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A scientist who worked out a theory describing the behavior of light using quantum mechanics and two scientists who used that knowledge to develop a powerful laser technique for identifying atoms and molecules were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced. Half of the prize, and half of the $1.3 million in prize money, go to Roy J. Glauber, 80, a professor of physics at Harvard, for calculations that laid the foundation for quantum optics. John L. Hall, 71, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder and at...

JUST about a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began writing a paper that secured his place in the pantheon of humankind's greatest thinkers. With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein's discovery. Nevertheless, say "Einstein" and most everyone thinks "relativity." physicists call 1905 Einstein's "miracle year" not because of the discovery of relativity alone, but because in that year Einstein achieved the unimaginable, writing four papers that each resulted in deep and formative changes to our understanding of the...

Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist. Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion. George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain...

Objective reality may owe its existence to a 'darwinian' process that advertises certain quantum states. A team of US physicists has proved a theorem that explains how our objective, common reality emerges from the subtle and sensitive quantum world. If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find? Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural...

Dr. Stephen W. Hawking threw in the towel yesterday, or at least an encyclopedia. Dr. Hawking, the celebrated Cambridge University cosmologist and best-selling author, declared at a scientific conference in Dublin that he had been wrong in a controversial assertion he made 30 years ago about black holes, the fearsome gravitational abysses that can swallow matter and energy, even light. As atonement he presented Dr. John Preskill, a physicist from the California Institute of Technology, with a baseball encyclopedia. The encyclopedia was the stake in a famous bet Dr. Hawking and another Caltech physicist, Dr. Kip Thorne, made with Dr....

The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...

    "Exact uncertainty" brought to quantum world   00:01 27 April 02   Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition   Exact uncertainty sounds like a contradiction in terms, but that is what governs the quantum world, according to a theoretical physicist who has created an improved version of the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Heisenberg worked out that there is a degree of inherent fuzziness to the world. You cannot measure both the position and the momentum of any particle with perfect accuracy. The better the accuracy of your momentum measurement, the more uncertain your position measurement must be, and vice versa....

Is God In Time? Gregory Koukl   Is it possible that all of history is one big space-time manifold--a "block universe"? Put your thinking caps on today. We're going to talk about time. It's common for us to make the comment "The spaceless, timeless God" or "Then we'll pass out of time, into eternity." However, the Scripture is not clear about God's timelessness. Most of the verses seem to indicate God is in time: Rev 1:4; Rev 4:8, Ps 90, Jude 25, 2 Pet 3:8. Two popular books describe a picture of God as timeless. Philip Yancey's book Disappointment...