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If you "lived inside" a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring. Fermilab is building a interferometer to test space time for holographic blurring. Possible consequence of holography Hypothesis: observable correlations are encoded on light sheets and limited by information capacity of a Planck wavelength carrier (“Planck information flux” limit) Predicts uncertainty in position at Planck diffraction scale

An attempt to show the scale of things from the tiniest to the galactic. Wow.

<p>The universe was in chaos after the Big Bang kick-started the cosmos, a new study suggests.</p> <p>While one might expect the explosion that began the universe to wreak some havoc, scientists mean something very specific when they refer to chaos. In a chaotic system, small changes can cause large-scale effects. A commonly cited example is the "butterfly effect" — the idea that a butterfly beating its wing in Brazil can bring about a tornado in Texas.</p>

Has physics done away with God? A newly release book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow says, “Yes.” What is a Jewish or Christian believer to make of this? Is the Creator now out of a job? The short answer is (unsurprisingly) no: the ideas propounded in Hawking’s book constitute no threat whatever to the Jewish and Christian doctrine of Creation. The idea that Hawking is now touting is not new—in fact, within the fast-moving world of modern physics it is fairly old. My first introduction to it was reading a very elegant theoretical paper entitled “Creation of Universes from...

Could the elusive Higgs boson finally be in sight? Earlier this summer, physicist Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua wrote about talk of a tentative hint of the Higgs at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result," wrote Dorigo. The blog post was low on detail but...

There's no denying that Stephen Hawking is intellectually bold as well as physically heroic. And in his latest book, the renowned physicist mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe. According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.' Unfortunately, while Hawking's argument is being hailed as...

God did not create the universe, world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book that aims to banish a divine creator from physics.Hawking says in his book "The Grand Design" that, given the existence of gravity, "the universe can and will create itself from nothing," according to an excerpt published Thursday in The Times of London."Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," he writes in the excerpt."It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going," he...

RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen atoms. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist. Why alpha takes on the precise value it does, so delicately fine-tuned for...

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say. The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's...

In this publicity image released by Miss Universe Organization, the 2010 Miss Universe Contestants pose along with last year's winner for the official group photo at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010. The Miss Universe 2010 competition that will air live from Mandalay Bay on the NBC Television Network at 9 PM ET, Aug. 23. (AP Photo/Miss Universe Organization LP, LLLP)

HD 209458b, shown in red in an artist's conception, is the first confirmed "cometary planet," experts say. Image courtesy G. Bacon, NASA/ESAAn alien planet orbits so close to its star that its atmosphere is being blasted away, forming a gaseous, comet-like tail, astronomers announced Thursday. (Related: "Odd Star Sheds Comet-like Tail.") About 153 light-years from Earth, planet HD 209458b hugs its star so tightly that the planet's atmosphere is likely a scorching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius) an a year passes in just 3.5 days—making Mercury's 88-day orbit seem downright leisurely.That tight orbit also means this gas giant—meaning...

A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe has a set destiny and its pre-existing fate reaches back in time to influence the past. It could explain the origin of life, dark energy and solve other cosmic conundrums.The universe has a destiny—and this set fate could be reaching backwards in time and combining with influences from the past to shape the present. It’s a mind-bending claim, but some cosmologists now believe that a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics in which the future can affect the past could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including how life arose....

Physicists have long wondered why the universe exists when matter and anti-matter particles obliterate each other on contact. But new data from a particle accelerator in the United States suggests a reason. The tests showed that when anti-protons and protons collide, the resulting new particles show a one per cent skew toward matter over anti-matter. Over a long period of time, this characteristic of the universe could explain why matter has come to dominate over anti-matter. "Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result," said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a physicist at the University of Manchester in the United...

According to my psychoanalyst, I have issues. She believes our nation's dichotomous political climate and divisive political dialogue is affecting my mental state and I'm beginning to show a "disconnect." It's disconcerting to confess that you're coming unhinged -- to admit you're losing touch with reality and are living in some loony parallel universe. Just this month, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking expressed his belief that humans are capable of time travel. No kidding. Welcome to my world. My therapist says my anger issues are revealing, but it's not a personality disorder that's got me. It's not an addictive disorder because...

A supermassive black hole sits inside the galaxy Centaurus A, seen in an artist's conception. Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn't collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a "white hole"...

Scientists celebrated at the world's biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era in the quest for the secrets of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light. "This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we...

You have probably heard about the multiverse--the idea that the universe is really a large number of universes. The multiverse helps to explain why our particular universe seems so special. Our universe seems to be a finely tuned machine and the evolution of life would require low probability events. Is our universe special? The multiverse helps to deflect such thinking. If there is a large number of universes, then perhaps each has a different set of natural laws. And perhaps intelligent life can only be supported by a very particular set of laws. So the only life forms that would...

GENEVA (Reuters) – Dark matter, which scientists believe makes up 25 percent of the universe but whose existence has never been proven, could be detected by the giant particle collider at CERN, the research center's head said Monday. Rolf-Dieter Heuer told a news conference some evidence for the matter may emerge even in the shorter term from mega-power particle collisions aimed at recreating conditions at the "Big Bang" birth of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. "We don't know what dark matter is," said Heuer, Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva....

Atom smashers at a U.S. national lab have produced temperatures not seen since the Big Bang — 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior — in work re-creating the universe's first microseconds. The results come from the 2.4-mile-wide Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory. Since 2000, scientists there have hurtled gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light. These smash-ups heat bubbles smaller than the center of an atom to about 40 times hotter than the center of an imploding supernova. Scientists say the results have given them...

When a Russian Cosmonaut returned from a space flight he said that he hadn’t seen God out there. An American Astronaut, one who was a Christian, was once asked if he had met God while in space. He answered with full confidence, “I would have, if I had taken off my space suit.” These are not just two contradictory answers to the same question. They are two totally different understandings of the word God and what is meant by it. The Russian Cosmonaut, an atheist, could not believe God existed unless he saw him with his own eyes. Whereas the...