All posts tagged: Physicists

Physicists propose that our universe may contain three dimensions of time

Physicists propose that our universe may contain three dimensions of time

Published by Jenni Sidey

Space and time looked settled, at least in broad outline. Einstein’s special relativity gave physics a durable framework for describing motion, and for more than a century one boundary seemed firm: light speed marked the edge of what any observer could cross. A new proposal asks what happens if that edge is not treated as a hard ban. In work published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, physicists argue that special relativity can be extended to include observers moving faster than light. The idea does not claim such observers have been found in nature. But it does suggest that throwing them out of the theory may have hidden something important, namely a possible link between relativity and the strange rules of quantum mechanics. The argument comes from Andrzej Dragan and Krzysztof Turzyński of the University of Warsaw, building on earlier work by Dragan and Artur Ekert, including the paper “Quantum Principle of Relativity” in the New Journal of Physics. Their latest study, “Relativity of superluminal observers in 1 + 3 spacetime,” keeps mathematical terms that are …

Physicists believe that warp drive could exist in the next 100 years

Physicists believe that warp drive could exist in the next 100 years

Published by Jenni Sidey

Warp drive has long lived in science fiction, but physicists now treat it as a real, if deeply uncertain, question. The idea could shorten interstellar travel dramatically, yet every proposed path runs into harsh limits that have not gone away. Warp drive sits in that strange space where pop culture, physics, and wishful thinking all meet. It sounds like pure fantasy, a shortcut to distant stars without waiting lifetimes to arrive. But behind the familiar sci-fi label is a real scientific idea, one that has pushed researchers to ask whether spacetime itself could do the traveling for us. The basic appeal is simple. Einstein’s theory of relativity says nothing with mass can move through space faster than light. That limit seems final, and for ordinary spacecraft it is. A warp drive tries to get around it by changing the stage instead of the actor. In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a model in which a spacecraft would sit inside a kind of bubble. Space in front of the craft would compress, while space behind it …

Ask Ethan: What do surveys of physicists actually reveal?

Ask Ethan: What do surveys of physicists actually reveal?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Out there in the Universe, there’s so much that we’ve learned and discovered. We know all about the normal matter present in the Universe: the full suite of Standard Model particles and how they interact all throughout cosmic history. We know about the laws that govern reality extremely well, including the fundamental forces and how they behave under a wide variety of cosmic and quantum conditions. We’ve reconstructed most of the history of the Universe in extraordinary detail, and from a variety of different approaches — observationally, theoretically, and experimentally — we’re gathering more and more evidence every day to peel back the curtains that obscure what’s beyond the currently understood frontiers governing reality. But what lies beyond what we’re already certain about? If we don’t already know, what do the greatest minds who ponder these problems think, and can their intuitions, educated guesses, or even hunches help drive the field forward? In one of the largest surveys of physicists about fundamental physics ever conducted, solicited by Physics magazine in 2025 and published online in …

UPenn physicists make ‘light’ work of computing

UPenn physicists make ‘light’ work of computing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Eighty years after ENIAC helped launch the electronic age at the University of Pennsylvania, a new Penn-led advance points to a very different way of computing. Instead of relying on electrons, which lose energy as heat and become harder to manage as chips grow more complex, physicists are pushing light deeper into the job. Their latest work centers on a hybrid particle. This particle lets light do something it usually struggles with in computing: interact strongly enough to switch signals on and off. That hybrid, called an exciton-polariton, blends the speed of photons with the stronger interactions of matter. In the new research, Penn physicists built a system that uses these quasiparticles to perform all-optical switching with about 4 femtojoules of energy, or roughly 4 quadrillionths of a joule. Furthermore, the team says that figure sets a new benchmark for switching energy in two-dimensional exciton-polariton systems. The work, published in Physical Review Letters, could matter most in artificial intelligence, where hardware now spends huge amounts of energy moving data, processing it, and shedding heat. 2D …

Physicists just debunked the idea that we’re living in a simulation

Physicists just debunked the idea that we’re living in a simulation

Published by Jenni Sidey

For years, the idea that reality might be a giant computer simulation has lived comfortably in science fiction, philosophy, and parts of popular physics. Mir Faizal’s latest work pushes hard in the opposite direction. If his argument holds, the universe is not just unsimulated in practice. It could never be fully simulated at all. That matters because modern physics has often moved in the other direction, toward more formal and more unified descriptions of nature. Newton’s mechanics described masses moving through fixed space and time. Einstein then rewrote that picture by joining space and time into spacetime, where geometry depends on the observer. Quantum mechanics delivered another shock, replacing certainty with probabilities and making measurement itself part of the puzzle. Together, relativity and quantum theory explain a huge range of phenomena. They also refuse to fit neatly together under extreme conditions. Dr. Mir Faizal, Adjunct Professor with UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science. (CREDIT: Dr. Mir Faizal) Where the math stops being enough That mismatch is one reason physicists have spent decades searching …

Someone Asked Physicists What They Really Believe About the Universe and… Yikes

Someone Asked Physicists What They Really Believe About the Universe and… Yikes

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech You’d hope that the world’s brightest scientific minds would more or less agree on the nature of our reality — but one of the largest physics surveys in history instead found that pretty much no one agrees on anything.  Published by the American Physical Society, the survey queried over 1,600 experts from disciplines ranging from astrophysics to particle physics, along with a chunk of respondents who identified as “science enthusiasts.” The results showed that there’re still quite a few strikingly differing opinions on the standard model of cosmology, the scientific culmination of our understanding of our physical world which describes the origins of our universe and how it functions on a grand scale today.  “I think the most surprising finding was the gap between the public perception of scientific consensus and what scientists actually said when asked,” coauthor of the survey Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo in Canada and the Perimeter Institute told Gizmodo. “Ideas often presented …

Why do particle physicists like spending time in fields?

Why do particle physicists like spending time in fields?

Published by skeptic

There is more than once kind of field Bennekom/Alamy When we were first preparing to launch my column for New Scientist, my editor asked me what I would like to call it. “Field notes from space-time,” I said. This title has a bit of a double entendre that might not be obvious, but was fun for me as a physicist. It is a reference to the scientific idea of taking notes while out in the field – a lab notebook of sorts. Simultaneously, it alludes to a specific concept that is very important in particle physics: the field itself. You might think that a field is a big open space you find on a farm, but in physics it is more abstract. Essentially, a field is a mathematical relation that assigns a number to each point in space and time. The intention is to characterise some physical phenomenon at that location. For example, when you feel the pull of a fridge magnet close to a refrigerator door, there is a magnetic force working between the …

Physicists rewrite Einstein’s equations to define spacetime evolution

Physicists rewrite Einstein’s equations to define spacetime evolution

Published by Jenni Sidey

Spacetime is often described as the stage on which the universe unfolds, a four-dimensional blend of space and time that bends, stretches and shifts as matter and energy move through it. However, despite more than a century of work since Einstein introduced general relativity, physicists still struggle to describe how that stage evolves when gravity becomes violent, nonlinear and hard to predict. A new theoretical study points to a different way of looking at the problem. Instead of treating spacetime only as geometry, researchers found that some of its structures may behave more like features in an electrically conducting fluid. In this view, these structures stay connected as spacetime changes. That idea comes from researchers at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile and Columbia University, whose work was published in Physical Review Letters. Using tools borrowed from electrodynamics and plasma physics, they argue that spacetime can contain what they call gravitational field connections. Additionally, they describe conserved quantities that place topological limits on how curved spacetime can evolve. In plain terms, topology deals with what stays …

Physicists Have a Major Problem With the Universe

Physicists Have a Major Problem With the Universe

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Almost a century ago, famed astronomer Edwin Hubble determined that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The further away galaxies were from Earth, he found, the faster they appeared to be moving away from us. It was an elegant observation that undergirds much of today’s cosmology. But nailing down the exact relationship between the distance of celestial objects and how fast they recede from us remains one of the most significant challenges in modern astronomy. Specifically, the precise expansion rate of the universe — called the Hubble constant — has turned into a major pain point as attempts to nail it down keep leading to widely differing figures. One issue is that when scientists calculate what the Hubble constant should be, it doesn’t quite match observations of the actual universe. Even worse, different sensitive devices designed to measure it down keep disagreeing with each other. The problem is so significant that it has its own name: …

Physicists achieve most accurate measurement yet of the W boson

Physicists achieve most accurate measurement yet of the W boson

Published by Jenni Sidey

For a few years, one of particle physics’ most unsettling numbers seemed to be pointing somewhere strange. The trouble centered on the W boson, a heavy particle that carries the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces in nature. That force helps particles switch identities, letting protons turn into neutrons and back again. It sits behind radioactive decay and helps make nuclear fusion in the sun possible. Then came a jolt in 2022. A measurement from the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, put the W boson’s mass noticeably above what the Standard Model of particle physics said it should be. Because the Standard Model is the field’s best-tested framework for matter and forces, the result stirred talk of hidden particles, unknown forces, and a crack in the theory itself. Now a new measurement from the CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider points the other way. In a paper published in Nature, the CMS Collaboration reports that the W boson has a mass of 80,360.2 ± 9.9 megaelectron volts, a figure that lines …