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New Force of Nature? Tantalizing Evidence for New Physics From CERN’s Large Hadron Collider University Of Cambridge By HARRY CLIFF, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE OCTOBER 26, 2021 Particle Accelerator Physics Concept The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sparked worldwide excitement in March as particle physicists reported tantalizing evidence for new physics — potentially a new force of nature. Now, our new result, yet to be peer reviewed, from CERN’s gargantuan particle collider seems to be adding further support to the idea. Our current best theory of particles and forces is known as the standard model, which describes everything we know about the...

Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics? Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question. The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well...

May 25, 2012 By Cindy Weiss EnlargeThomas C. Blum, Associate Professor, Physics. Credit: Daniel Buttrey/UConn (Phys.org) -- An international collaboration of scientists, including Thomas Blum, associate professor of physics, is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. Ads by GoogleSix Sigma — Black Belt - Get Trained & Six Sigma Certified. Flexible, Top Program 100% online. - www.VillanovaU.com/SixSigmaThe research, reported online in the March 30, 2012 Physical Review Letters, used breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to...

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 14/11/2007 An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which as received rave reviews from scientists. The E8 pattern (left), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right) Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt). In winter, he heads...

When played together, they compose the symphony of the universe. Or at least, that's the theory. There's a problem, though. The strings have too much range. So much, in fact, that for string theory to agree with the established laws of physics and mathematics, there must be not three but at least ten dimensions (including time) that are curled up and tucked away. And because each of these multidimensional landscapes requires a different string tuning, there are potentially billions and billions of different versions of string theory relating to billions and billions of different universes. Then there's the problem of...

'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots- Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer Monday, March 14, 2005 The most celebrated theory in modern physics faces increasing attacks from skeptics who fear it has lured a generation of researchers down an intellectual dead end. In its original, simplified form, circa the mid-1980s, string theory held that reality consists of infinitesimally small, wiggling objects called strings, which vibrate in ways that yield the different subatomic particles that comprise the cosmos. An analogy is the vibrations on a violin string, which yield different musical notes. Advocates claimed that string theory would smooth out...

December 7, 2004 String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not) By DENNIS OVERBYE SPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology.Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his...

The inherent uncertainty of mathematics means we will never fully understand our world, writes Paul Davies. The world about us looks so bewilderingly complex, it seems impossible that humans could ever understand it completely. But dig deeper, and the richness and variety of nature are found to stem from just a handful of underlying mathematical principles. So rapid has been the advance of science in elucidating this hidden subtext of nature that many scientists, especially theoretical physicists, believe we are on the verge of formulating a "theory of everything". When Stephen Hawking accepted the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge...

Exclusive from New Scientist Hidden extra dimensions are causing measurements of the strength of gravity at different locations on Earth to be affected by the planet's magnetic field, French researchers say. This is a controversial claim because no one has ever provided experimental evidence to support either the existence of extra dimensions or any interaction between gravity and electromagnetism. But lab measurements of Newton's gravitational constant G suggest that both are real. Newton's constant, which describes the strength of the gravitational pull that bodies exert on each other, is the most poorly determined of the constants of nature. The two...