In chatting with colleagues after a talk this week, Joe Polchinski said he'd love to fall into a black hole. Most theoretical physicists would. It's not because they have some peculiar death wish or because science funding prospects are so dark these days...
Sorry, Matrix fans: the laws of physics suggest we are not living inside a computer
Comly Wilson at CleanEdison, which runs training and certification programs for green-tech installers, has put together a list of five things homeowners should know before buying solar.
Quantum theory once seemed like the last nail in the coffin of pure reason. Now it's looking like its savior
For years I've been thinking and hoping that quantum physics would become the next hacker revolution. DIYers in their basements, garages, and hackerspaces have already pioneered radio communications, PCs, household robots, and cheap 3-D printers--why not quantum entanglement, cryptography, computers, and teleportation?...
In about 10 minutes, using stuff you probably already have lying around your house, you can watch atomic nuclei and elementary particles for yourself using a diffusion cloud chamber--a rudimentary particle detector...
Last Thursday, my colleague John Matson described a truly amazing galaxy known, somewhat unromantically, as BX442. It has a majestic spiral pattern while hundreds of its galactic contemporaries were gawky and misshapen a peculiar and special anomaly which suggests to many astronomers that cosmic pinwheels are ephemeral art forms, like Tibetan sand mandalas...
It may well have been the liveliest hour and a half I’ve ever spent in the company of theoretical physicists. In April, during a workshop I was attending on black holes, Bill Unruh gave a talk that challenged his colleagues on a point almost all of them thought had been settled in the mid-1980s...
Iranian, Israeli, Turkish and Arab physicists plan a joint accelerator
There's something unnerving about unifying physics. The two theories that need to be unified, quantum field theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity, are both highly successful...
SANTA BARBARA—"Maybe we're just too dumb," Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried...
Why quantum physicists think eliminating a dimension of space might be a good idea
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