Physics Buzz

"Think Pods" at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyjd/ / CC BY-ND 2.0 The new Scottish parliament building was unveiled in 2004, some Scots were far from pleased. Some felt that the building's unusual design wasn't so much playful, creative, or forward-looking as embarrassing. "It looks like a baboon cage designed by a demented five-year-old," one told me. Some felt the complex's whimsical design insulted to the Scots' newly-minted representational government, which they'd lacked since 1707. Others, with typical Scottish levity, joked that the building's looks suited its inhabitants and purpose. It's understandable that Edinburgh natives, used to either Georgian pomp or medieval heft, found the Spanish-designed clash of stone, grass, cement, and wood somewhat out of place amid the ancient buildings of Edinburgh's Old Town. Angular slabs of cement echo the nearby crags of Arthur's Seat, Edi

Under normal circumstances, broomsticks and rockets have nothing (that I can think of) in common. But at the December 2008 Space Elevator Conference in Luxembourg, these trusty sweeping untensils get the job--of going to space--done. European Space Agency engineer Age-Raymond Riise used a broomstick and an electric sander to demonstrate how a hypothetical "space lift" or "space elevator" might pull its cargo mechanically. The project could see a 100,000km long cable anchored to the Earth as a means of cheaper transportation to space. I wrote about the concept of a space lift a few months ago . The simplicity of the idea, combined with the numerous and complex hurdles in technology needed to morph a project like this into life is what fascinates me. I suppose it's a prime example of the notion that "old" ideas aren't necessarily bad ones to be quickly tossed out in favor of the completely innovative; they can be modified and applied to new sit

In 1929 Edwin Hubble showed (to an irritated Einstein) that distant galaxies were moving farther and farther away from the Earth, picking up speed the farther they traveled. It was the birth of Hubble's law, which says that the more distant the galaxy the greater its velocity or redshift . Scientists concluded that for Hubble's observations to make sense, the universe must be expanding, swelling like a balloon or a loaf of bread in the oven. The beginnings of the Big Bang Theory began to emerge (hey all this expansion had to start from a single point, right?). There are many hypotheses and much debate over how expansion occurs, but it is generally believed that expansion is the same everywhere, progressing uniformly. That may soon change. Recently, a team of American and Canadian researchers discovered that a certain region of our universe (400 million light years away to be exact, and thats considered 'close to home") is not expanding uniformly but rather uneven

Watch CBS Videos Online Ah, a cop out if there ever was one, in my opinion. The clip above (thanks to Buzz Skyline for sending me the link) is from last Sunday's episode of 60 minutes, " A Look at Wall Street's Shadow Market ". Steve Kroft makes the point that obscure and extremely complicated stuff (ya know, algorithms, models, the "fine print") may be to blame for this swamp of pecuniary mud we're currently wading in. Note -60 Minutes requested interviews with top executives at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch , Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and AIG. They all declined. A snippet of transcript: With its clients clamoring for safe investments with above average return, the big Wall Street investment houses bought up millions of the least dependable mortgages, chopped them up into tiny bits and pieces, and repackaged them as exotic investment securities that hardly anyone could understand. These complex financial instruments were ac

In light of the housing slump, our tanking financial institutions, and a halted economy, it might be a bit relieving to know that something, (even if it ain't money) is flowing. 'Dark flow', as scientists have dubbed the phenomenon , is made up of patches of matter in distant galaxy clusters , that appear to be moving through the universe at extremely high speeds (nearly 2 million mph), and in a uniform direction. Researchers believe the gravity of some object(s) outside of the observable universe is pulling on the matter, causing the high-speed motion. The discovery could help scientists probe what happened to the universe before inflation , a general term for the theory that the observable universe expanded very rapidly right after the Big Bang, blowing up from a very small region to the size it is now (imagine a bubble the size of a proton swelling to the size of a basketball, in less than a fraction of a second). The new findings may provide clues to what is happe

 Anyone ambling along the side streets of Georgetown in Washington, DC, between 1985 and 2002 might have had the pleasure of stumbling upon J.F. Ptak Science Books. It was a cozy, welcoming sort of independent bookstore, and the owner, John Ptak, took great pride in his specialty: "unusual, rare and unique material in the sciences and the history of science." Needless to say, much of that material dealt with the history of physics. It was a sad day for science buffs when the store closed its doors six years ago. But now Ptak Science Books has risen like a phoenix from the ashes, finding renewed life online! That's right: John Ptak has gone digital. You can browse the Website at your leisure for books on every conceivable scientific subject, as well as antiquarian prints and maps from the 16th through 19th centuries. There's even a healthy stock of digital historical images available for downloading. And the best part: John Ptak has a blog . His posts (he calls them

Thanks to fellow intern Justin Reeder for sending me an interesting article this morning, Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes? , published in Scientific American by cosmologist Sean M. Carroll. The article (a formidable 6 pages) tackles those ever-so-elusive problems relating to the origins of our universe, and presents a couple of intriguing explanations. Almost as important are the comments at the bottom of the article, which provide a handful of concise critiques and different perspectives. The author, a physics researcher at the California Institute of Technology, discusses the main ideas behind his and fellow colleague Jennifer Chen's theory that attempts to reconcile the arrow of time (the irreversible unidirectional time we observe) with certain characteristics of our universe, namely its entropy . Carroll proposes that universes are created spontaneously by patches of ultra-dense dark energy , which expands rapidly into a vast empty space, before immediately shrinkin

Admit it, sometimes you think the world revolves around you. In fact, it's possible that the whole universe revolves around you, and a new analysis may be able to confirm your ultra specialness once and for all. Don't go getting all full of yourself, until you read the post below by our newest Physics Buzz blogger, who we call Uncalm . -Buzz Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus stated that the earth is not in a special, central place in the universe. As observers, humans on earth have no advantage over other places in the universe. But was he wrong? Is the earth actually located in the center of a matter-free bubble, a billion light years long, and enclosed by a massive dense shell of material? If so, dark energy , which is invisible (like dark matter ) and thought by physicists to pervade all of space while causing the universe to expand faster, may not exist. The force of gravity would cause galaxies inside the bubble to speed towards the earth, creating the illusion that th

Darkness is filled now Matter confounds Newtons grasp Lost within the void - Demick As "Demick" poetically phrased in the above haiku, calculations that demonstrate missing masses in galaxies and larger-than-expected gravitational forces point to a mysterious dark matter . It seems to concentrate in halos around galaxies. The Bullet Cluster , two colliding galaxies which provide the best evidence yet for dark matter. Its particles scarcely notice the matter in our everyday lives. In fact, they hardly interact with the matter that makes up everything that we can see in the universe. So how do we figure out what it is? Well, that’s rather a large problem. Luckily, theoretical physicists like Erik Lundström, Michael Gustafsson, Lars Bergstrom, and Joakim Edsjo of Stockholm University are on the case, tracking down the cause of the unexpected mass and gravity. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles ( WIMPs ) are a hypothetical form of dark matter that interacts only thro