Phuck Yeah Physics

nationalpost: NASA’s Black Marble is the most detailed night...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:46:15 -0500

NASA’s Black Marble is the most detailed night image of Earth ever made
Twinkling city lights, raging wildfires and colourful auroras are lit up in new dazzling nighttime views of the Earth.

The new “Black Marble” images released Wednesday are courtesy of a newly launched NASA-NOAA satellite that’s equipped with a sensor to observe the planet at night.

The full view consists of a series of images stitched together as an extremely high-resolution composite that gives us the most detailed night view of Earth ever created. (NASA)

Trip My Reactor Look at the awesome fun nuclear engineers get...

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:47:51 -0400

Trip My Reactor

Look at the awesome fun nuclear engineers get up to. Lyrics under the read more. Thank you, odetomyday!

For the last sixty years I’ve operated safe as south texas
But I’m boiling dangerously like at Indian Point I think
All my sump pumps are ready to be feed-and-bleed collectors
You don’t want a total meltdown but I’m so close to the brink
I think I’m done with this whole flux thing, operator operator
Cause I seem to have an overactive steam generator
All my alarms are sounding; my control room’s all lit up
Operator operator, I think I’ve had enough SCRAM

Won’t you trip my reactor I’m ready to go offline
You say you’re ready to LOCA which I think sounds mighty fine
Won’t you just trip my reactor you know where my buttons are
I’m just concrete and uranium this has gone on too faaarrr

I don’t want to report this one to the NRC
Cause it’s getting bad enough I’m classified emergency
There was time to get to normal but honey that came and went
Cause my energy output’s at about 300 percent
If you wait too much longer you’ll deal with some melted pipes
I’ve always had a soft spot for the engineering type
Backup coolant’s started flowing and your control rods are all ready
I’m a dynamic control so please hold your hand steady
I think holding a trip off till last minute is overrated
In fact I’m so out of control I might be underboronated
My turbines are a twirling some smoke is curling too
well I’m just a test reactor but you know what I would do

Won’t you trip my reactor I’m ready to go offline
You say you’re ready to LOCA which I think sounds mighty fine
Won’t you just trip my reactor you know where my buttons are
I’m just concrete and uranium this has gone on too faaarrr

I’m venting to containment as far as I can surmize
I’m not sure how long I can last on PWIs
I see you’re looking nervous maybe I’m getting some traction
Operator, have you ever heard of an immediate action?

Won’t you trip my reactor I’m ready to go offline
You say you’re ready to LOCA which I think sounds mighty fine
Won’t you just trip my reactor you know where my buttons are
I’m just concrete and uranium this has gone on too faaarrr

Picture of the Big Bang (a.k.a. Oldest Light in the Universe)...

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:45:10 -0400

Picture of the Big Bang (a.k.a. Oldest Light in the Universe) (from Minute Physics)

knowledgehoover: Quantum Levitation by Tel Aviv University Can...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:50:37 -0400

knowledgehoover:

Quantum Levitation by Tel Aviv University

Can I just say…

HOLY FREAKIN’ SHIT! THIS IS AMAZING. LITERALLY AMAZING. I AM SERIOUSLY NOT KIDDING, IT’S AMAZING.

(via trademark)

Speedy neutrino mystery likely solved, relativity safe after all

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:02:24 -0400

Speedy neutrino mystery likely solved, relativity safe after all:

Those weird faster-than-light neutrinos that CERN thought they saw last month may have just gotten slowed down to a speed that’ll keep them from completely destroying physics as we know it. In an ironic twist, the very theory that these neutrinos would have disproved may explain exactly what happened.

Back in September, physicists ran an experiment where they sent bunches of neutrinos from Switzerland to Italy and measured how long the particles took to make the trip. Over 15,000 experiments, the neutrinos consistently arrived about 60 nanoseconds early, which means 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Einstein’s special theory of relativity says this should be impossible: nothing can travel faster than light.

The fact that the experiment gave the same result so many times suggested that one of two things was true: either the neutrinos really were speeding past light itself and heralding a new era of physics, or there was some fundamental flaw with the experiment, which was much more likely. It’s now looking as though the faster-than-light result was a fundamental flaw, and appropriately enough, it’s a flaw that actually helps to reinforce relativity rather than question it.

The Experiment

Here’s the deal: neutrinos move very very fast (at or close to light speed, at least), and the distance that they traveled in this experiment was (to a neutrino) not that far, only 450 miles. This means that in order to figure out exactly how long it takes a given neutrino to make the trip, you need to know two things very, very precisely: the distance between the two points, and the time the neutrino leaves the first point (the source) and arrives at the second point (the detector).

In the original experiment, the CERN researchers used GPS to make both the distance measurement and the time measurement. They figured out the distance down to about 20 centimeters, which is certainly possible with GPS, and since GPS satellites all broadcast an extremely accurate time signal by radio, they were also used as a way to sync the clocks that measured the neutrino’s travel time. The CERN team had to account for a lot of different variables to do this, like the time that it takes for the clock signal to make it from the satellite in orbit to the ground, but they may have forgotten one critical thing: relativity.

It’s All Relative

Relativity is really, really weird. It says that things like distance and time can change depending on how you look at them, especially if you’re moving very fast relative to something else. In the case of the neutrino experiment, we’ve got two things to think about: the detectors on the ground that measure where and when the neutrinos depart and arrive, and the GPS satellites up in space that we’re using as a basis for these measurements. Since the satellites are orbiting the Earth and moving way faster than the detectors, we say that they’re in a different “reference frame,” which just means that the motion of the satellites is significantly different than the motion of the Earth.

Part of the deal with relativity is that neither of these reference frames are the “correct” one. From our perspective here on Earth, the satellites are whizzing around in orbit at about 9,000 miles per hour. But the perspective of the satellites, the Earth is whizzing around just as fast, and the difference in velocities between these two reference frames is large enough that some strange things start to happen.

A Satellite’s Perspective

To understand how relativity altered the neutrino experiment, it helps to pretend that we’re hanging out on one of those GPS satellites, watching the Earth go by underneath you. Remember, from the reference frame of someone on the satellite, we’re not moving, but the Earth is. As the neutrino experiment goes by, we start timing one of the neutrinos as it exits the source in Switzerland. Meanwhile, the detector in Italy is moving just as fast as the rest of the Earth, and from our perspective it’s moving towards the source. This means that the neutrino will have a slightly shorter distance to travel than it would if the experiment were stationary. We stop timing the neutrino when it arrives in Italy, and calculate that it moves at a speed that’s comfortably below the speed of light.

“That makes sense,” we say, and send the start time and the stop time down to our colleagues on Earth, who take one look at our numbers and freak out. “That doesn’t make sense,” they say. “There’s no way that a neutrino could have covered the distance we’re measuring down here in the time you measured up there without going faster than light!”

And they’re totally, 100% correct, because the distance that the neutrinos had to travel in their reference frame is longer than the distance that the neutrinos had to travel in our reference frame, because in our reference frame, the detector was moving towards the source. In other words, the GPS clock is bang on the nose, but since the clock is in a different reference frame, you have to compensate for relativity if you’re going to use it to make highly accurate measurements.

Not So Fast

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands went and crunched the numbers on how much relativity should have effected the experiment, and found that the correct compensation should be about 32 additional nanoseconds on each end, which neatly takes care of the 60 nanosecond speed boost that the neutrinos originally seemed to have. This all has to be peer-reviewed and confirmed, of course, but at least for now, it seems like the theory of relativity is not only safe, but confirmed once again.

5 Myths about Girls regarding Math & Science

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 11:07:52 -0400

5 Myths about Girls regarding Math & Science

Photo

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:31:08 -0400

'Light-speed' neutrinos point to new physical reality

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:26:14 -0400

'Light-speed' neutrinos point to new physical reality:

metaconscious:

[This New Scientist article is only available to subscribers so it has been presented in its entirety.]

SUBATOMIC particles have broken the universe’s fundamental speed limit, or so it was reported last week. The speed of light is the ultimate limit on travel in the universe, and the basis for Einstein’s special theory of relativity, so if the finding stands up to scrutiny, does it spell the end for physics as we know it? The reality is less simplistic and far more interesting.

“People were saying this means Einstein is wrong,” says physicist Heinrich Päs of the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany. “But that’s not really correct.”

Instead, the result could be the first evidence for a reality built out of extra dimensions. Future historians of science may regard it not as the moment we abandoned Einstein and broke physics, but rather as the point at which our view of space vastly expanded, from three dimensions to four, or more.

“This may be a physics revolution,” says Thomas Weiler at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who has devised theories built on extra dimensions. “The famous words ‘paradigm shift’ are used too often and tritely, but they might be relevant.”

The subatomic particles - neutrinos - seem to have zipped faster than light from CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, to the OPERA detector at the Gran Sasso lab near L’Aquila, Italy. It’s a conceptually simple result: neutrinos making the 730-kilometre journey arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than they would have if they were travelling at light speed. And it relies on three seemingly simple measurements, says Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon, France, a member of the OPERA collaboration: the distance between the labs, the time the neutrinos left CERN, and the time they arrived at Gran Sasso.

But actually measuring those times and distances to the accuracy needed to detect nanosecond differences is no easy task. The OPERA collaboration spent three years chasing down every source of error they could imagine (see illustration) before Autiero made the result public in a seminar at CERN on 23 September.

Physicists grilled Autiero for an hour after his talk to ensure the team had considered details like the curvature of the Earth, the tidal effects of the moon and the general relativistic effects of having two clocks at different heights (gravity slows time so a clock closer to Earth’s surface runs a tiny bit slower).

They were impressed. “I want to congratulate you on this extremely beautiful experiment,” said Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after Autiero’s talk. “The experiment is very carefully done, and the systematic error carefully checked.”

Most physicists still expect some sort of experimental error to crop up and explain the anomaly, mainly because it contravenes the incredibly successful law of special relativity which holds that the speed of light is a constant that no object can exceed. The theory also leads to the famous equation E = mc².

Hotly anticipated are results from other neutrino detectors, including T2K in Japan and MINOS at Fermilab in Illinois, which will run similar experiments and confirm the results or rule them out (see “Fermilab stops hunting Higgs, starts neutrino quest”).

In 2007, the MINOS experiment searched for faster-than-light neutrinos but didn’t see anything statistically significant. The team plans to reanalyse its data and upgrade the detector’s stopwatch. “These are the kind of things that we have to follow through, and make sure that our prejudices don’t get in the way of discovering something truly fantastic,” says Stephen Parke of Fermilab.

In the meantime, suggests Sandip Pakvasa of the University of Hawaii, let’s suppose the OPERA result is real. If the experiment is tested and replicated and the only explanation is faster-than-light neutrinos, is E = mc² done for?

Not necessarily. In 2006, Pakvasa, Päs and Weiler came up with a model that allows certain particles to break the cosmic speed limit while leaving special relativity intact. “One can, if not rescue Einstein, at least leave him valid,” Weiler says.

The trick is to send neutrinos on a shortcut through a fourth, thus-far-unobserved dimension of space, reducing the distance they have to travel. Then the neutrinos wouldn’t have to outstrip light to reach their destination in the observed time.

In such a universe, the particles and forces we are familiar with are anchored to a four-dimensional membrane, or “brane”, with three dimensions of space and one of time. Crucially, the brane floats in a higher dimensional space-time called the bulk, which we are normally completely oblivious to.

The fantastic success of special relativity up to now, plus other cosmological observations, have led physicists to think that the brane might be flat, like a sheet of paper. Quantum fluctuations could make it ripple and roll like the surface of the ocean, Weiler says. Then, if neutrinos can break free of the brane, they might get from one point on it to another by dashing through the bulk, like a flying fish taking a shortcut between the waves (see illustration).

This model is attractive because it offers a way out of one of the biggest theoretical problems posed by the OPERA result: busting the apparent speed limit set by neutrinos detected pouring from a supernova in 1987.

As stars explode in a supernova, most of their energy streams out as neutrinos. These particles hardly ever interact with matter. That means they should escape the star almost immediately, while photons of light will take about 3 hours. In 1987, trillions of neutrinos arrived at Earth 3 hours before the dying star’s light caught up. If the neutrinos were travelling as fast as those going from CERN to OPERA, they should have arrived in 1982.

OPERA’s neutrinos were about 1000 times as energetic as the supernova’s neutrinos, though. And Pakvasa and colleagues’ model calls for neutrinos with a specific energy that makes them prefer tunnelling through the bulk to travelling along the brane. If that energy is around 20 gigaelectronvolts - and the team don’t yet know that it is - “then you expect large effects in the OPERA region, and small effects at the supernova energies,” Pakvasa says. He and Päs are meeting next week to work out the details.

The flying fish shortcut isn’t available to all particles. In the language of string theory, a mathematical model some physicists hope will lead to a comprehensive “theory of everything”, most particles are represented by tiny vibrating strings whose ends are permanently stuck to the brane. One of the only exceptions is the theoretical “sterile neutrino”, represented by a closed loop of string. These are also the only type of neutrino thought capable of escaping the brane.

Neutrinos are known to switch back and forth between their three observed types (electron, muon and tau neutrinos), and OPERA was originally designed to detect these shifts. In Pakvasa’s model, the muon neutrinos produced at CERN could have transformed to sterile neutrinos mid-flight, made a short hop through the bulk, and then switched back to muon before reappearing on the brane.

So if OPERA’s results hold up, they could provide support for the existence of sterile neutrinos, extra dimensions and perhaps string theory. Such theories could also explain why gravity is so weak compared with the other fundamental forces. The theoretical particles that mediate gravity, known as gravitons, may also be closed loops of string that leak off into the bulk. “If, in the end, nobody sees anything wrong and other people reproduce OPERA’s results, then I think it’s evidence for string theory, in that string theory is what makes extra dimensions credible in the first place,” Weiler says.

Meanwhile, alternative theories are likely to abound. Weiler expects papers to appear in a matter of days or weeks.

Even if relativity is pushed aside, Einstein has worked so well for so long that he will never really go away. At worst, relativity will turn out to work for most of the universe but not all, just as Newton’s mechanics work until things get extremely large or small. “The fact that Einstein has worked for 106 years means he’ll always be there, either as the right answer or a low-energy effective theory,” Weiler says.

(via New Scientist)

Related reading » Neutrinos: Everything you need to know

roomthily: prostheticknowledge: Schrödinger’s Nyan Cat oh,...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:14:54 -0400

roomthily:

prostheticknowledge:

Schrödinger’s Nyan Cat

oh, internet.

pork2k: Albert Einstein explains his famous formula: E=mc² “It...

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 02:04:16 -0400

pork2k:

Albert Einstein explains his famous formula: E=mc²

“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind. Furthermore, the equation E is equal to m c-squared, in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa. The mass and energy were in fact equivalent, according to the formula mentioned above. This was demonstrated by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932, experimentally.”

invaderxan: Cosmic rays

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:49:23 -0400

invaderxan:

Cosmic rays

proofmathisbeautiful: Scientist Trap Antimatter for a Record...

Wed, 04 May 2011 16:01:31 -0400

proofmathisbeautiful:

Scientist Trap Antimatter for a Record Breaking 16 Minutes!!

(gizmodo) - Scientists working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) near Geneva, Switzerland did something no other scientists have done. They stored atoms of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds (~16 minutes) which is 10,000 times longer than they’ve ever done before. By trapping and observing antimatter for that long, scientists can better understand the properties of it.

Read the whole article HERE!!

ummwhat: Made a standard model and a carbon atom w/ some...

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 01:18:51 -0500

ummwhat:

Made a standard model and a carbon atom w/ some modelling clay I found.

pork2k: Albert Einstein explains his famous formula: E=mc² “It...

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:12:52 -0500

pork2k:

Albert Einstein explains his famous formula: E=mc²

“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind. Furthermore, the equation E is equal to m c-squared, in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa. The mass and energy were in fact equivalent, according to the formula mentioned above. This was demonstrated by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932, experimentally.”

"Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator is set to shut down at the end of the year after losing out..."

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:25:52 -0500

“

Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator is set to shut down at the end of the year after losing out on additional federal funds to continue its operation.

An estimated 100 jobs could be lost as a result. But area officials are still hopeful about the future of the physics laboratory.

Foster believes Fermilab can continue to be on the forefront of research, even without the Tevatron.

”

- R.I.P. Tevatron, 1987-2011 (via dreamclassier/Daily Chronicle)

unknownskywalker: Hotspots in fountains on the Sun’s surface...

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:43:57 -0500

unknownskywalker:

Hotspots in fountains on the Sun’s surface help explain coronal heating mystery

Among the many constantly moving, appearing, disappearing and generally explosive events in the sun’s atmosphere, there exist giant plumes of gas — as wide as a state and as long as Earth — that zoom up from the sun’s surface at 150,000 mph. Known as spicules, these are one of several phenomena known to transfer energy and heat throughout the sun’s magnetic atmosphere, or corona.

Thanks to NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Japanese satellite Hinode, these spicules have recently been imaged and measured better than ever before, showing them to contain hotter gas than previously observed. Thus, they may perhaps play a key role in helping to heat the sun’s corona to a staggering million degrees or more. (A number made more surprising since the sun’s surface itself is only about 10,000 °F.)

The traditional view is that all heating happens higher up in the corona. The suggestion in this research is that cool gas is ejected from the sun’s surface in spicules and gets heated on its way to the corona. This doesn’t mean the old view has been completely overturned, but this is a strong suggestion that part of the spicule material gets heated to very high temperatures and provides some coronal heating.

Image: Spicules on the sun, as observed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. These bursts of gas jet off the surface of the sun at 150,000 miles per hour and contain gas that reaches temperatures over a million degrees.

• Source: Full story at NASA

roomthily: Particle Pings: Sounds Of The Large Hadron...

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 18:32:07 -0500

roomthily:

Particle Pings: Sounds Of The Large Hadron Collider

Asquith, like many physicists, spends a lot of time thinking about particles like the elusive Higgs boson — the subatomic particle that scientists say endows everything in the universe with mass. Proving the existence of the Higgs boson is one of the main goals of the collider.

“You tend to personify things that you think about a lot,” she says. She gives particles personalities, colors and sounds. “I think electrons, perhaps, sound like a glockenspiel to me.”

[…]

She wondered what would happen if she used music composition software to turn data from the collider into sound. So she fed in a sample of the LHC data — three columns of numbers.

“So we’ll map, for example, the first column of numbers, which may be a distance, to time,” Asquith says. “And we may map the second column of numbers to pitch, and the third, perhaps, to volume.”

What she got isn’t quite music, but sounds that are more out of this world — bells, beeps and clangs.

via NPR

audio clip of physics at the link

unknownskywalker: International Space Station on the Moon? From...

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:01:46 -0500

unknownskywalker:

International Space Station on the Moon?

From our vantage point on Earth, it takes just a half second for the International Space Station to fly across the face of the Moon, so catching a transit is tricky. But award-winning French astrophotographer Theirry Legault captured an amazingly sharp and detailed transit image that makes the ISS look like it is sitting on the Moon’s surface!

Legault took this image from Avranches (Normandy, France) a few hours before the eclipse, on December 20th at 21:34 UT. He used a Meade 10″ ACF on Takahashi EM400, with a Canon 5D mark II. The transit duration was just 0.55 seconds, as the ISS is traveling at 7.5km/s or 28,0000 km/h (17,500 mph).

• Source: Universe Today • View High-Res (2919×2919 px)

Photo

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:59:25 -0500

Physics: Planetary Motion Simulator

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:56:06 -0500

Physics: Planetary Motion Simulator