Attention to the Unseen

Eddy Keming Chen writes: Was there ever any choice in the Universe being as it is? Albert Einstein could have been wondering about this when he remarked to mathematician Ernst Strauss: “What I’m really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.” US physicist James Hartle, who died earlier this year aged 83, made seminal contributions to this continuing debate. Early…

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Live Science reports: Scientists have used a first-of-its-kind technique to visualize two entangled light particles in real time — making them appear as a stunning quantum “yin-yang” symbol. The new method, called biphoton digital holography, uses an ultra high-precision camera and could be used to massively speed up future quantum measurements. The researchers published their findings Aug. 14 in the journal Nature Photonics. Quantum entanglement — the weird connection between two far-apart particles that Albert Einstein objected to as “spooky…

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Science Alert reports: Glass might look and feel like a perfectly ordered solid, but up close its chaotic arrangement of particles more closely resemble the tumultuous mess of a freefalling liquid frozen in time. Known as amorphous solids, materials in this state defy easy explanation. New research involving computation and simulation is yielding clues. In particular, it suggests that, somewhere in between liquid and solid states is a kind of rearrangement we didn’t know existed. According to scientists Dimitrios Fraggedakis,…

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Mario Barbatti writes: The camera zooms in on the person’s arm to reveal the cells, then a cell nucleus. A DNA strand grows on the screen. The camera focuses on a single atom within the strand, dives into a frenetic cloud of rocketing particles, crosses it, and leaves us in oppressive darkness. An initially imperceptible tiny dot grows smoothly, revealing the atomic nucleus. The narrator lectures that the nucleus of an atom is tens of thousands of times smaller than…

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The inside of the LZ outer detector. The LZ is a super sensitive machine that may one day detect a dark matter particle. Matt Kapust, SURF, CC BY-SA By Hugh Lippincott, University of California, Santa Barbara Physicists like me don’t fully understand what makes up about 83% of the matter of the universe — something we call “dark matter.” But with a tank full of xenon buried nearly a mile under South Dakota, we might one day be able to…

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Avshalom Elitzur writes: It is perhaps the most fundamental ingredient of our experience that reality is constantly changing: Every moment, in its turn, seems to bring new events that did not exist before and that will vanish later. Every event, therefore, has three temporal properties that come one after another: i) before the event takes place it is a potential future event, subject in principle to interference; then, ii) when it actually happens, it is a fleeting present, and finally,…

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Science reports: A measurement of the humble electron has dimmed particle physicists’ long-held hopes of discovering exotic new particles. The finding, reported today in Science, confirms to greater precision than ever before that the distribution of electric charge in the electron is essentially round. The result implies that any new fundamental particles lurking undiscovered in the vacuum might be too massive for even the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to produce. “It’s a fantastic result,” says…

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Huw Price and Ken Wharton write: Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity. This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the submicroscopic level. Through the 1920s, QM’s components were assembled by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Alongside Albert Einstein’s relativity theory,…

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