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Blog life: Backreaction
Bloggers: Sabine Hossenfelder and Stefan Scherer
URL: backreaction.blogspot
First post: February 2006
A husband and wife team, currently separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is based at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, and Stefan Scherer works in the editorial office of the Landolt-Börnstein scientific database in Frankfurt, Germany.
Life, the universe and everything
The Universe: A Biography
John Gribbin
2007 Penguin
256pp £20.00hb The title of John Gribbin's latest book – The Universe: A Biography – suggests we might be in for claims that the universe has a life of its own, but in fact this is a book packed with physics.
Clouding the issue of climate
The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change
Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder
2007 Icon Books 256pp £9.99/$15.95pb For scientists, the archetypal romantic hero is the unappreciated pioneer working long hours while being scorned for his unorthodox, but ultimately correct, ideas.
Fermi gases go with the superfluid flow
The study of superfluidity in "imbalanced" ultracold fermionic gases is helping researchers unearth the mechanisms behind superfluids and superconductors, explain Wolfgang Ketterle and Yong-il Shin If asked to describe the characteristic properties of a gas, most physicists would refer immediately to its diluteness: gases such as air or the helium inside balloons are about 1000 times less dense than liquids or solids.
Cracking a material problem
Cracks occur on scales ranging from the atomic to the tectonic, and are the reason why materials fail. Traditionally the preserve of engineers, Robert Spatschek and Efim Brener explain how the rich dynamics of crack propagation is attracting the attention of physicists Fracture plays a ubiquitous role in our lives, from everyday annoyances like dropping a glass to catastrophes such as the break-up of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986.
Crash! The physics of vehicle testing
Newtonian physics lies at the heart of attempts to make cars safer on the roads. Richard Frampton explains how virtual crash-test dummies and "intelligent" seat belts are helping to save lives If someone told you that up to 37 million people are expected to die over the next 20 years in some particularly horrific way, you might think they were talking about the rise of a ghastly worldwide epidemic.
Sounding out the Big Bang
Gravitational waves offer a unique way of studying inflation and other fundamental processes of the very early universe, explains Craig J Hogan, and may even connect string theory with the world of experiment Our view of the universe is about to change forever. Since science began, all our knowledge of what lies above, below and around us has come from long-familiar forms of energy: light, produced by distant astrophysical objects; and matter, in the form of particles such as cosmic rays.
Science bloopers II
Robert P Crease relates your responses to his call for "science bloopers" – mistakes in books, movies and other media In the 1980s ABC News – the news division of the American Broadcasting Company – unveiled a new logo consisting of a stylized image of the Earth, which was animated with the continents moving from east to west: from right to left on the TV screen. Soon after the logo's debut, someone pointed out the error.
Neutron lab comes back from the dead
The European Spallation Source is firmly back on the agenda with several countries unveiling bids to host the world-beating neutron facility. Edwin Cartlidge reports on the lab's dramatic change in fortune When the German government announced in February 2003 that it was withdrawing its support for the European Spallation Source (ESS), the news came as a serious blow to neutron scatterers across the continent.
In support of neutrons
The UK must put forward a formal bid to host the European Spallation Source If there is one field of research in which Europe can justifiably claim to lead the world, then it is neutron scattering. Europe boasts the world's two most powerful sources of neutrons: the Institut Laue-Langevin reactor in France and the ISIS spallation facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK.
Electronics with carbon nanotubes
From mobile phones and laptops to Xboxes and iPods, it is difficult to think of any aspect of modern life that has not been touched by developments in electronics, computing and communications over the last few decades. Many of these technological advances have arisen from our ability to create ever smaller electronic devices, in particular silicon-based field effect transistors (FETs), which has led to denser, faster and less power-hungry circuits.
Vision on a chip
If you think of medical prostheses, then artificial limbs, hip replacements or cochlear implants may spring to mind. These are all undoubtedly impressive feats of medical engineering, but scientists are now attempting to develop something altogether more complex – a retinal prosthesis. This is a device designed to restore some vision to blind people by bypassing damaged photoreceptors in the retina and stimulating the neuronal cells at the end of a still healthy optic nerve.
Closing in on the gamma-ray sky
Over the last century our window on the universe has been widened by a staggering amount. From observations in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which spans one octave, astronomers have extended their view in two different directions. We are now able to study the cosmos in the long-wavelength radio and microwave regions right up to the ultrashort wavelengths of X-rays and gamma radiation – an increase of over 70 octaves.
Categories: News
Key to the quantum industry
Technology that exploits the strange rules of quantum mechanics to guarantee the security of encrypted messages is the first product of a new quantum-information industry to reach the market, as Andrew Shields and Zhiliang Yuan explain As theories go, quantum mechanics has certainly been successful. Despite its many counterintuitive predictions, it has provided an accurate description of the atomic world for more than 80 years.
Equations as icons
Why is it that particular equations, formulas and expressions become icons, asks Robert P Crease When the 14-year-old Richard Feynman first encountered eiπ + 1 = 0, the future physics Nobel laureate wrote in big, bold letters in his diary that it was "the most remarkable formula in math".
The costs of replacing Trident
Replacing the UK's Trident nuclear-weapons system would divert the country's declining workforce of physical scientists from tackling global threats
such as climate change, argues Stuart Parkinson This month the UK parliament will vote on one of the most important defence issues the country has faced: whether or not to replace its Trident nuclear-weapons system when it reaches the end of its lifetime some 20 years from now.
The Trident solution
Refurbishing the UK's Trident nuclear-weapons system would be better than replacing it Life is far from simple in the post-Cold War world. The neat US-Soviet divide is long gone, having been replaced by a more complex geopolitical reality in which countries like North Korea and Iran have fledgling nuclear programmes. So what should a country like the UK do about its nuclear weapons? The answer for the British government is simple.
The magnet in the electron
The best measurement ever of the electron’s magnetic moment allows us to re-evaluate the fine-structure constant and put quantum electrodynamics to the ultimate test, explains Gerald Gabrielse What do the massive Earth and the tiny electron have in common? The unusual answer is that both act as if they have a magnet lurking inside them.
The science of origami
The science underlying paper-folding is leading to new technological and artistic applications for the centuries-old craft of origami, as Robert J Lang describes Most people think of origami, the Japanese art of folding paper, as good for little more than making toys and trinkets. Indeed, you might imagine that the closest it comes to practical utility is in the making of paper aeroplanes – and even that is not very close.
Shot in the dark
A cosmic collision between two galaxy clusters known collectively as the Bullet Cluster has provided researchers with persuasive evidence for the existence of dark matter, describe Douglas Cloweand Dennis Zaritsky In 1933 the astronomer Fritz Zwicky unearthed a puzzle that has kept researchers busy ever since.
About this image
Courtesy of SOHO/EIT consortium. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. Image has been modified.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is designed to study the internal structure of the Sun, its extensive outer atmosphere and the origin of the solar wind, the stream of highly ionized gas that blows continuously outward through the Solar System. An uninterrupted view of the Sun is achieved by operating SOHO from a permanent vantage point 1.5 million kilometers sunward of the Earth. SOHO was designed to observe the Sun continuously for at least two years.
- New quasar is the oldest yet
- Closing in on the gamma-ray sky
- Milky Way Black Hole May Be A Colossal 'Particle Accelerator'
- Cosmic Lighthouses: Astrophysicists Explain Differences In Brightness Of Supernova Explosions
- Universe Offers 'Eternal Feast,' Cosmologist Says
- Origin Of Darkest Galaxies In The Universe Elucidated
- Scientists Find High Energy Systems Hidden In 'Gas Cocoon'
- Astronomer Finds Closest Gravitational Lensing Galaxy
- First negatively charged molecule found in space
- Binary star pulsates with high-energy gamma rays
- Active galactic nuclei
- Gamma ray 'clock' found creating antimatter
- Astronomers Find First Ever Gamma Ray Clock
- How Many Black Holes Are There In The Universe?
- Big Bang's Afterglow Fails Intergalactic 'Shadow' Test
