Scientists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland have discovered two never-before-seen subatomic particles, the nuclear research facility announced. (1)
Two USC researchers have proposed a link between string field theory and quantum mechanics that could open the door to using string field theory — or a broader version of it, called M-theory — as the basis of all physics.
“This could solve the mystery of where quantum mechanics comes from”, said Itzhak Bars, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences professor and lead author of the paper. Bars collaborated with Dmitry Rychkov, his Ph.D. student at USC. The paper was published online on Oct. 27 by the journal Physics Letters.
Rather than use quantum mechanics to validate string field theory, the researchers worked backwards and used string field theory to try to validate quantum mechanics. (1)
Choose A to validate B.
Choose B to validate A.
Everything can be validated.
Or nothing at all can.
How can a beam of light tell the difference between left and right? Tiny particles have now been coupled to a glass fiber. The particles emit light into the fiber in such a way that it does not travel in both directions, as one would expect. Instead, the light can be directed either to the left or to the right. This has become possible by employing a remarkable physical effect – the spin-orbit coupling of light. This new kind of optical switch has the potential to revolutionize nanophotonics. (1)
Left.
Right.
Up.
Down.
Name things.
And you will start discovering “impossibilities”.
Stop naming things.
And just everything is possible.
We have limited our selves.
To get free all we have to do is turn right. And left. And up. And down.
Be everywhere. And nowhere at the same time. And just let the light go wherever it wishes to go…
Viewed through microscopes similar to Hooke’s, most cells are see-through and colorless; it’s hard to discern fine features. Due to diffraction, the bending of light, objects smaller than about 250 nanometers — the size of the smallest bacteria — are fuzzy when viewed through an optical microscope, if they can be seen at all. (Consider that most proteins are merely a few nanometers across.) This diffraction barrier, explicitly defined by German physicist Ernst Abbe in 1873, makes a smeared blur of much that happens in and on a cell.
That’s all changed in the last few decades. Scientists have developed a suite of new optical techniques that circumvent the diffraction barrier and show us a cell’s full guts and glory. With new fluorescent tags that light up structures in the dense darkness inside a cell these new optical approaches produce detailed images of what was once invisible. In the pages that follow, some of the most striking images are highlighted, all from animal cells that scientists use to understand basic cellular processes and disease. (1)
Breaking the diffraction barrier.
Breaking the sound barrier.
Breaking the speed of light barrier.
Oups!
No, that cannot be broken.
Or can it?
We have a tendency of “discovering” barriers.
And then we like to “discover” that they are not barriers at all…
Why not accept the world as a whole?
Without barriers.
Just us.
Alone.
Doing whatever we like.
No “laws”. No “limits”. No “barriers”.
Once upon a time we were more powerful than the stars.
Now we look down at the Earth as if we are small small ants…
Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter.
The researchers are not shining light through crystal — they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place. “It’s something that we have never seen before”, said Andrew Houck, an associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the researchers. “This is a new behavior for light”. (1)
We see light as something special.
And yet it seems that it is not after all.