Physics

Stephen Hawking’s internment service is scheduled to take place at Westminster Abbey, Broad Sanctuary, London, on Friday July 15 at 12 PM. Members of the public who wish to attend may apply here; there are 1,000 open spots and attendees will be randomly selected. But those who apply may notice …

A Bell test, named for the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, is a randomized trial that compares observations against the philosophical worldview of local realism, in which the properties of the physical world are independent of our observation of them and no signal travels faster than light. On November …

Professor Stephen Hawking’s theory about the Big Bang, which he worked on in collaboration with Katholieke Universiteit Leuven’s Professor Thomas Hertog, has been published this week in the Journal of High-Energy Physics (arXiv.org preprint). Professor Stephen Hawking. Modern theories of the Big Bang predict that our local Universe came into …

A team of physicists at Yale University has observed a signature of a discrete time crystal (DTC) in an unexpected place: a crystal of ammonium dihydrogen phosphate, better known as monoammonium phosphate (MAP). Rovny et al looked for a signature of a discrete time crystal in a crystal of monoammonium …

Entanglement — an intriguing phenomenon in which two distant objects can manifest correlations, even if they are far away from each other — has now been made a reality in macroscopic-scale objects. An illustration of tiny drumheads prepared on silicon chips used in the experiment; the drumheads vibrate at a …

A team of researchers in Switzerland has observed the quantum mechanical Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in a system of interacting ultracold atoms. Their work appears in the journal Science. A cloud of atoms is held above a chip by electromagnetic fields; the EPR paradox was observed between the spatially separated regions A …

A team of Canadian physicists has developed a new way to improve our knowledge of the Big Bang by measuring radiation from its afterglow, called the cosmic microwave background radiation. The team’s results, published in the journal Foundations of Physics, predict the maximum bandwidth of the Universe, which is the …

The rapid expansion of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a cloud of atoms cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero in which all the atoms occupy the same quantum state, can mimic the expansion of the early Universe, according to a team of physicists from the University of Maryland, the …

A team of physicists at Aalto University in Finland has successfully created a Bose-Einstein condensate of light coupled with metal (gold) electrons, so-called surface plasmon polaritons. The research is published online in the journal Nature Physics. The wavelength of emitted light grows, that is, the energy decreases, along the gold …

Stellar-mass black holes that reside in globular clusters — small regions of space, usually at the edges of a galaxy, that are packed with hundreds of thousands to millions of stars — could combine repeatedly to form objects bigger than anything a single star could produce. A snapshot of a …