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Category: Physics

A neglected particle from the dawn of time might explain why everything in the universe exists

A neglected particle from the dawn of time might explain why everything in the universe exists

Live Science reports: A neglected “ghost particle” may have dominated the universe right after the Big Bang ‪—‬ changing how the cosmos expanded in its first moments and reshaping the conditions under which matter won out over antimatter, a new study suggests. In other words, it may explain why anything exists at all. The particle, a hypothetical “right-handed” neutrino, briefly could have held more energy than everything else in the infant universe combined, which would have sped up cosmic expansion…

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Why a world without friction is a world without progress

Why a world without friction is a world without progress

Jennifer R Vail writes: In conversations, few words catch my attention faster than ‘friction’ – and especially talk of making things frictionless. From the workplace to grocery shopping, our societies seem to be striving to remove friction from everything. The motivation appears to be that decreasing resistance makes life easier and smoother. Having spent a career as a tribologist, studying friction, wear and lubrication scientifically, I have some opinions on this. I’ll confess that, in most of my career, I…

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High-speed particle smashing recreates primordial soup droplets from the universe’s first moments

High-speed particle smashing recreates primordial soup droplets from the universe’s first moments

Discover reports: In the universe’s earliest moments, it took the form of a scalding soup filled with particles called quarks and gluons. These particles zipped through liquidy plasma for just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Now, physicists have recreated these conditions by producing tiny droplets of the same primordial soup that filled the universe right after it was born. Making a modern version of the primordial soup — known as quark-gluon plasma — entails smashing…

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The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

By Phil Wiseman, University of Southampton and Mark Sullivan, University of Southampton A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism. Scientists had long known that the universe was expanding. But in the late 1990s, researchers discovered that this expansion…

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Physicists are closing in on the origin of matter

Physicists are closing in on the origin of matter

Scientific American reports: Why is there something rather than nothing? Philosopher Martin Heidegger called this “the first of all questions,” and it has vexed scholars and theologians alike throughout history. Science has yet to find an answer, either—but researchers have narrowed it down. What’s clear is that the big bang churned out infinitesimally more baryonic matter—the protons and neutrons that glom together as atomic nuclei—than it did antimatter. This is strange because matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they…

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Astrophysicists puzzle over the new universe revealed by Webb

Astrophysicists puzzle over the new universe revealed by Webb

Jay Bennett writes: When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came…

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A dark dimension could link two of the universe’s great unknowns

A dark dimension could link two of the universe’s great unknowns

Steve Nadis writes: For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, approximately 70% of the stuff that makes up the cosmos consists of dark energy, an unknown force that pushes space to expand. And another 25% consists of dark matter, a mysterious material that holds galaxies together. But semantically speaking, dark energy and dark matter are not so much “dark” as they are invisible. They do not…

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Why reality is more than the sum of its particles

Why reality is more than the sum of its particles

Felix Flicker writes: What is the world made of? For centuries, people have believed that matter is constructed from tiny, indivisible parts. Some of the earliest known references come from the Greek philosopher Democritus, who taught that the Universe was composed of atoms the size of dust motes floating in sunlight. Theravada Buddhism developed the concept of kalapas, indivisible bundles of properties fleeting into and out of existence. Alchemy’s description of fundamental ‘corpuscles’, expounded by Isaac Newton and others, derived…

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Physicists discover the most complex forms of ice yet

Physicists discover the most complex forms of ice yet

Shalma Wegsman writes: Ice comes in more forms than what you’ll find in a freezer or a glacier. Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity. Ice is the name for any phase of water that is solid and crystalline, meaning that it has a repeating molecular structure. Over the past decade, computer simulations have predicted tens of…

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Universe’s expansion rate cannot be explained by current physics

Universe’s expansion rate cannot be explained by current physics

Live Science reports: There’s a central crisis in cosmology: Different measurements yield different values for the expansion rate of the universe. Now, a comprehensive analysis combining decades of independent measurements suggests that this discrepancy is not due to error or uncertainty; instead, it’s a potential pathway to new physics beyond the standard cosmological model. Astronomers calculate the universe’s expansion rate, or Hubble constant, in two ways. One method is to use measurements of the distance to the cosmic microwave background…

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Physicists have found something (which is nothing) that can move faster than light

Physicists have found something (which is nothing) that can move faster than light

Science Alert reports: For the first time, physicists have observed that ‘holes’ in light can move faster than the light itself. They’re known as phase singularities or optical vortices, and since the 1970s, scientists have predicted that, just as eddies in a river can move faster than the flowing water around them, so too can whirlpools in a wave of light outrun the light they’re embedded within. This does not break relativity, which states that nothing can travel faster than…

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How astronomers are unveiling the ‘skeleton’ of the universe

How astronomers are unveiling the ‘skeleton’ of the universe

Paul Sutter writes: The universe is a vast, unseen loom, weaving galaxies into an intricate cosmic web through invisible threads of matter. This cosmic web is the fundamental scaffolding of everything we see, dictating where galaxies form and how they evolve. Much of this architecture remains a mystery, its delicate pathways hidden, and uncovering these cosmic threads requires new eyes and persistent effort. But a new observation has helped us trace one in the Ursa Major Supergroup. In a preprint…

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Are the mysteries of quantum mechanics beginning to dissolve?

Are the mysteries of quantum mechanics beginning to dissolve?

Philip Ball writes: None of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. This unsatisfying state was a key element of Beyond Weird, my 2018 book on the meaning of quantum mechanics. It’s no wonder experts are…

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Is time a fundamental part of reality? A quiet revolution in physics suggests not

Is time a fundamental part of reality? A quiet revolution in physics suggests not

Pack-Shot/Shutterstock By Florian Neukart, Leiden University Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and we die, in exactly that order. We plan our lives around time, measure it obsessively and experience it as an unbroken flow from past to future. It feels so obvious that time moves forward that questioning it can seem almost pointless….

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The truth that physics can no longer ignore

The truth that physics can no longer ignore

Adam Frank writes: On October 8, 2024, the field of physics was plunged into controversy. That day, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for discoveries not involving black holes, cosmology, or strange new subatomic particles, but about AI. How could the discipline’s highest award go to research about machines designed to mimic human brains? Where was the physics in that? For most of the 20th century, physicists largely ignored living systems. They understood living things as machines, albeit ones…

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China’s JUNO observatory shows promise in solving neutrino mysteries

China’s JUNO observatory shows promise in solving neutrino mysteries

Scientific American reports: Trillions of neutrinos whiz through our bodies every day, pulsing from the sun, outer space and deep beneath Earth. Yet these elusive subatomic particles have proven difficult to study. That could soon change, however. Buried 700 meters beneath the rolling hills of southern China, an enormous neutrino observatory called JUNO has released its first results after a mere 59 days of operation. And so far, they are very promising, physicists say. “The physics result is already world-leading…

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