Editor's note: This story was first published in Quanta Magazine in September 2013.

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.

“Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the lead author of the new work, which he is presenting in talks and in aforthcoming paper. “Both are suspect.”

Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature.

In keeping with this idea, the new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.

“It’s a better formulation that makes you think about everything in a completely different way,” said David Skinner, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.

The amplituhedron itself does not describe gravity. But Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators think there might be a related geometric object that does. Its properties would make it clear why particles appear to exist, and why they appear to move in three dimensions of space and to change over time.

Because “we know that ultimately, we need to find a theory that doesn’t have” unitarity and locality, Bourjaily said, “it’s a starting point to ultimately describing a quantum theory of gravity.”

Clunky Machinery

The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated, “scattering amplitudes,” which represent the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain other particles upon colliding. These numbers are what particle physicists calculate and test to high precision at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

The 60-year-old method for calculating scattering amplitudes — a major innovation at the time — was pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He sketched line drawings of all the ways a scattering process could occur and then summed the likelihoods of the different drawings. The simplest Feynman diagrams look like trees: The particles involved in a collision come together like roots, and the particles that result shoot out like branches. More complicated diagrams have loops, where colliding particles turn into unobservable “virtual particles” that interact with each other before branching out as real final products. There are diagrams with one loop, two loops, three loops and so on — increasingly baroque iterations of the scattering process that contribute progressively less to its total amplitude. Virtual particles are never observed in nature, but they were considered mathematically necessary for unitarity — the requirement that probabilities sum to one.

“The number of Feynman diagrams is so explosively large that even computations of really simple processes weren’t done until the age of computers,” Bourjaily said. A seemingly simple event, such as two subatomic particles called gluons colliding to produce four less energetic gluons (which happens billions of times a second during collisions at the Large Hadron Collider), involves 220 diagrams, which collectively contribute thousands of terms to the calculation of the scattering amplitude.

In 1986, it became apparent that Feynman’s apparatus was a Rube Goldberg machine.

To prepare for the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas (a project that was later canceled), theorists wanted to calculate the scattering amplitudes of known particle interactions to establish a background against which interesting or exotic signals would stand out. But even 2-gluon to 4-gluon processes were so complex, a group of physicists had written two years earlier, “that they may not be evaluated in the foreseeable future.”

Stephen Parke and Tomasz Taylor, theorists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, took that statement as a challenge. Using a few mathematical tricks, they managed to simplify the 2-gluon to 4-gluon amplitude calculation from several billion terms to a 9-page-long formula, which a 1980s supercomputer could handle. Then, based on a pattern they observed in the scattering amplitudes of other gluon interactions, Parke and Taylor guessed a simple one-term expression for the amplitude. It was, the computer verified, equivalent to the 9-page formula. In other words, the traditional machinery of quantum field theory, involving hundreds of Feynman diagrams worth thousands of mathematical terms, was obfuscating something much simpler. As Bourjaily put it: “Why are you summing up millions of things when the answer is just one function?”

“We knew at the time that we had an important result,” Parke said. “We knew it instantly. But what to do with it?”

The Amplituhedron

The message of Parke and Taylor’s single-term result took decades to interpret. “That one-term, beautiful little function was like a beacon for the next 30 years,” Bourjaily said. It “really started this revolution.”

In the mid-2000s, more patterns emerged in the scattering amplitudes of particle interactions, repeatedly hinting at an underlying, coherent mathematical structure behind quantum field theory. Most important was a set of formulas called the BCFW recursion relations, named for Ruth Britto, Freddy Cachazo,Bo Feng and Edward Witten. Instead of describing scattering processes in terms of familiar variables like position and time and depicting them in thousands of Feynman diagrams, the BCFW relations are best couched in terms of strange variables called “twistors,” and particle interactions can be captured in a handful of associated twistor diagrams. The relations gained rapid adoption as tools for computing scattering amplitudes relevant to experiments, such as collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. But their simplicity was mysterious.

“The terms in these BCFW relations were coming from a different world, and we wanted to understand what that world was,” Arkani-Hamed said. “That’s what drew me into the subject five years ago.”

With the help of leading mathematicians such as Pierre Deligne, Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators discovered that the recursion relations and associated twistor diagrams corresponded to a well-known geometric object. In fact, as detailed in a paper posted to arXiv.org in December by Arkani-Hamed, Bourjaily, Cachazo,Alexander Goncharov, Alexander Postnikov and Jaroslav Trnka, the twistor diagrams gave instructions for calculating the volume of pieces of this object, called the positive Grassmannian.

Named for Hermann Grassmann, a 19th-century German linguist and mathematician who studied its properties, “the positive Grassmannian is the slightly more grown-up cousin of the inside of a triangle,” Arkani-Hamed explained. Just as the inside of a triangle is a region in a two-dimensional space bounded by intersecting lines, the simplest case of the positive Grassmannian is a region in an N-dimensional space bounded by intersecting planes. (N is the number of particles involved in a scattering process.)

It was a geometric representation of real particle data, such as the likelihood that two colliding gluons will turn into four gluons. But something was still missing.

The physicists hoped that the amplitude of a scattering process would emerge purely and inevitably from geometry, but locality and unitarity were dictating which pieces of the positive Grassmannian to add together to get it. They wondered whether the amplitude was “the answer to some particular mathematical question,” said Trnka, a post-doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. “And it is,” he said.

Arkani-Hamed and Trnka discovered that the scattering amplitude equals the volume of a brand-new mathematical object — the amplituhedron. The details of a particular scattering process dictate the dimensionality and facets of the corresponding amplituhedron. The pieces of the positive Grassmannian that were being calculated with twistor diagrams and then added together by hand were building blocks that fit together inside this jewel, just as triangles fit together to form a polygon.

Like the twistor diagrams, the Feynman diagrams are another way of computing the volume of the amplituhedron piece by piece, but they are much less efficient. “They are local and unitary in space-time, but they are not necessarily very convenient or well-adapted to the shape of this jewel itself,” Skinner said. “Using Feynman diagrams is like taking a Ming vase and smashing it on the floor.”

Arkani-Hamed and Trnka have been able to calculate the volume of the amplituhedron directly in some cases, without using twistor diagrams to compute the volumes of its pieces. They have also found a “master amplituhedron” with an infinite number of facets, analogous to a circle in 2-D, which has an infinite number of sides. Its volume represents, in theory, the total amplitude of all physical processes. Lower-dimensional amplituhedra, which correspond to interactions between finite numbers of particles, live on the faces of this master structure.

“They are very powerful calculational techniques, but they are also incredibly suggestive,” Skinner said. “They suggest that thinking in terms of space-time was not the right way of going about this.”

Quest for Quantum Gravity

The seemingly irreconcilable conflict between gravity and quantum field theory enters crisis mode in black holes. Black holes pack a huge amount of mass into an extremely small space, making gravity a major player at the quantum scale, where it can usually be ignored. Inevitably, either locality or unitarity is the source of the conflict.

“We have indications that both ideas have got to go,” Arkani-Hamed said. “They can’t be fundamental features of the next description,” such as a theory of quantum gravity.

String theory, a framework that treats particles as invisibly small, vibrating strings, is one candidate for a theory of quantum gravity that seems to hold up in black hole situations, but its relationship to reality is unproven — or at least confusing. Recently, a strange duality has been found between string theory and quantum field theory, indicating that the former (which includes gravity) is mathematically equivalent to the latter (which does not) when the two theories describe the same event as if it is taking place in different numbers of dimensions. No one knows quite what to make of this discovery. But the new amplituhedron research suggests space-time, and 

therefore dimensions, may be illusory anyway.

“We can’t rely on the usual familiar quantum mechanical space-time pictures of describing physics,” Arkani-Hamed said. “We have to learn new ways of talking about it. This work is a baby step in that direction.”

Even without unitarity and locality, the amplituhedron formulation of quantum field theory does not yet incorporate gravity. But researchers are working on it. They say scattering processes that include gravity particles may be possible to describe with the amplituhedron, or with a similar geometric object. “It might be closely related but slightly different and harder to find,” Skinner said.

Physicists must also prove that the new geometric formulation applies to the exact particles that are known to exist in the universe, rather than to the idealized quantum field theory they used to develop it, called maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. This model, which includes a “superpartner” particle for every known particle and treats space-time as flat, “just happens to be the simplest test case for these new tools,” Bourjaily said. “The way to generalize these new tools to [other] theories is understood.”

Beyond making calculations easier or possibly leading the way to quantum gravity, the discovery of the amplituhedron could cause an even more profound shift, Arkani-Hamed said. That is, giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry.

“In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of the object,” he said. “But it’s not from the object changing. The object is basically timeless.”

While more work is needed, many theoretical physicists are paying close attention to the new ideas.

The work is “very unexpected from several points of view,” said Witten, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study. “The field is still developing very fast, and it is difficult to guess what will happen or what the lessons will turn out to be.”

Note: This article was updated on December 10, 2013, to include a link to the first in a series of papers on the amplituhedron.

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An international team of scientists have crunched the numbers and discovered something straight out of science-fiction: They claim that the center of our galaxy could host a giant wormhole. Despite what some media outlets are saying about the study, the results are entirely unfounded according to scientific experts.

So, as much as some of us might want to shoot through a wormhole like in Nolan's latest film "Interstellar," it's never going to happen. At least not from the center of our galaxy the way the team suggests in their paper, which was recently published in the journal Annals of Physics.

Wormholes are cosmic portals that some physicists theorize can connect distant corners of the same universe together or link one universe to an entirely separate, parallel universe. They form when extremely heavy objects create a well in the fabric of space time that is deep enough to reach another side of the universe.

If they existed, wormholes could help humans travel to or communicate with parts of the universe that are millions of light years away that we might otherwise never reach, unless we developed faster-than-light spaceships.

The team discusses a specific type of wormhole called a Morris-Thorne wormhole. This wormhole is what theorists call a traversable wormhole, which means you can enter either end and fall out the other side. In comparison, the original wormhole — called a Rosen-Einstein bridge and featured in the film "Thor"— is unstable and closes up, so once you get through, there's no going back. (Unless you have someone who can open the wormhole up again, like Heimdall in "Thor".)

Luckily for the characters in "Interstellar," the wormhole was stable and traversable, which is no surprise since the science consultant of the film, Kip Thorne, first predicted the possibility of traversable wormholes with his graduate student Mike Morris in 1988.

What makes Morris-Thorne wormholes stable, and therefore traversable, is that instead of closing off, like a Rosen-Einstein bridge, they are held open. Holding them open is what theorists have dubbed "exotic matter," a hypothetical, mysterious form of matter that does not follow the regular laws of physics.

Dark matter is one possible example of exotic matter and there's strong evidence to suggest that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is encased in a massive dark matter bubble, called a dark halo. Astronomers have found that in most spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, dark matter is most dense at the center of the dark halo.

And in this latest paper, the team suggests that the amount of dark matter at the center of our galaxy's dark halo could have enough density to create a giant wormhole. Last year, some of the same authors published earlier results indicating that wormholes could exist at other points in the dark halo. 

"This result is an important compliment to the earlier result, thereby confirming the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies," the team state in a pre-print of their latest paper on arXiv.org.

But some experts are skeptical:

Matthew Buckley, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, told Business Insider in a series of tweets that exotic material necessary to hold open a Morris-Thorne wormhole at the center of our galaxy "would not have the necessary properties to be dark matter." He goes on to say that some of the team's work "seems very suspect."

MIT theoretical astrophysicist, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, also speculates the paper's approach saying that the solution the team provides would not form a stable wormhole:

Astrophysicist, Katie Mack had something to say about the paper, as well:

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Light doesn't always travel at the speed of light. A new experiment reveals that focusing or manipulating the structure of light pulses reduces their speed, even in vacuum conditions.

A paper reporting the research, posted online at arXiv.org and accepted for publication, describes hard experimental evidence that the speed of light, one of the most important constants in physics, should be thought of as a limit rather than an invariable rate for light zipping through a vacuum.

"It's very impressive work," says Robert Boyd, an optical physicist at the University of Rochester in New York. "It's the sort of thing that's so obvious, you wonder why you didn't think of it first."

Researchers led by optical physicist Miles Padgett at the University of Glasgow demonstrated the effect by racing photons that were identical except for their structure. The structured light consistently arrived a tad late. Though the effect is not recognizable in everyday life and in most technological applications, the new research highlights a fundamental and previously unappreciated subtlety in the behavior of light.

The speed of light in a vacuum, usually denoted c, is a fundamental constant central to much of physics, particularly Einstein's theory of relativity. While measuring c was once considered an important experimental problem, it is now simply specified to be 299,792,458 meters per second, as the meter itself is defined in terms of light's vacuum speed.

Generally if light is not traveling at c it is because it is moving through a material. For example, light slows down when passing through glass or water.

Padgett and his team wondered if there were fundamental factors that could change the speed of light in a vacuum. Previous studies had hinted that the structure of light could play a role. Physics textbooks idealize light as plane waves, in which the fronts of each wave move in parallel, much like ocean waves approaching a straight shoreline.

But while light can usually be approximated as plane waves, its structure is actually more complicated. For instance, light can converge upon a point after passing through a lens. Lasers can shape light into concentrated or even bull's-eye–shaped beams.

The researchers produced pairs of photons and sent them on different paths toward a detector. One photon zipped straight through a fiber. The other photon went through a pair of devices that manipulated the structure of the light and then switched it back.

Had structure not mattered, the two photons would have arrived at the same time. But that didn't happen. Measurements revealed that the structured light consistently arrived several micrometers late per meter of distance traveled.

"I'm not surprised the effect exists," Boyd says. "But it's surprising that the effect is so large and robust."

Greg Gbur, an optical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, says the findings won't change the way physicists look at the aura emanating from a lamp or flashlight. But he says the speed corrections could be important for physicists studying extremely short light pulses.

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A pair of scientists at the University of Rochester have transformed average metal into something amazing — a metal with a surface so resistant to water that droplets actually bounce across its surface, shown in the photo to the right.

While everyday objects like nonstick Teflon cooking pans repel water — a property called hydrophobicity — they don't hold a torch to the metal that Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev cooked up in their lab.

Teflon pans get their hydrophobic properties from a water-repelling chemical mixture coating the surface, not the metal itself. That means this coating — and it's water-repelling power — wears away over time. The high-powered lasers that Guo and Vorobyez used to forge this super-special metal in their lab alters the metal, rendering the metal itself hydrophobic, ensuring it's water resistant nature won't wear away with time.

The two scientists took regular sheets of platinum, titanium, and brass metals and then fired a high-powered laser at the surface. Each laser pulse lasted for a quadrillionth of a second and contained the same power capacity as the entire power grid of North America.

With this much power, the lasers actually engrave micro- and nanoscale structures onto the metals' surfaces that transforms them into super-hydrophobic materials.

Super-hydrophobic means that water will roll or bounce off the surface without any help. If you try to get water to roll off a Teflon surface, you have to tip the pan at a steep angle before the water will move due to gravity, like in the clip below taken from a video explaining the metal's properties:

On the other hand, this new material "is so strongly water-repellent, the water actually gets bounced off. Then it lands on the surface again, gets bounced off again, and then it will just roll off from the surface,"Guo said in a statement.

Super-hydrophobic materials have a number of important applications. Since liquids don't stick to them, they are self-cleaning. When water contacts the surface, like in the clip below, it traps bits of dirt and dust in side. In one experiment Guo and Vorobyev dumped dust from a vacuum cleaner over the metal's surface and after a dozen drops, the surface was spotless and completely dry.

Super-hydrophobic metals would also be great to use on planes, so water drops don't stick and freeze on the wings.

These water-repelling properties have particularly important applications in developing countries.

"In these regions, collecting rain water is vital and using super-hydrophobic materials could increase the efficiency without the need to use large funnels with high-pitched angles to prevent water from ticking to the surface,"Guo said. "A second application could be creating latrines that are cleaner and healthier to use."

For these reasons, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are supporting the scientists' research.

The manufacturing process is not ready for large-scale manufacturing — it takes an hour to etch a one-inch-square piece of metal.

The researchers published their latest results in the Journal of Applied Physics. Check out the magical metal in action in this video, uploaded to YouTube by the University Of Rochester:

NOW WATCH:

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The source of the smell of rain was one of nature's best-kept secrets — until scientists armed with high-speed cameras got a look at it.

After a rainstorm the air is perfumed with a fresh, earthy-mist from tiny air bubbles that form inside of the rain droplet upon impact — a mechanism that had never before been observed.

This information is actually useful too, knowing how this smell is created helps us find the best places to smell the rain.

Using high-speed cameras, a pair of scientists at MIT recorded droplets of water slapping the ground in slow motion. They discovered that Just like bubbles in a glass of champagne, the bubbles in rain droplets shoot to the surface and then burst open. When this happens, they release aerosols — fine solid particles or liquid droplets in a gas. For example, fog is a natural type of aerosol.

The aerosols contain the aroma that we recognize as the scent of rain, the scientists suspect. This aroma likely comes from oils secreted by plants after long dry spells. Once the aroma-carrying aerosols are released, the wind blows the tiny droplets around the atmosphere and into our noses.

The gif below shows a droplet falling in slow motion and the aerosols being blown away:

Upon further investigations into the intensity of rainfall and the type of ground surface, the researchers discovered that some storms and locations are better than others for smelling rain. The researchers published their work in the journal Nature Communications on Jan. 14.

They conducted approximately 600 experiments on 28 different surfaces including dirt, clay, and sand. By releasing drops of water at various heights above the surfaces, they could measure the effects of how the speed at which rain falls effects the amount of aerosols released during a storm.

"When moderate or light rain hits sandy or clay soils, you can observe lots of aerosols," said Youngsoo Joung the MIT press release. Joung is a postdoc at MIT and lead author of the paper. "Heavy rain [has a high] impact speed, which means there's not enough time to make bubbles inside the droplet."

Watch the center boxed-in frame in the gif below that shows the aerosols bubbling to the surface in slow motion:

This explains the phenomenon called petrichor, which refers to the distinct scent following a light rain after a dry spell. Two Australian researchers coined the term in 1964, when they published an article in the journal Nature which linked the smell to oils secreted by plants during dry periods.

"Interestingly, they don't discuss the mechanism for how that smell gets into the air," Cullen R. Buie said in the press release. Buie is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and co-author of the paper. "One hypothesis we have is that that smell comes from this mechanism we've discovered."

Jounng and Buie are continuing to study other, more harmful, affects of the aerosols released from rainfall. In addition to aromatic molecules, these aerosols might also carry pathogens like E. coli. Right now, the two researchers are examining whether aerosols from rainfall with these contaminants can be significantly spread throughout the environment.

Watch more slow-motion video below, uploaded to YouTube by MIT:

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When Elon Musk was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, he pursued a dual degree in business and physics.

"It was an unusual combination,"he told Physics World in 2007, "and I enjoyed the physics more. I'm not sure I would study business again if I could replay things." 

The interest in physics was long in the making for Musk. He's said that he grew up in a "technical" household in South Africa, thanks to his father being an engineer. He was inspired by Richard Feynman, the American physicist who pioneered quantum mechanics and made physics accessible to laypeople in books like "Six Easy Pieces." 

Musk went as far as being accepted to a physics Ph.D. program at Stanford University, but dropped out to get in on the internet boom.

"It's a common story,"Musk said. "Google, Yahoo, and several other firms were started by people who dropped out of their graduate programs at Stanford." 

And while physics and business made for an odd undergraduate pairing, Musk has said that his pursuit of the former has shaped his success in the latter.

"Of necessity, physics had to develop a framework of thinking that would allow understanding counterintuitive elements of reality,"he said. "Something like quantum physics is not very intuitive, and in order to make progress, physics essentially evolved a framework of thinking that was very effective for coming to correct answers that are not obvious. And in order to do this, it requires quite a lot of mental exertion." 

That framework is called "first principles reasoning," Musk said, wherein you "try to identify the most fundamental truths in any particular arena and you reason up from there." 

It's been crucial to the success of Musk's big-name ventures — namely SpaceX, the company whose aim is to make humanity an interplanetary species.

With a framework for thinking taken from physics, SpaceX was able to create a major victory in its supply chain.

"Historically, [if you look at] how much rockets cost, you'd see that the trend line has been pretty flat and in the United States, it's actually gotten worse over time," Musk explained, saying that if you were reasoning by analogy, you'd assume that that's just the way things are. 

"But it's not," he said. "The first-principle approach would be to ask what materials is a rocket made of and how much do those materials cost. When we look at that we say, 'Wow — in terms of raw materials cost, it's a few percent of what the price of a rocket is. So there must be something wrong here, and people are being pretty silly. If we can be clever, we can make a much lower-cost rocket.'" 

That's exactly what Musk did. By finding out how much rockets really cost, SpaceX built one for about 2% of the typical price.

The takeaway? Like its sibling field of study, engineering, physics trains leaders to understand problems in their most essential parts, and then deduce from there — often with staggering amounts of innovation to follow. Just ask Jeff Bezos, the one-time engineer.

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News reports say that 11 of the 12 game balls used by the New England Patriots in their AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts were deflated, showing about 2 pounds per square inch (psi) less pressure than the 13 psi required by the rules, so it seems that the most bizarre sports scandal of recent memory is real. But there are still plenty of questions: why would a team deflate footballs? Could there be another explanation? And most importantly, what does physics tell us about all this?

For New England fans, the first priority is a search for an innocent explanation. After all, party balloons and car tires deflate during cold winter weather, so might a simple temperature difference be responsible for the change in inflation pressure?

The physics principle known as the ideal gas law tells us that a reduction in temperature leads to a reduction in pressure. The pressure of a confined gas multiplied by its volume is proportional to the number of molecules in the gas multiplied by the temperature. Maybe you remember the equation PV=nRT from your schooldays. So if you cool a gas while keeping its volume fixed, the pressure must decrease.

But we don’t need equations to check this: we can demonstrate it directly. I got a couple of old footballs from Union College’s athletic department, pumped them up and popped them in the freezer. After a night in the cold, the pressure was around 2psi lower, just like the Patriots’ footballs — from about 19psi at the start (I slightly overinflated the balls by using the tire pump in my car) down to about 17 psi.

Of course, the temperature difference involved was a little extreme — from about 68F in my office, down to about -10F in the freezer. So, you can use temperature changes to produce the pressure change seen by investigators, but the temperature required would’ve matched the legendary Ice Bowl of 1967. Last Sunday’s game was played in pouring rain at about 50F, so unless they did the pre-game testing of the balls in a sauna, or the post-game investigation in a meat locker, thermodynamics alone can’t get the Patriots off the hook.

Assuming that the balls really were deliberately deflated, then what would be the reasoning? Would the lower pressure make the ball lighter and more aerodynamic, allowing longer, more accurate passing?

This is another question easily answered with the ideal gas law — the volume of a football doesn’t change very much with pressure, so deflating it by 2psi requires reducing the amount of gas inside by about 15%. But air is, by definition, very light. The air in a fully inflated football accounts for only about 10 grams of its mass (about 2.5% of the total) and deflating it would reduce that by maybe a gram or two. (This also explains why the officials didn’t notice anything funny during the game — the change in weight from the missing air is too small to notice, particularly in bad weather, where rain probably added more to the mass of the ball than the deflation took away.)

And again, we have experimental confirmation of this — a 2006 episode of the TV show Mythbusters replaced the air inside a football with helium to see if that would allow a kicker to boot the ball father. The mass reduction of swapping helium for air is far greater than that for a 2psi reduction in pressure, but the Mythbusters found no gain in performance — in fact, air-filled balls might be slightly better, as the extra mass makes them somewhat less susceptible to air resistance.

In the end, the reason for deflating a football owes more to physiology than physics. A slightly deflated ball is a bit softer, making it easier to grip the ball to throw it and reducing the bounce when it hits the hands of a receiver, making it easier to catch. We can see this even with frozen footballs — although the cold makes the leather stiffer, the balls had noticeably more give when squeezed than before they went in the freezer. In cool, rainy conditions, where the ball becomes wet and slippery, this works to the advantage of the quarterback and receivers.The most puzzling aspect of the story, though, is the scoreboard. The Patriots won the game 45-7, thoroughly outplaying the Colts in every aspect of the game. The tiny advantage they may have gained from a better grip on the ball can’t explain such a lopsided outcome. If the Patriots were that much better, why risk punishment by tampering with the footballs?

That question, alas, isn’t one the ideal gas law can answer. For that, you would need to understand the psychology of Patriots coach Bill Belichick, and that is a mystery much too deep for physics.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Nitrogen is the most abundant chemical element in Earth's atmosphere and is crucial for plant growth and reproduction. And yet, it's incredibly boring, clear gas at room temperature.

But expose it to low pressure conditions, and you can transform it into a beautiful, crackling sheet of glass.

While nitrogen is a gas at room temperature, it becomes a liquid when cooled down to negative 320 F. And when you take that liquid, and shove it under a vacuum, something amazing happens — as ChefSteps learned.

But don't try this at home, liquid nitrogen can cause frostbite if not handled carefully.

When the liquid is placed in a vacuum, it makes a crazy substance called "nitrogen glass." The pressure in a vacuum is significantly lower than at sea level on Earth because there's very little air inside. As a result, any liquid placed inside of a vacuum boils at a lower temperature.

You can see the crazy boiling action below:

This boiling action is what the experimenters are after because as the liquid boils it cools. This is because it takes energy to transform the liquid into a gas and as the liquid expends energy, it reduces its overall temperature.

This seems counterintuitive, but think about when you sweat: The liquid evaporating from your skin lowers your body temperature because its carrying away energy, in the form of heat. Similarly, the evaporating liquid nitrogen cools as it boils.

Eventually, the liquid nitrogen boils enough heat away that it reaches its freezing point and instantly hardens into a glass-like solid, shown below, in a slow motion close up and in real time.

While the nitrogen glass looks pretty, it's not stable. The nitrogen atoms want to reorganize into a tighter, stronger, crystalline structure. So, shortly after forming, the glass cracks into a million tiny fissures as the molecules rearrange themselves explosively and seemingly all at once:

"Solid nitrogen is something that few people have ever seen," according to the the video of making nitrogen glass by ChefSteps.

Below is the fracturing in slow motion. What you're seeing is the atoms rearranging themselves like falling dominoes in a chain reaction. The once beautiful glass sheet is now scarred with millions of cracks. Check out the full video below, posted to YouTube by ChefSteps.

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Your typical store-bought dominoes are all of the same size, but what happens when you set up a series so that each is a bit bigger than the last?

It won't come as a surprise that they fall just as a regular series of dominoes do, but things quickly start to take on a pretty massive scale.

Stephen Morris (who holds a PhD in geophysics and lists"the Physics of everyday phenomena" as a research interest) set up a series of 13 dominoes, each roughly one and a half times the size of the one knocking it over.

The first domino is so tiny — it's 5 millimeters tall and only 1 millimeter thick, it's actually smaller than a Tic Tac — that it needs to be set up with tweezers. The 13th is more than three feet tall and weighs about 100 pounds.

One of the critical factors in the physics at play here, Morris explains, is that a domino only needs to be slightly tipped forward before gravity takes over and pulls the weight of the domino to the ground. And with such high centers of gravity — resting as they do on a small surface area — it doesn't take much to take dominoes to that all-important tipping point.

Gravitational potential energy— or the energy stored by balancing the tall domino on such a tiny footprint — comes from the domino's mass and height, both of which increase with every subsequent domino.

"As in all gravitational phenomena, the total mass of the object drops out of the equations, but not the mass distribution," a heady paper (by Leiden University's J. M. J. van Leeuwen) on the physics of "domino magnification" notes. Like Morris, Leeuwen has a funny label for this odd research interest: Curiosa.

A summarization of that paper by the MIT Technological Review explains that "the force required to topple the domino is smaller than the force it generates when it falls. It is this 'force amplification' that can be used to topple bigger dominoes."

In fact, the kinetic energy exerted to push that first domino is just 2 billionths of that released by the last one as it comes loudly crashing down.

Another important factor of domino physics is that they lean on one another as they fall. Since one falling domino is being weighed upon by its predecessor, its force is greater than if you or I had simply tipped it over. Van Leeuwen even proves that — with optimal spacing and no domino "slipping"— a domino series like this one could use dominoes that double in size from one to the next.

But that's more theoretical than practical. In Morris's demonstration, you can clearly see that the dominoes slip back after they've fallen.

But fall they do. "That was 13 dominoes," Morris says. "If I had 29 dominoes, the last domino would be as tall as the Empire State Building."

That exponential growth is pretty surprising, right? In that way it's reminiscent of the "wheat and chessboard" problem: If you had a single grain of wheat and doubled that for every square on a chessboard (there are 64), how many would you be left with?

The answer — 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, or roughly 18 and a half quintillion — is much greater than most people would guess before doing the math.

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Suppose you traveled back in time and stopped your grandparents from ever meeting.

This would create a paradox since you never would have been born if your grandparents never met. You've prevented your later birth, so you shouldn't exist anymore.

This is called the "Grandfather Paradox," and it's an infamous one among physicists.

Even though Einstein's famous theory of general relativity actually allows for time travel, the Grandfather Paradox gets in the way. According to Einstein, a gravitational field with enough force (like the one generated by a black hole) could bend space-time enough to fold it back on itself.

This bending could create a path through space-time that returns to its original starting position, but at an earlier moment in time. It's essentially a time-travel loop. Physicists call it a closed time-like curve, or CTC.

CTCs frustrate physicists because they come with all kinds of paradoxes, like the Grandfather Paradox. If you entered a CTC, traveled back in time and stopped your grandparents from meeting, you would never come back out of that CTC. The principles of cause and effect collapse.

Einstein's predicted CTCs are part of our conventional understanding of physics, but could never allow for time travel without a paradox.

Enter quantum mechanics.

While Einstein's general relativity describes the macro world, like planets and galaxies, quantum mechanics describes the micro world of things like atoms and particles. The two sets of laws do not get along well, and physicists are still working on reconciling them.

The math behind quantum mechanics suggests that time travel through a CTC is not only possible, but could be done without creating any paradoxes. So while a person (a macro object) can't time travel without creating a paradox, something much smaller, like a single particle (a micro object), could.

Back in the 1990s, theoretical physicist David Deutsch was the first person to realize this, and he figured out a way to get around the paradox.

In the world of quantum mechanics, the rules are a lot more fuzzy than conventional physics. If a quantum particle, like a photon or an electron, entered one of these time travel loops, it would have to emerge on the other side as that same identical particle. But when a quantum particle enters a CTC, there's no set outcome, only a spread of probabilities that the particle will emerge or not. So a particle that enters a CTC with a 50% chance of coming back out will only fail to make it back out of the CTC half the time. It's a crazy solution, but that 50/50 chance is good enough to solve the paradox according to the laws of quantum mechanics.

No one has discovered a CTC or successfully built one, so time travel is still not possible. But physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia have built a system that can mimic how a quantum particle would behave if it passed through a CTC and interacted with a younger version of its self. They've effectively built a time machine simulator.

The team of physicists simulated a particle traveling through a CTC by firing pairs of entangled light particles through a circuit. Entangled particles are created from the same parent particle, so they are identical to each other and any force that acts on one immediately affects the other. The entangled particles passed through a circuit and hit a polarized beam splitter that broke them apart so they could interact with each other. Think of it has you meeting the younger version of yourself right at the entrance to a time travel loop.

The physicists encoded the polarization of each particle pair they tested before sending it through the time machine simulator, so the polarization of any particles that emerged could be measured and compared to the original to make sure it was in fact the same particle.

So what happened when the simulated past and present versions of the particle met each other? The interaction was paradox-free, and the quantum particles came out of the mock time machine in exactly the same way they entered it.

Time travel isn't possible yet, but this simulation means it could be. The experiment also fit both the laws of general relativity and quantum mechanics, demonstrating that the two bodies of law could actually be compatible.

SEE ALSO: Scientists Come Up Empty-Handed After Online Search For Time Travelers From The Future

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On April 17, 1955, the greatest scientist of his generation checked himself into Princeton Hospital due to chest pains. By early the next morning, Albert Einstein had died from an abdominal aortic aneurysm – the rupture of the aorta, the heart vessel that’s the body’s main supplier of blood.

While word was still getting out that the great Dr. Einstein had passed away at the age of 76, something rather disturbing was happening at the hospital, if not downright nefarious. Einstein’s brain, the keeper of one of the world’s greatest intellects, had been stolen. And that is just the beginning of the story.

Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey was the pathologist on call during the early morning hours of the 18th and was the doctor assigned to attend to Dr. Einstein. Seven hours after the great scientist’s death at 1 am, Harvey began the autopsy he claimed he was given permission to do.

After determining the cause of death, Harvey went about removing, measuring, and weighing Einstein’s brain. Harvey later would say that he "knew we had permission to do an autopsy, and I assumed that we were going to study the brain.” To this day, no paperwork nor permission prior to the autopsy has ever been found.

After all the calculations had been done, Dr. Harvey interjected and immersed the brain in formaldehyde. After he was done with that, he took Einstein’s eyeballs out, which were later given to Einstein’s eye doctor Henry Adams (rumors still exist that the eyeballs are in a safe deposit box somewhere in New York City). Finally, he gave the rest of the body back to be cremated.

The removal of the brain and eyeballs were against Einstein’s final wishes. According to to Brian Burrell’s book Postcards from the Brain Museum, Einstein had left very specific instructions. He wanted to be cremated with the brain still inside of his head and his ashes scattered in secret, in order to "discourage idolaters."

So not only was this against Einstein’s personal wishes, Harvey had no legal nor medical right for keeping the brain. He wasn’t even a neurosurgeon nor a brain specialist. His responsibility simply was to determine the cause of death – which was heart failure and had very little to do with brain (at least, directly).

Burrell speculates that there were two possible reasons for Harvey to remove and keep for himself one of history’s most famous brains – one is that it was at the request of Harry Zimmerman, Einstein’s personal physician and a mentor of Harvey.

Zimmerman never publicly said this to be true, though did he make the request for the brain after the deed was done. The other theory that Burrell gives is that Harvey, perhaps inspired by the study done on Lenin’s brain in 1926, simply got “caught up in the moment and was transfixed in the presence of greatness.";

Whatever the case, on April 19th, after the removal and storing of the brain, Harvey went about asking for permission retroactively from Einstein’s son, Hans Albert Einstein. Hans Albert granted the permission, making Harvey promise that his father’s mind would be used for careful scientific study and the findings published in legitimate medical journals.

When the New York Times printed Einstein’s obituary on April 20th, it said that Dr. Harvey performed the autopsy “with the permission of the scientist’s son," with another headline that same day proclaiming “Son Asked Study of Einstein Brain." It makes no mention that this permission came after the fact.

When word got out that Harvey had the brain, requests came flooding in from across the world from others who wanted to see and study it. As mentioned, one request came from Dr. Harry Zimmerman in New York, whom Harvey promised would get the first chance to study it.

Zimmerman and his hospital in New York prepared for Harvey and the brain, but it never showed. A short time later, it was announced by Princeton Hospital that the brain would stay in New Jersey. “Snarl Develops Over Which Hospital Will Conduct Einstein Brain Study," was a headline in the Washington Post, while another newspaper went with “Hospitals Tiff over Brain of Einstein." The controversy over ownership of Einstein’s brain had become a circus and it was about to get even more bizarre.

Technically, Princeton Hospital never really had possession of the brain. Dr. Harvey did. He kept it in a jar in his home office. Soon after the public spat with Dr. Zimmerman and with still no medical studies on the brain underway, Dr. Harvey was fired from Princeton Hospital. He took the brain with him.

Harvey went to the University of Pennsylvania, and with help of a technician, cut up the brain into a thousand slides and 240 blocks, putting them into squares of celluloid – a semi-solid plastic-like substance. He finally gave some of the pieces to Dr. Zimmerman and kept the remainder of Albert Einstein’s brain in two formalin-filled glass jars for himself. Other researchers made overtures about wanting the rest of the brain, but Harvey refused to let go – insisting that he was “a year from finishing study on the specimen."

Harvey’s marriage fell apart and he quickly packed his bags to get out of Princeton, bound for the midwest. Before he could leave, his (ex) wife threatened to “dispose" of the brain. Of course, Harvey didn’t let this happen and took it with him as he made his way to Wichita, Kansas, where he worked as a medical supervisor in a biological testing lab. Legendarily, during his time in Wichita, he kept Einstein’s brain in a cider box underneath a beer cooler.

For the next thirty years, Harvey moved around the Midwest, towing the brain along, never publishing any studies. Every once in awhile, a researcher would contact him and he would send them a slide or two, hoping they could do the research he never did.

A few times, the story of Einstein’s brain drew the public’s attention again, especially after a 1978 article in the regional magazine New Jersey Monthly by Steven Levy. Said Levy about his first experience with Harvey and the brain,

At first he didn’t want to tell me anything, but after a while he finally admitted that he had the brain. After a longer while, he sheepishly told me it was IN THE VERY OFFICE WE WERE SITTING IN. He walked to a box labeled “Costa Cider" and pulled out two big Mason jars. In those were the remains of the brain that changed the world.

Another documented interaction comes from Kenji Sugimoto, a Japanese professor and Einstein expert, who visited Harvey in Kansas:

Humbly, the professor asks if he maybe could bring a piece back with him to Japan."Sure, why not," Harvey replies and walks out to the kitchen to fetch his bread board and a knife. Harvey finds an old pill cup to store the slice in and pours a little formaldehyde in.

In 1985, three decades after Einstein’s death, someone finally published a study on Einstein’s brain after receiving slides from Harvey – Marian Diamond of UCLA. Published in Experimental Neurology, her study was (admittedly) far from conclusive, but it did speculate that Einstein’s brain had more glial cells for every neuron than a normal brain.

This could mean that the cells had a greater “metabolic need"– meaning more energy was used and needed, which it was speculated could also mean an increase in conceptual and thinking skills. While recent research may have debunked this theory, there were finally studies about Einstein’s stolen brain published in legitimate medical journals. Yet, this still wasn’t the end to the brain’s journey.

In 1988, Thomas Harvey had his medical license revoked when he failed a three day competency exam in Missouri. A few years later, he returned to Princeton, only to be convinced by writer Michael Paterniti to go meet Einstein’s granddaughter in California.

Of course, he had to bring the brain. In Paterniti’s book Driving Mr. Albert, it describes, with the jars of brain in a duffle-bag in the trunk of Harvey’s Buick Skylark, their drive to sunny California. They did, indeed, meet Evelyn Einstein in Berkeley, where Harvey forgot the brain at her house when he left. She returned it to him, not wanting anything to do with it.

Thomas Harvey passed away in 2007, but before he did, he donated the brain to the Princeton Hospital, the same place that the brain began its extra-curricular journey over fifty years prior. Public interest once again increased and researchers, who had received slides of Einstein’s brain over the years, sent them back to Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania (where they were originally cut).

Today, the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is only place in the world one can currently see pieces of Einstein’s brain (slides were also once on display in 2013 in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland) – on slides, stained, and with handwritten notes from Thomas Harvey.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

• The Truth About Einstein and Whether He Failed at Mathematics as a Child
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• Why Do Zombies Eat Brains
• The Duels Fought Over Marie Curie

Bonus Facts:

• Einstein got his wife to agree to divorce him by offering her the money he would hopefully some day receive if he ever won a Nobel Prize for one or more of his papers he wrote in 1905. Apparently, she must have thought he had a good shot at it someday, because, after thinking it over for a week, she accepted. She ended up having to wait until 1921, but got the money.
• While Einstein’s brain was missing from his body, “a small group of intimates" secretly scattered his cremated ashes along the Delaware River per Einstein’s wishes less than twelve hours after his death.
• Harvey always claimed that Otto Nathan, the executioner of Einstein’s will, was present during the autopsy. Nathan would later admit to being present, but said that he had no clue what Harvey was doing and his view was obstructed. Later, Evelyn Einstein, as recounted in Paterniti’s book, would say that her family never trusted Nathan anyway and believes he was up to no good himself.
• Legend has it that Thomas Harvey, while living in Kansas, happened to be neighbors with the writer and poet William Burroughs. Harvey shared stories of the brain with Burroughs, who would often tell friends that he could have a piece of Einstein’s brain anytime you wanted. He never did get a piece, though.

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They may look flimsy, but the materials printed with 3-D printing technology are one-of-a-kind, light-weight and super-strong.

Materials engineers at LLNL have created a material with a special 3-D printer that mixes hard metal, tough ceramics and flexible plastics.

“It can hold more than 100,000-times its own weight. In fact, even more than that," said Chris Spadaccini, a materials engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

“One of the benefits of this methodology is the ability to work with a wide range of materials," said Josh Kuntz, a materials engineer at LLNL.

“These are things that are generally not available in 3-D printing today,” Spadaccini commented.

The engineers create the materials with a sophisticated technology that creates 3-D parts layer by layer.

“Wherever it gets hit by light, it hardens and forms a layer,” Spadaccini explained.

The materials are so strong that they can remain stiff almost indefinitely and can hold up to at least 160,000 times their own weight.

“The connectivity is so high that the structure does not have an extra degree of freedom to bend under load," said Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng, a materials engineer at LLNL.

The materials could someday be used in products that require strong but lightweight parts such as automobiles, space vehicles and airplanes.

Check out the video, here:

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Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with.

The term Big Bang was created by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle as a way to mock the theory. Hoyle thought of the universe as like an endlessly flowing river, saying “Things are they way they are, because they were the way they were.” However, the weight of evidence—particularly the discovery of the cosmic background radiation—led the scientific community to overwhelmingly favor the idea that the universe came into being from a single, infinitely dense point.

Nevertheless, the problem of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang has continued to trouble many scientists, along with questions about how it actually occurred.

"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt. In collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Ali has created a series of equations that describe a universe much like Hoyle's; one without a beginning or end. Part of their work has been published in Physics Letters B, while a follow-up paper by Das and Rajat Bhaduri of Manchester University, Canada, is awaiting publication.

Ali and Das are keen to point out that they were not seeking a preordained outcome, or trying to adjust their equations to remove the need for the Big Bang. Instead they sought to unite the work of David Bohm and Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri, connecting quantum mechanics with general relativity. They found that when using Bohm's work to make quantum corrections to Raychaudhuri's equation on the formation of singularities, they described a universe that was once much smaller, but never had the infinite density currently postulated.

The quest to unite the two great theories of modern physics into quantum gravity has been one of the major projects of some of science's greatest minds in recent decades. Ali and Das are not claiming to have constructed a complete theory of quantum gravity, but think their work will be compatible with future paradigms.

In another proposal that harks back to a now-discarded theory, Das and Ali propose that the universe is filled with a quantum fluid made up of gravitons, particles that probably have no mass themselves but transmit gravity the way photons carry electromagnetism. The follow-up paper suggests that in the early universe these gravitons would have formed a Bose-Einstein condensate, a collection of particles that display quantum phenomena at the macroscopic scale. Moreover, the paper argues that this condensate could cause the universe's expansion to accelerate, and so explain dark energy, and might one day be the only surviving component of the universe.

Although Das and Ali's vision appears to resolve a number of problems with the dominant cosmological models, it still requires extensive elaboration to test whether it has even larger problems of its own.

Now read: What happened before the Big Bang started the Universe

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Scientists just announced the discovery of two never-before-seen particles hiding inside data collected by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland.

The LHC is a 17-mile-long underground tunnel that hurls protons at each other at incredible speeds. Physicists study the particles that they break apart into.

Physicists predicted the existence of these two new particles a few years ago, but we had no hard evidence that they existed until now.

The two new particles reinforce the standard model of physics, which is a working theory that describes all the known particles in the universe. The discovery of the particles is also helping physicists learn more about one of the fundamental forces in the universe, strong force, which acts like glue and hold particles together. The research was published on Feb. 10 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The two new particles are named Xi_b'^- and Xi_b*^- (pronounced “zi-b-prime” and “zi-b-star,” Scientific American points out). Both Xi_b^-and Xi_b*^- are a type of particle called a baryon.

Baryons include familiar particles like protons and neutrons, which are held together by strong force. (The other fundamental forces in the universe are gravity, electromagnetism, and weak force. Strong force holds particles together; weak force makes particles decay.) Scientists understand the basic theory of strong force, and they can use the theory to estimate the sizes and masses of different baryons. But the mathematical equations behind strong force are incredibly complex.

That's because the particles they apply to have some wacky characteristics. Part of a baryon's mass can spontaneously burst into and out of existence.This weird flux makes it difficult to use strong force to predict their mass. Physicists test their predictions against real data collected by particle accelerators like the LHC to see if they're on the right track.

For these particular particles, the actual mass measurements from the LHC data agreed with the masses that physicists had already predicted. The two new particles are each about six times larger than a proton, according to a press release from CERN, the home of the LHC. For physicists, this result is more evidence that they're on the right track when it comes to understanding strong force.

That also means that these two new particles are perfectly in line with the standard model of physics. But the standard model is far from perfect, and physicists are constantly revising it. One of its weaknesses is it doesn't do a good job of explaining how the other fundamental forces interact with each other. It also doesn't account for dark matter — the mysterious (and so far undetectable) substance that physicists believe makes up about one-quarter of the universe.

But before physicists can discover new physics beyond the standard model, they need a firm grasp on the principles that we already know about, and that's why the discovery of these new particles is important.

The famous LHC that brought us the Higgs boson will be up and running again in March, and it'll be hurling protons at each other faster than ever before. Physicists hope the higher-energy collisions will reveal new, exotic particles that further challenge the standard model and maybe even provide us with a new theory that could account for dark matter.

NOW FIND OUT: What is a Higgs boson?

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How many licks does it take to get to the center of a lollipop? Science now has an answer to the famous question asked in the iconic Tootsie Roll Pop commercial: about 1,000. And you can take that number to the bank — it's based on a sophisticated mathematical model of how flowing fluid dissolves solids.

Researchers at New York University arrived at the number by custom-making their own candy spheres and cylinders to test how materials dissolve in a flow. But this seemingly simple process is actually quite complex, said study leader Leif Ristroph, a physicist at NYU. First, the presence of the solid disrupts the flow, forcing it to bend and change directions, he said.

"But then, the flow starts to dissolve the solid, so now something about the flow is being imprinted on the solid object," Ristroph told Live Science. "What happens is, you get a weird feedback between the two."

The result was surprising: Tests of both spherical lollipop-type candies and Jolly Rancher-style cylinders resulted in the same half-sphere shape after a little time in the fluid flow, Ristroph and his colleagues reported in the February issue of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. [See Time-Lapse Video of the Dissolving Shapes]

Sugary science

Ristroph, along with NYU graduate student Jinzi Mac Huang and mathematician Nicholas Moore of Florida State University, were interested in the dissolution question because it applies to more than just candy. In fact, the dynamics of dissolution and erosion are applicable to numerous fields, Ristroph said. For instance, understanding the process could explain how rivers carve landscapes. Dissolving materials are also important in chemical industrial processes, he said, and in the pharmaceutical industry. (Those pills can't just pass right through the stomach, after all.)

"The simplest thing you can do is have simple shapes in a nice, steady flow, and then look at what happens when they are dissolving," Ristroph said.

The researchers turned to hard candy for their experiments, but they couldn't just go out and buy Tootsie Roll Pops. Commercial candies are full of tiny bubbles that could skew the experiment, Ristroph said, so the researchers had to create bubble-free, perfectly shaped hard candies that "even a mathematician would love."

"None of us are particularly good cooks, but we learned how to make candy ourselves," he said.

Then, the researchers put the candies into flows of water moving between about 4 to 40 inches per second (10 to 100 centimeters per second). They used time-lapse photography to capture the dissolution process over several hours.

Flow formations

To the researchers' surprise, both the spheres and the cylinders took on the same shape before vanishing: a smooth, well-polished spherical side facing into the flow, with a rough edge encircling the candy like a belt. On the back side, the candies developed a flat but pockmarked surface. The unevenness of the back was driven by the speed and lack of stability in the flow as it passed over the rear of the candy, Ristroph said.

From the experiments, the researchers created mathematical formulas to explain how fast the materials dissolve. Just for fun, they tackled the "How many licks?" question, and found that a lollipop with a radius of 0.4 inches (1 cm) licked at the equivalent to a flow rate of 1 cm per second would reveal its center in about 1,000 licks. Of course, plenty of real-world factors affect that number. Online, posts about Tootsie Pop licking experiments report numbers ranging from 144 to850 licks.

"It could be 500; it could be 1,500 … It's kind of a crude estimate," Ristroph said. "But it seems like it's working pretty well."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article onLive Science.

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The particle accelerator, which has been shut for maintenance since 2013, is bigger and better than ever.

The Large Hadron Collider will restart this spring following an upgrade to allow it to discover particles which are even more mysterious than the Higgs boson.

The particle accelerator, which has been shut for maintenance since 2013, is bigger and better than ever and will be able to produce collisions with 60 per cent more energy.

Scientists at Cern said the higher energies mean they stand a good chance of discovering the sub-atomic particles involved in ‘supersymmetry’ which are “twins” of the particles that form the basis of matter.

Discovering supersymmetry would be an even bigger breakthrough than finding the Higgs boson, a fundamental sub-atomic particle that accounts for gravitational attraction.

The first supersymmetry particle is likely to be something called a gluino, the symmetric twin of a gluon particle and "it could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we’re really lucky,” said Professor Beate Heinemann of the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

“This would rock the world... For me, it’s more exciting than the Higgs.”

Discovering an elusive ‘gluino’ would be mark a step forward in understanding elusive dark matter and dark energy which have so far defied detection.

The upgrades to the collider include 18 new “superconducting dipole magnets.”

The Large Hadron Collider has 1,232 of them, and CERN engineers had to replace 18 of them because of wear and tear. Additionally, they fitted over 10,000 of the connections between those dipole magnets with splices that provide alternative paths for the 11,000 amp currents.

This will allow the interconnections to be saved even if a fault occurs.

CERN also installed nearly 60,000 new cores and more than 100 petabytes of memory so that the collider will be able to handle the significantly larger amount of data it will be processing from the experiments.

1 New magnets

2 Stronger connections

3 Safer magnets

4 Higher energy beams

5 Narrower beams

6 Smaller but closer proton packets

7 Higher voltage

8 Superior cryogenics

9 Radiation-resistant electronics

10 More secure vacuum

This article was written by Sarah Knapton from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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A Yale University graduate student from Iran was denied admission to the University of Massachusetts after UMass implemented a policy barring Iranian students from studying in certain engineering and science programs, he told the New Haven Register.

Sina Rostami studies physics at Yale as a visiting researcher through the Lulea University of Technology in Sweden, where he is getting his master's degree. Rostami had applied to a doctoral program at UMass when he was notified earlier this month that his application was denied due to a federal law "which excludes citizens of Iran from education in the United States if they plan to focus on nuclear and, more broadly, energy related research in Iran."

"I'm in the department of Physics, though my research is purely in cosmology," Rostami wrote in an email to Business Insider. "I've applied to the Physics department of UMass and my research interest was in theoretical astrophysics."

UMass announced Wednesday that it's reversing its policy barring Iranian graduate students, which it had defended by citing the "Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012,"as explained on its website. The university told the Boston Globe it's ditching the policy after consulting with the State Department.

It's unclear what effect this will have on Iranian students like Rostami who were already denied due to their nationality. We have reached out to UMass for clarification about the status of Iranian students previously barred under the now-changed policy.

As the Register reports, while his astronomy work does overlap with physics, "Rostami's research is focused on something more theoretical than the fields in which UMass bars Iranian students." According to the newspaper, Rostami said that his research — which focuses on supernovae and the nature of dark energy — "is not connected to anything the US government would be concerned with."

Much of the criticism surrounding the UMass policy had to do with what many perceive to be a flawed interpretation of the law by the university. Rather than universities taking it upon themselves to bar Iranian students, the Act has traditionally been enforced by government agencies that issue visas.

UMass had said it's not the only US university with this policy, although other schools may not make it public.

"If this is true, it should be investigated in what scale Iranian nationals are being effected by similar laws," Rostami told Business Insider. "People in US should be informed that cutting off Iranian citizens from their diverse society will reduce the cultural and social interaction between the two nations."

A University of Massachusetts spokesperson sent Business Insider the following statement about the status of Iranian students:

Students whom the departments had previously rejected will stay rejected. They were rejected for academic reasons having nothing to do with the policy.

Students whose applications had not yet been acted on were withdrawn and their money was refunded whenever possible. All of those students will have their applications reactivated, and of course they won't be made to pay again. The departments will then decide whether or not to admit them in the usual way.

Four Iranians had been recommended for admission by their departments, but not yet admitted when the policy went into effect. Their applications were withdrawn as well, and their fees were refunded when possible. They will now be admitted.

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If you think of bespectacled white men like J. Robert Oppenheimer when you think of the Manhattan Project, you're not alone. But you're also missing out on a critical part of the equation.

In fact, one of the most important contributors to the atom bomb was a Chinese woman named Chien-Shiung Wu.

Before she took her place as "the world's distinguished woman physicist of her time," Chien-Shiung Wu was an enthusiastic student in Shanghai. Though her school only went through the fourth grade, she managed to transfer to a boarding school, where she graduated at the top of her class before going on to receive her degree in physics from National Central University in Nanking in 1934.

Wu emigrated to the United States to pursue a postdoctorate education in physics and earned her doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940.

But given Wu's gender and her nationality, her road as an American physicist was a rocky one. Anti-Asian sentiment during World War II made it hard for her to find a job on the West Coast, so she went east. But the war that limited Wu's opportunities ended up expanding them, too.

She was offered jobs replacing MIT and Princeton faculty who had been called up for war work, and eventually recruited into Columbia University's super-secret Manhattan Project.

She wasn't the only woman there. As Maia Weinstock notes, "Contrary to public perception, a fair number of women — many hundreds, certainly, and possibly thousands — were involved in the technical reaches of the Manhattan Project. They were chemists, technicians, doctors, mathematicians, and more. But Wu was one of the very few women who contributed at the highest levels of physics research for this critical war effort."

Wu helped develop a process that used gaseous diffusion to isolate radioactive uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project. Her initial experiments became the basis of huge separation efforts at the project's Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility and eventually helped fuel the bomb.

But the Manhattan Project wasn't Wu's only accomplishment in physics—in the 1950s, Wu performed experiments that led to the abandonment of the law of parity. And though the Nobel Committee gave the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics to her colleagues instead, her accomplishments were nothing to sneeze at.

This testimony from one of her colleagues when she died gives a sense of just how respected Wu was in her time: "C.S. Wu was one of the giants of physics. In the field of beta decay, she had no equal."

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Some radical raindrops are flouting the rules: The wet-weather drips seem to be breaking a physical speed limit, sometimes falling 10 times faster than they should, scientists have found.

Like all objects in free fall, raindrops move according to the laws of physics. One of those laws puts a barrier on how fast a free-falling object can travel. This terminal velocity is reached when the downward tug of gravity equals the opposing force of air resistance.

In 2009, physicists reported that they had discovered small raindrops falling faster than this terminal velocity. In that study, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Alexander Kostinski and Raymond Shaw of Michigan Technological University, along with Guillermo Montero-Martinez and Fernando Garcia-Garcia of the National University of Mexico, measured 64,000 raindrops, and found clusters of "superterminal" drops falling faster than they should based on their size and weight, especially as the rain became heavier. [Weirdo Weather: 7 Rare Weather Events]

In the new study, Kostinski and his colleagues verified that initial finding using completely different instruments. The researchers clocked the speeds of 1.5 million raindrops passing through a laser beam during six rainstorms at a site near Charleston, South Carolina. All of the raindrops measuring 0.8 millimeters (0.03 inches) and larger fell to the ground at predicted speeds, but 30 to 60 percent of the smaller drops (those measuring about 0.3 millimeters, or about 0.01 inches) traveled faster than their terminal velocity.

"Occasionally, smaller drops (less than a millimeter) fall more than 10 times faster than expected," Kostinski told Live Science in an email. "On average, small drops move about 30 percent faster than expected, but it depends on rain type and strength."

The superterminal drops may be the result of fragmenting, in which a "parent" droplet breaks up into smaller droplets. "Right after the breakup, fragments move approximately with the speed of mother drops," Kostinski wrote. "The mother drop is large, and its terminal speed is much higher than the one of smaller drops. This is one possible reason for smaller drops (fragments), breaking the speed limit."

So-called turbulent wakes that form behind the raindrops may also explain the odd behavior. In those wakes, air resistance that's opposing gravity's downward pull would decrease. "If they fall behind another drop, air drag decreases (like a group of bikers behind a leader)," Kostinski wrote.

By using 21 laser precipitation monitors and a video device, the researchers also ruled out the idea that the speedy raindrops were the result of droplets splashing off the instruments or some kind of measurement error.

"The fact that a substantial fraction of drizzle-sized drops are moving faster than their terminal velocities suggest that we are not just seeing an outlier effect here," lead author Michael Larsen, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the College of Charleston, said in a statement. "That was a bit surprising to me and helped me realize that there's more science to be done."

The researchers aren't sure what is causing some raindrops to plummet to Earth so fast. "We did not predict this, to be honest," Kostinski said. However, the finding may impact rainfall estimates and erosion calculations based on models that use assumed speeds of all raindrops. (Faster-moving raindrops have more kinetic energy to erode the soils they hit.)

"The assumption that rain consists of single, isolated drops, falling at prescribed speeds, has lasted so long [in atmospheric science]," Kostinski said in the statement.

The new study is detailed in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Follow Jeanna Bryner on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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As the era of civilian space travel draws nearer with the successful launch and return of a reusable spacecraft, NASA is now faced with the challenge of creating a lightweight and cost-efficient suit for space-bound citizens.

Enter Ted Southern, visionary Brooklyn artist and founder of Final Frontier Design. As of December 23, 2014, NASA and Final Frontier Design signed an official Space Act Agreement to collaborate on the new suit.

Southern caught NASA's attention after entering their 2009 Glove Challenge to improve the dexterity and safety of the key piece of equipment. Southern's prize-winning pressurized gloves outperformed NASA's previous model in dexterity and degrees of freedom, and he continued developing the gloves in 2011 when NASA contracted his services further.

But his impressive resume hardly ends there. Southern's intricately engineered bodysuit designs have been featured in Broadway's Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark and the acrobatic spectacle Cirque du Soleil. Perhaps more relevant to the collective consciousness, it is his expertise and indelible panache that helped bring to life Heidi Klum's very massive and iconic Victoria's Secret angel wings.

As a graduate of the Pratt Institute for Design, Southern offers the ideal blend of engineering expertise and sleekness of design. While possessing a keen eye for glitz and glamour, Southern isn't your typical science nerd. He recognizes that space design is particularly challenging because of the external demands that zero gravity and interstellar travel impose on the body, like high speeds and dramatic pressure and temperature differentials.

Southern hopes to design a suit that uses mechanical counterpressure technology, which applies pressure to the skin to offset the effects of the vacuum of space, rather than effectively creating a balloon of pressurized gas around the wearer like suits do today. Though such technology is still far from perfected, if anyone has the ambition and creativity to make it happen, it's certainly Ted.

Russia, China, and countries in Europe are similarly racing to design their own spacesuits. In a burgeoning era of innovation for space technology, it is hard not to compare innovators like Ted Southern to his recent contemporaries. With such talent for design and firm understanding of engineering processes, could Ted Southern be the Steve Jobs of the modern space era? One thing is for certain – space fashion is about to get an upgrade, and it's sure to be chic.

SEE ALSO: Astronauts are already starting to work on space taxis

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