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<p>Cops have launched an investigation into a series of mysterious assaults on crippled astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. The probe reportedly began after the author of the best seller "A Brief History of Time" was left stranded in his wheelchair in the garden of his country home last summer on the hottest day of the year.</p>

University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics researchers achieved the first observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets by exploiting a loophole in 1980’s-era laser physics theorem. A research paper by CREOL and Florida Photonics Center of Excellence professor Ayman Abouraddy and research assistant Layton Hall ’22MS has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Nature Physics. Observation of optical de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets highlights the team’s research using a class of pulsed laser beams they call space-time wave packets. In an interview with Dr. Abouraddy, he provides more insight into his team’s research and what it may hold...

By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time... This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu. The...

Newton’s Theory of Gravity explains most large-scale events fairly well. ... However, the theory is not foolproof. Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, for example, explained data that Newton’s theory couldn’t. Scientists still use Newton’s theory because it works in the overwhelming majority of cases and has much simpler equations. Dark matter was proposed as a way to reconcile Newtonian physics with the data. But what if, instead of reconciliation, a modified theory is needed.... Mordehai Milgrom...developed a theory of gravity (called Modified Newtonian Dynamics or “Mond” for short) in 1982 that postulates gravity functions differently when it becomes...

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock. But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously. How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: Even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual. A crisis in physics Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the Universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general...

A hub for rocketry research and development in its early days, the Cape served as a test center not just for spaceflight and research but also for the US missile development programs...and along the eastern coastline, the iconic “missile row” of Atlas and Titan launch complexes dominated the skyline. Many of the Cape’s launch facilities have long since fallen silent, but with newcomers Firefly and Relativity preparing for their first launches from Cape Canaveral, the sight of rockets lifting off along the “row” is about to return. The eight launch pads that made up the core of what is unofficially...

Microlensing strikes again. Astronomers have been using the technique to detect everything from rogue planets to the most distant star ever seen. Now, astronomers have officially found another elusive object that has long been theorized, and that Universe Today first reported on back in 2009 but has never directly detected – a rogue black hole. That detection comes at the end of a 6-year observational campaign, with dozens of authors collaborating on a paper recently published in arXiv (meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed). Those six years of painstakingly gathered data all started back in 2011, when a star...

“You could see stars hundreds of light-years away, not as they looked centuries ago but exactly as they are right this instant,” says Dr. Derek Muller in a recent YouTube video about measuring the speed of light.1 Dr. Muller is a well-known science educator who has worked with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye and whose Veritasium YouTube channel has nearly a billion views and around eight million subscribers. How we can see distant starlight in a universe only 6,000 years old is a primary objection to biblical creation. This video revisits the possibility that starlight might reveal the stars...

Embrace the flow, says a duo of mechanical engineers at North Carolina State University—the flow of energy, that is. The mantra you might normally hear from your yoga instructor could be an entirely new way of looking at the universe. 🌌The universe is badass. Let's explore it together. The two theorists, Larry Silverberg and Jeffrey Eischen, suggest that fragments of energy, rather than waves or particles, may be the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The bedrock of their theory is the foundational idea that energy is always flowing through space and time. The authors suggest thinking of energy as...

First of all, what is the black hole information loss problem, or paradox, as it’s sometimes called. It’s an inconsistency in physicists’ currently most fundamental laws of nature, that’s quantum theory and general relativity. Stephen Hawking showed in the early nineteen-seventies that if you combine these two theories, you find that black holes emit radiation. This radiation is thermal, which means besides the temperature, that determines the average energy of the particles, the radiation is entirely random. This black hole radiation is now called Hawking Radiation and it carries away mass from the black hole. But the radius of the...

A phenomenon of quantum mechanics known as superposition can impact timekeeping in high-precision clocks, according to a theoretical study from Dartmouth College, Saint Anselm College and Santa Clara University. Research describing the effect shows that superposition—the ability of an atom to exist in more than one state at the same time—leads to a correction in atomic clocks known as "quantum time dilation." The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, takes into account quantum effects beyond Albert Einstein's theory of relativity to make a new prediction about the nature of time. In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein presented a revolutionary...

The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds. That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time. Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily...

HANCOCK COUNTY, Miss. (WLOX) - Hancock County is soon to be home to a 3D printing rocket factory. In just a few years, the rocket company Relativity says it plans to have its manufacturing operations up and running at Stennis Space Center. The company is now hiring to find the right men and women to make it all a reality. As the future of aerospace continues to lift off in Hancock County, David Sykes and Jon Oliver say they are excited to be a part of it. Both men have returned home to Mississippi to work for Relativity Space, a...

Some six months after the Great War of 1914-18 ended, Arthur Eddington travelled at the head of a team on a scientific expedition to the island of Principe off the coast of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa. He headed one of the two teams of astronomers assigned by a Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain to observe and record photographically the full solar eclipse scheduled to take place on May 29, 1919. At the time under Portuguese rule, Principe was selected as one of the two sites – the other was...

An invisible force is having an effect on our Universe. We can't see it, and we can't detect it - but we can observe how it interacts gravitationally with the things we can see and detect, such as light. Now an international team of astronomers has used one of the world's most powerful telescopes to analyse that effect across 10 million galaxies in the context of Einstein's general relativity. The result? The most comprehensive map of dark matter across the history of the Universe to date. ... "If further data shows we're definitely right, then it suggests something is missing...

Nearly 40 years after it was proposed, mathematicians have settled one of the most profound questions in the study of general relativity. In a paper posted online last fall, mathematicians Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk have proven that the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, which concerns the strange inner workings of black holes, is false.“I personally view this work as a tremendous achievement — a qualitative jump in our understanding of general relativity,” emailed Igor Rodnianski, a mathematician at Princeton University.The strong cosmic censorship conjecture was proposed in 1979 by the influential physicist Roger Penrose. It was meant as a...

Observations of a trio of dead stars have confirmed that a foundation of Einstein’s gravitational theory holds even for ultradense objects with strong gravitational fields. The complex orbital dance of the three former stars conforms to a rule known as the strong equivalence principle, researchers reported January 10 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. That agreement limits theories that predict Einstein’s theory, general relativity, should fail at some level. According to general relativity, an object’s composition has no impact on how gravity pulls on it: Earth’s gravity accelerates a sphere of iron at the same rate as a...

Post-Modern Prosecutions by William Anderson Over the past four years, I have written (or co-written with Candice E. Jackson) a number of articles dealing with the dishonesty of prosecutors in this country. The Duke Non-Rape case, as I see it, is a logical extension to a pattern that is so egregious that all we can do now is damage control. Justice pretty much is dead in the United States. The final blow in this death of a million blows has been the increasing use of conspiracy theories by the prosecution, something that the law forbids, but the courts let it...

UBC math and physics instructor, Ben Tippett. Credit: UBC Okanagan ================================================================================================================================= After some serious number crunching, a UBC researcher has come up with a mathematical model for a viable time machine. Ben Tippett, a mathematics and physics instructor at UBC's Okanagan campus, recently published a study about the feasibility of time travel. Tippett, whose field of expertise is Einstein's theory of general relativity, studies black holes and science fiction when he's not teaching. Using math and physics, he has created a formula that describes a method for time travel. "People think of time travel as something as fiction," says Tippett....

The speed of light in a vacuum is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. Just getting close to it causes problems: the weird distortions of Einstein’s relativity kick in, so time slows down, lengths go up, masses balloon and everything you thought was fixed changes. Only things that have no mass in the first place can reach light speed – photons of light being the classic example. Absolutely nothing can exceed this cosmic max.We have known about the special nature of light speed since an experiment by US physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in the 1880s. They set two beams...