Credit: Nature
The standard model of particle physics is currently the best theory out there describing the fundamental constituents of nature. The model accurately describes the basic forces and their interactions with gravity being the only exception.
Despite the successes that the model boasts of, there are certain shortcomings of the theory that scientists around the world are trying to address and resolve. One of the key motivations is to find out the foundational building blocks of the so called Dark matter and Dark Energy which are believed to be made up of new unknown and undiscovered particles.
Recently, an interdisciplinary team of scientists led by physicists from Boston college in the US announced that they have discovered a new particle – or previously undetectable quantum excitation – known as the axial Higgs mode, a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson.
“The detection a decade ago...
"Supersymmetry is not a tight and efficient theory, welded together to explain observations. It’s a convoluted mess of mathematical models that could potentially explain anything, or nothing at all." – Tom Hartsfield, PhD physicist and Big Think Contributor
In a new essay for Big Think PhD physicist Tom Hartsfield urges his colleagues not to build another Large Hadron Collider—a next-generation LHC++ —and delineates a number of reasons why it could end up being a colossal waste of money and yield little to no new discoveries to advance physics and our understanding of the fundamentals of Nature.
Tom Hartsfield lists a few critical reasons why it is a bad idea to build another LHC:
In recent years, an extraordinary and unexpected feature in high energy collisions (collisions of subatomic particles at extremely speeds, performed mainly at CERN) has surprised the physicists working on the nucleonic scale: a fractal pattern that had been observed intermittently in high energy experimental data (particularly in the behavior of the particle multiplicity against the collision energy), can be accounted for by the Yang-Mills Field (YMF) equations, which recently have been shown to present fractal structure, as claimed by the authors of the study.
These theories that apply to subatomic particles, such as protons, electrons and quarks, belong to the category of distinguishable particles called fermions, and the way these particles distribute in different energy levels (also known as states) is described by Fermi Dirac Statistics. Fermi Dirac statistics is commonly replaced by the classical...
By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation
We first reported on the break-through observation of a time crystal in our article Time Crystals – A New Phase of Matter. Now, in the next major development, the same team who generated the new phase of matter have created the first time-crystal two-body system in an experiment that seems to bend the laws of physics.
As the name would imply, a time crystal is not an easy system to prepare and experiment with. Perpetual ground state motion in equilibrium defines a time crystal, however observing such motion is famously unfeasible, because experimentally a time crystal only achieves stability if it is isolated from the environment and the observer— shielding the pure quantum state of the system from decoherence— where either the perpetuity or equilibrium requirements can be “bent”. Much like the quantum mechanical bit, or qubit, coupling separate quantum time crystals while...
A very unexpected discovery has surprised the world. The Amazon Forest, thought to be a reservoir of wildlife and primitive indigenous settlements, was also the seat of advanced civilizations. By advanced, we mean that they were large urban societies with civic and ritualistic activities, in contrast with nomadic small tribes.
Using a remote-sensing technology called Lidar to map the terrain from a helicopter, researchers found that ancient Amazonians had built and lived in densely populated centers, starting about 1,500 years ago. The immense settlements stretch across some 80 square miles of the Llanos de Mojos region of Bolivia.
“The complexity of these settlements is mind blowing”, Heiko Prümers, archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute.
The findings include 22-metre-tall conical pyramids and earthen buildings that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways and...
The Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium has completed a 3.055 billion-base pair sequence of a human genome, including complete sequencing of all centromeric satellite arrays, recent segmental duplications, and the short arms of all five acrocentric chromosomes, unlocking these hitherto un-resolved regions to variational and functional studies [1]:
"Mapping this genetic material should help explain how humans adapted to and survived infections and plagues, how our bodies clear toxins, how individuals respond differently to drugs, what makes the brain distinctly human and what makes each of us distinct, said Evan Eichler, a geneticist at the University of Washington School of Medicine who helped lead the research." [2]
Each bar is a linear visualization of a chromosome, with the chromosome number shown at left. Red segments denote previously missing sequences that the T2T Consortium resolved. GRAPHIC: V....
Lando Calrissian Heads to Hyperspace. An accelerating object, such as a spaceship traveling at relativistic speeds (close to the speed of light), should generate showers of faintly glowing particles, according to the predicted phenomenon known as the Unruh effect.
Einstein’s principle of equivalence states that gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable from each other. The best example to see this, is to place oneself inside an elevator. Initially it is static in a floor, and when it starts to move upwards (i.e., it accelerates or changes its speed) one feels pushed towards the floor, as if one is pulled by gravity, even though the effect comes from an acceleration in the opposite direction.
Now, let us imagine that an object is in space, in a perfect vacuum; a supposedly friction-less environment, and it accelerates suddenly. The first question that arises is … how can it even move, if there is...
In a previous article by Resonance Science Physical Chemist Dr. Ines Urdaneta an experiment that possibly demonstrates non-trivial quantum mechanical properties in microtubules was discussed. In the experiment, laser light shone on microtubules was absorbed, and had a delayed re-emission on physiologically relevant timescales [1]. The laser light was being absorbed by atoms and molecules within the microtubules and altering their properties before being re-emitted. This is a quantum mechanical process, and hints at potential quantum information processing in the biological system. In a seeming demonstration of how this process can be used in the transfer of information, a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have utilized a similar process to stream video with a quantum receiver [2].
The team had already used their quantum receiver to stream music with AM / FM reception [3], but now they...
Image Credit: EHT Collaboration.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the largest scientific initiative, has given the world the closets look and confirmation of Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. It is just 26,000 light years away from Earth!
In our RSF scientific blog we had been following the EHT initiative. EHT is an international collaboration that aims to obtain the first image of the event horizon of a black hole, using a virtual telescope the size of the earth. Different telescopes scattered across the planet collect the data of the same object, which is then combined and processed by a supercomputer to produce a final image through the interferometry technique, just as the one used in ALMA, but this time at a global scale. By triangulating the data from the nine telescope arrays – (ARO/SMT), (APEX), (IRAM), (JCMT), (LMT)...
A chaotic dynamics is typically characterized by the emergence of strange attractors with their fractal or multifractal structure. On the other hand, chaotic synchronization is a unique emergent self-organization phenomenon in nature [1].
Complex systems are, by their intrinsic nature, immensely challenging to describe and delineate scientifically. Of particular interest in understanding their uniquely chaotic behavior is how synchronization and self-organization emerge from such systems, as is often observed [2,3]. For instance, synchronization underlies numerous collective phenomena— providing a scaffold for emergent behaviors— ranging from the acoustic unison of cricket choruses and the coordinated choreography of starling flocks to human cognition, perception, memory and consciousness phenomena [4-6]. As the authors— a group of physicists from Bar–Ilan University in Israel—...
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