Robert Furman, a civil engineer who helped round up German scientists suspected of working on an atomic bomb for the Nazis during World War II, has died. He was 93.

Furman died Oct. 14 of metastatic melanoma, The New York Times writes in his obituary today.

As chief of foreign intelligence for the U.S. bomb project in the last two years of the war, Furman coordinated the kidnapping of German scientists, including physicist Werner Heisenberg. Eventually, Heisenberg and nine other scientists were spirited out of Soviet reach and into a detention center in France called the Dustbin, according to the Times.

Continue Reading >

More than a decade after driving their jet-powered Thrust SSC (for super sonic car) an ear-popping 763 miles (1,228 kilometers) per hour, a team of British engineers and pilots has set its sites on a new record: to build a car by 2011 that can travel faster than 1,000 miles (1,610 kilometers) per hour, BBC News reports. The team has already christened its new super sonic vehicle--which will be powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter Typhoon jet engine--the Bloodhound SSC.

The team expects the 42-foot (12.8-meter) long, 6.4-ton Bloodhound SSC to accelerate from zero to 1,050 miles (1,690 kilometers) per hour in just 40 seconds—faster than a bullet shot from a .357 Magnum, which is capable of flying at up to about 962 miles (1,548 kilometers) per hour.) The vehicle's 35.4 inch- (900 millimeter-) diameter wheels will spin so fast that they had to be made from a high-grade titanium to prevent them from splitting apart, the BBC reports.

Continue Reading >

Once upon a time, physicists raised eyebrows when they said we existed in multiple universes. But this "many worlds" theory has become widely accepted since it was first proposed in 1957 by eccentric physicist Hugh Everett.

Everett, who died in 1982 at the age of 51, is the subject of a new documentary, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, which airs today at 8 P.M. Eastern time on PBS. Journalist Peter Byrne, whose 2007 profile of Everett in Scientific American explains the theory and describes Everett's troubled private and professional life, appears in the film.

"If everything physically possible happens in the universe, why do we only see one possibility at a time? That's the question philosophers are beating their heads bloody trying to answer," Byrne tells us.  "Everett's answer is there's more than one you, and you are splitting into trillions of copies of yourself every time there's a quantum interaction of a certain size."

Continue Reading >

Is a wristwatch worth more than half a million dollars? If it belonged to Albert Einstein, the answer isn't relative.

An anonymous bidder has coughed up $596,000 for a gold wristwatch worn by the physicist whose special theory of relativity proposed that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast things are moving.

Perhaps the buyer hopes its magic will rub off; Einstein took his inspiration from concrete problems of timekeeping, Peter Galison notes in his book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps.

Einstein received the watch in 1931, as a gift from a rabbi during a luncheon of a Zionist convention at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, says Michelle Halpern, a spokeswoman for New York auctioneer Antiquorum, which sold the 81-year-old watch yesterday. Einstein emigrated to the United States two years later.

Continue Reading >

Initial suspicions that a faulty electrical connection between two magnets inside the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) caused a helium leak that ultimately shut down the machine have proved correct.

Mechanical damage from the September 19 electrical snafu caused the magnet to release helium into the particle accelerator's 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the LHC, said today. CERN's investigation confirms its original explanation for the leak.

Continue Reading >

Earlier this month, a free repository at Cornell University for technical papers that has become a wire service of sorts for physicists, mathematicians and other disciplines, named ArXiv, marked a major milestone as the number of papers collected there reached the half-million mark. ArXiv serves as the main forum for scientists in many fields to present and discuss the latest findings before their pre-publication papers are accepted by a journal.

An example: Grigori Perelman, who devised a proof for the Poincaré conjecture, a 100-year-old problem in mathematics, never submitted his solution to any academic journal. In 2002, he posted the first of a series of papers that contained a proof for the topology problem on ArXiv. Science magazine later named the work “breakthrough of the year” and Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics, which the quirky Russian refused.

Continue Reading >

Three men who study broken symmetry -- the phenomenon that "conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface," according to the Nobel Foundation -- have won the Nobel Prize in Physics: Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago; Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan; and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.

Broken symmetry has become an important underpinning of particle physics. You can read more about Kobayashi and Maskawa's work here.

Continue Reading >

What if the people who run the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) threw a party, and no particles came?

That’s what  is set to happen on October 21, when CERN plans an inauguration ceremony for the supercollider. After a much-ballyhooed first proton beam run on September 10, the LHC won’t actually be operational until next year, thanks to a few early mishaps. Not exactly the results LHC operators were hoping for – but why let a little thing like failure get in the way of celebrating?

A press release announcing the ceremony stressed the positive:

“It’s remarkable how quickly the LHC went through its paces on 10 September,” LHC project leader Lyn Evans said, “and testimony to the rigorous preparation that has gone into building and commissioning the LHC.”

Continue Reading >

If you thought the Cold War was over—that long nuclear standoff that shaped the last five decades of the 20th century—think again. Following his American counterpart, and perhaps prompted by new tensions over the war in Georgia and the agreement between the U.S. and Poland to deploy a missile defense system there, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has announced plans to upgrade that country's "nuclear deterrent" by 2020.

It's part of a full upgrade for the Russian armed forces: more nuclear-powered subs, better bombs as well as their own "air and space defense network". "Star wars" has at last come to a galaxy not so far away.

The move prompted U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to boast that the U.S. possesses an "extremely capable, robust, broad and indeed varied nuclear deterrent," according to an interview with Reuters. That no doubt includes not only the hit-or-miss missile defense effort but also plans to build new nuclear weapons and the industrial complex that develops and fabricates them.

Continue Reading >

A federal judge has tossed out a case challenging the operation of the world's biggest particle accelerator—not that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is running, anyway.

Judge Helen Gillmor of the U.S. District Court in Hawaii dismissed the lawsuit Friday, saying the American judicial system has no jurisdiction over the $8-billion LHC, which is housed in a circular tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border. The New York Times is reporting on the dismissal today.

The suit was filed by a retired radiation safety officer, Walter Wagner, and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, MSNBC's Cosmic Log has previously noted. The two claimed that the operator of the LHC, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and its backers failed to show that smashing protons at nearly the speed of light wouldn't produce mini black holes that could obliterate Earth.

Continue Reading >