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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...

Last year, scientists detected the most energetic gamma ray burst we've ever seen. A distant galaxy spat out a colossal flare in the range of a trillion electron volts (TeV), providing invaluable new insight into the physics of these incredibly energetic events. That was pretty amazing on its own - but now astrophysicists have used the burst to perform a new, precise test of the theory of general relativity. And - quelle surprise! - this test found that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum. Relativity, once again, has passed with flying colours. The test hinges on a...

The idea that our Universe is filled with dark matter has been around for nearly a century. When astronomers noticed that orbital speeds towards the edges of spiral galaxies remain the same or even increase slightly, rather than decrease, they surmised that either there must be some huge unseen mass driving the rotation, or that the laws of gravity given by Einstein's General Relativity need to be changed. They elected the first option. Over that time, cosmologists have accumulated boatloads of evidence in favor of the notion that this invisible, "dark" matter -- which neither interacts with nor emits light...

There has been no announcement, no peer review or publication of the findings - all typically important steps in the process of releasing reliable and verifiable scientific research. Instead, a message on Twitter from an Arizona State University cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, has sparked a firestorm of speculation and excitement. Krauss does not work with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which is searching for ripples in the fabric of space and time. But he tweeted on Monday about the apparent shoring up of rumor he'd heard some months ago, that LIGO scientists were writing up a paper...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-First-Test-That-Proves-General-Theory-of-Relativity-Wrong-20259.shtml According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been measured for the first time and to the scientists' astonishment, it proved to be no less than...

New theory describes faster than light travel, could explain CERN's results Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, including Albert Einstein, consider the speed of light a sort of universal "speed limit".  But over the past couple decades physicists theorized that it should be possible to break this law and get away with it -- to travel faster than the speed of light. I. CERN Results Potentially Described One of several possible routes to faster-than-light travel was potentially demonstrated when researchers at CERN, the European physics organization known for maintaining the Large Hadron Collider, sent high-energy particles through the Earth's crust from Geneva, Switzerland...

Roll over, Einstein? The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905. If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous. Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center...

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...