24-hour period constitutes the entire life span of this time traveler. He experiences the same thing over and over again, although he doesn’t realize it himself, since he does not accumulate new memories along the way. Every trip through the gate is precisely the same to him. That may strike you as weird or unlikely, but there is nothing paradoxical or logically inconsistent about it.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: Biwa Studios)

In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists’ revolt.

That’s just the beginning of the difference we would see between a movie battle and what would happen in the outer space we have. Read more at Gizmodo. Link -via Digg

Points for you if you already understand this physics-based bumper sticker. The effect is called blue shift. From Wikipedia:

Blue shift is the shortening of a transmitted signal’s wavelength, and/or an increase in its frequency, due to the Doppler Effect, which indicates that the object is moving toward the observer. The name comes from the fact that the shorter-wavelength end of the optical spectrum is the blue (or violet) end, hence, when visible light is compacted in wavelength, it is shifted towards the “blue” end of the spectrum. Since the longer-wavelength end of the visible electromagnetic spectrum is red, the opposite effect, of a lengthening of a signal’s wavelength, is referred to as redshifting.

While the terms “redshifting” and “blueshifting” imply significantly redder or bluer light, only the most distant galaxies and those moving at speeds far above average emit light that arrives with perceptible red or blue tinges. For the most part, shifting is not a visible phenomenon.[1]

Link

The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build ‘invisibility carpets’ and super-clear lenses.[...]

The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic ‘resonators’ arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole’s ‘core’ until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. “The light into the core is totally absorbed,” Cui says.

Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA

An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates, the researchers reported online September 23 at arXiv.org.[...]

In the case of the universe, Egan says, “we’d like to know [when and] if the entropy will eventually reach a maximum value, marking the end of all dissipative processes, including life.” Physicists have dubbed that maximum entropy “heat death.”

I know nothing about physics, therefore I propose that people take alarmist, unjustified responses to this disastrous news.

Link via Gizmodo | Image: NASA

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