Higsov bozon i dalje nepotvrđen al iima indicija...

[-_-]

naravno da je stara bar 2500 hiljade godina, mada je tek od renesanse stvarno živnula.

Ne bih se slozio, jer iako su odavno postojali pokusaji objasnjenja razlicitih termina i pojava,
cenim da to nije bila nauka u strogom smislu reci.

odakle to sad da ti hvališ jednu državnu agenciju kao što je NASA?

To je zato sto nisam iskljuciv.
Kad je bio onaj problem sa budzetom u SAD, pa drzavne agencije nisu radile,
gledao sam mnoge liberalne FB stranice kako likuju (jel vidite da nam NASA ne treba), ja se sa tim nisam slozio.
Ako nesto ne moze doneti opipljiv rezultat danas, vec ko zna kad u buducnosti, to ne znaci da ne treba da postoji.

Osim toga, tesko mogu da zamislim nekog da voli fantastiku (pogotovo SF), a da nije opcinjen istrazivanjem svemira.

Koren svake nauke je u sumnji. To će vam reći svako ko se ozbiljno bavio naučnom misli. Kad se dovoljno dugo budete bavili time shvatićete.

Mozda je moj pokusaj sale pogresno shvacen.
Nisam mislio da je ispravo shvatanje da je ovo sto danas znamo jedino i konacno,
vec da treba verovati nauci naspram nekih nenaucnih pojava (tipa astrologija i sl).

Jasno je da nauka napreduje tako sto se stalno dovodi u sumnju ono sto trenutno vazi za tacno.

ta pamet mora malo da se osloni i na prethodnike.

I sa ovim se slazem. Napredak nauke je nemoguc bez oslanjanja na pretodna dostignuca.
Neko je ovojako lepo rekao (jel bese Hoking?) - "Video sam daleko, jer sam stajao na ledjima divova."

Nauka je, valjda, disciplina & postupak kojim se od hipoteze dolazi do nekakve, pragmatične istine.

Pa ima brdo definicija, ali ovome sto si ti napisao, fali jedan mali, ali bitan dodatak - uz koriscenje naucnog metoda.

Samo budale nikad ne menjaju mišljenje.

Amin.

eno Boris misli

A posto Boris veruje u nauku, siguran je da ne mozes da mu citas misli 

umesto da prežvakavamo priču o nauci i njenim temeljima u verovanju koju smo već više puta ovde prežvakali

Verovatno tad nisam bio na ovde, zao mi je ako je nekom zasmetao moj offtopic,
ali mislim da je ovde bilo malo skretanje od teme. Malo - kakvo inace zna da bude.

[Albedo 0]

nisam ti čito misli, sam iznosiš tvrdnje da je tržište svetinja a sad slaviš NASA-u, koja je u stvari organizacija koja pokazuje da nije tržište stvorilo bogatstvo na Zapadu

[Albedo 0]

Meho, pa hajde što sam ja nešto tamo komentarisao o koliziji modela, ali mac i scallop od kojih prvo čekamo neku reakciju i dalje ništa

[mac]

Izvinjavam se, nisam pohvatao. Kako je prošli ja u nesaglasju sa trenutnim ja?

[tomat]

nije li to pitanje već prežvakano, to da bi kosmos trebalo da se uruši. račun je pokazivao da bi inflacija kosmosa trebalo da usporava, i da će u nekom momentu proces krenuti unatrag, odnosno ka singularitetu iz kojeg je nastao. onda su posmatranjem utvrdili da inflacija ne usporava, već ubrzava, pa je tu na scenu uletela tamna energija kao uzrok ubrzane inflacije. sada su samo u taj već postojeći "sukob" ubacili Higsov bozon.

[Albedo 0]

Izvinjavam se, nisam pohvatao. Kako je prošli ja u nesaglasju sa trenutnim ja?

u tome što je velika razlika između mišljenja i mjerenja

[mac]

I dalje ne znam o čemu pričaš. Ja ne pravim razlike između mišljenja i merenja, nego između filozofije i fizike. U filozofiji nikakvog merenja nema. Pošto nema merenja (potvrde teorije) nema ni vrednost sa stanovišta fizike.

Kako je ono Hegel rekao, tim gore po stvarnost?

[Albedo 0]

U filozofiji nikakvog merenja nema

zavisi šta misliš pod mjerenjem, pogotovo što ne praviš razliku u odnosu na mišljenje

al eo ti Zenonove aporije, koje su filozofsko poigravanje sa mjerenjem

Liotar bi, naravno, bio, njihova savremena verzija

[Mica Milovanovic]

Повремено ми је и Лорд Куфер био јаснији од вас... Што је разлог за озбиљну забринутост...
Моју или вашу, није ми баш јасно... 

[Meho Krljic]

The Physics of a New Generation
 

How a fundamental but unstable particle might be our first window into particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
 

[Albedo 0]

ša sam reko

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/08/21/quantum-gravity-expert-says-philosophical-superficiality-has-harmed-physics/

[Meho Krljic]

Tamna materija (možda) ima pametnije objašnjenje nego što je do sada imala:
 
 Dark matter: Out with the WIMPs, in with the SIMPs? 

Like cops tracking the wrong person, physicists seeking to identify dark matter—the mysterious stuff whose gravity appears to bind the galaxies—may have been stalking the wrong particle. In fact, a particle with some properties opposite to those of physicists' current favorite dark matter candidate—the weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP—would do just as good a job at explaining the stuff, a quartet of theorists says. Hypothetical strongly interacting massive particles—or SIMPs—would also better account for some astrophysical observations, they argue."We've been searching for WIMPs for quite some time, but we haven't found them yet, so I think it's important to think outside the box," says Yonit Hochberg, a theorist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and an author of the new paper.Theorists dreamed up WIMPs 30 years ago to help explain why galaxies don’t just fly apart. The particles would have a mass between one and 1000 times that of a proton and, in addition to gravity, would interact with one another and with ordinary matter through only the weak nuclear force, one of two forces of nature that normally exert themselves only in the atomic nucleus.The infant universe would have produced a huge number of WIMPs as subatomic particles crashed into one another. Some of those WIMPs would then disappear when two of them collided and annihilated each other to produce two ordinary particles. As the universe expanded, such collisions would become ever rarer and, given the strength of the weak force, just enough WIMPs would survive to provide the right amount of dark matter today—about five times that of ordinary matter. That coincidence, or "WIMP miracle," has made WIMPs a favorite of theorists, even if experimenters have yet to spot them floating about.However, Hochberg and colleagues argue that dark matter could also consist of lighter particles that have a mass somewhere around one-tenth that of the proton and interact with one another—but not ordinary matter—very strongly. Such SIMPs would pull on one another almost as strongly as the quarks in a proton, which cling to each other so fiercely that it's impossible to isolate a quark.SIMPs can also provide just the right amount of dark matter, assuming the theorists add a couple of wrinkles. The SIMPs must disappear primarily through collisions in which three SIMPs go in and only two SIMPs come out. These events must be more common than ones in which two SIMPs annihilate each other to produce two ordinary particles. Moreover, the theorists argue, SIMPs must interact with ordinary matter, although much more weakly than WIMPs. That's because the three-to-two collisions would heat up the SIMPs if they could not interact and share heat with ordinary matter.That may seem like a lot to ask, but those conditions are easy to meet so long as the SIMPs aren't too heavy, Hochberg says. So the WIMP miracle could easily be replaced with a SIMP miracle, as the team reports this month in Physical Review Letters.Moreover, the fact that SIMPs must interact with ordinary matter guarantees that, in principle, they should be detectable in some way, Hochberg says. Whereas physicists are now searching for signs of WIMPs colliding with massive atomic nuclei, researchers would probably have to look for SIMPs smacking into lighter electrons because the bantamweight particles would not pack enough punch to send a nucleus flying.Compared with WIMPy dark matter, SIMPy dark matter would also have another desirable property. As the universe evolved, dark matter coalesced into clumps, or halos, in which the galaxies then formed. But computer simulations suggest that dark matter that doesn't interact with itself would form myriad little clumps that are very dense in the center. And little "dwarf galaxies" aren't as abundant and the centers of galaxies aren't as dense as the simulations suggest. But strongly interacting dark matter would smooth out the distribution of dark matter and solve those problems, Hochberg says. "This isn't some independent thing that we've just forced into the model," she says. "It just naturally happens."The new analysis "has the flavor of the WIMP miracle, which is nice," says Jonathan Feng, a theorist at UC Irvine who was not involved in the work. Feng says he's been working on similar ideas and that the ability to reconcile the differences between dark matter simulations and the observed properties of galaxies makes strongly interacting dark matter attractive conceptually.However, he cautions, it may be possible that, feeble as they may be, the interactions between dark and ordinary matter might smooth out the dark matter distribution on their own. And Feng says he has some doubts about the claim that SIMPs must interact with ordinary matter strongly enough to be detected. So the SIMP probably won't knock WIMP off its perch as the best guess for the dark matter particle just yet, Feng says: "At the moment, it's not as well motivated as the WIMP, but it's definitely worth exploring."

[Meho Krljic]

Physicists just discovered two new subatomic particles. Here's why that matters.

[Meho Krljic]

Slowing down the speed of light traveling through air

Scientists have long known that the speed of light can be slowed slightly as it travels through materials such as water or glass.
 
However, it has generally been thought impossible for particles of light, known as photons, to be slowed as they travel through free space, unimpeded by interactions with any materials.
 
In a paper published in Science Express, researchers from the Univ. of Glasgow and Heriot-Watt Univ. describe how they have managed to slow photons in free space for the first time. They have demonstrated that applying a mask to an optical beam to give photons a spatial structure can reduce their speed.
 
Their experiment was configured like a race, with two photons released simultaneously across identical distances towards a defined finish line.
 
The team compare a beam of light, containing many photons, to a team of cyclists who share the work by taking it in turns to cycle at the front. Although the group travels along the road as a unit, the speed of individual cyclists can vary as they swap position.
 
The group formation can make it difficult to define a single velocity for all cyclists, and the same applies to light. A single pulse of light contains many photons, and scientists know that light pulses are characterized by a number of different velocities.
 
The researchers found that one photon reached the finish line as predicted, but the structured photon which had been reshaped by the mask arrived later, meaning it was travelling more slowly in free space. Over a distance of one metre, the team measured a slowing of up to 20 wavelengths, many times greater than the measurement precision.
 
The work demonstrates that, after passing the light beam through a mask, photons move more slowly through space. Crucially, this is  very different to the slowing effect of passing light through a medium such as glass or water, where the light is only slowed during the time it is passing through the material—it returns to the speed of light after it comes out the other side. The effect of passing the light through the mask is to limit the top speed at which the photons can travel.
 
The work was carried out by a team from the Univ. of Glasgow’s Optics Group, led by Prof. Miles Padgett, working with theoretical physicists led by Stephen Barnett, and in partnership with Daniele Faccio from Heriot-Watt Univ.
 
Daniel Giovannini, one of the lead authors of the paper, said: “The delay we’ve introduced to the structured beam is small, measured at several micrometres over a propagation distance of one metre, but it is significant. We’ve measured similar effects in two different types of beams known as Bessel beams and Gaussian beams.”
 
Co-lead author Jacquiline Romero said: “We’ve achieved this slowing effect with some subtle but widely-known optical principles. This finding shows unambiguously that the propagation of light can be slowed below the commonly accepted figure of 299,792,458 m/sec, even when travelling in air or vacuum.
 
“Although we measure the effect for a single photon, it applies to bright light beams too. The effect is biggest when the lenses used to create the beam are large and when the distance over which the light is focused is small, meaning the effect only applies at short range.”
 
Prof. Padgett added: “It might seem surprising that light can be made to travel more slowly like this, but the effect has a solid theoretical foundation and we’re confident that our observations are correct.
 
“The results give us a new way to think about the properties of light and we’re keen to continue exploring the potential of this discovery in future applications. We expect that the effect will be applicable to any wave theory, so a similar slowing could well be created in sound waves, for example.”
 
Source: Univ. of Glasgow
 

[Meho Krljic]

Tiny black holes could trigger collapse of universe—except that they don't

If you like classic two-for-one monster movies such as King Kong vs. Godzilla, then a new paper combining two bêtes noires of pseudoscientific scaremongers—mini black holes and the collapse of the vacuum—may appeal to you. Physicists working with the world's biggest atom-smasher—Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—have had to reassure the public that, even if they can make them, mini black holes, infinitesimal versions of the ones that form when jumbo stars implode, won't consume the planet. They've also had to dispel fears that blasting out a particle called the Higgs boson will cause the vacuum of empty space to collapse. Now, however, three theorists calculate that in a chain reaction, a mini black hole could trigger such collapse after all.
Come out from under the bed; there's a big caveat. If this could have happened, it would have long before humans evolved. "The thing you mustn't say is, ‘Shock, horror! We're going to destroy the universe!’" says Ian Moss, a theoretical cosmologist at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom and an author of the paper explaining the result. Rather, he says, the message is that some unknown physics must enter to stabilize the vacuum—encouraging news for physicists searching for something new. Still, Moss acknowledges that the paper could be taken the wrong way: "I'm sort of afraid that I'm going to have [prominent theorist] John Ellis calling me up and accusing me of scaremongering."
Stability of the vacuum is a real issue. Ever since the discovery of the long-predicted Higgs boson in 2012, physicists have known that empty space contains a "Higgs field," a bit like an electric field, that is made of Higgs bosons lurking "virtually" in the vacuum. Other fundamental particles such as the electron and quarks interact with the field to gain their mass. However, particle physicists have calculated that, given their current standard model of the known particles and the Higgs boson's measured mass, the Higgs field may not be in its stable, lowest energy state. Rather, it could achieve a much lower energy by taking on much higher strength. That energy-saving transition should inevitably cause the vacuum to collapse and wipe out the universe.
So why hasn't that collapse happened? It turns out that to get to the lower energy "true vacuum" state, the Higgs field would have to get through an enormous energy barrier through a process known as quantum tunneling. That barrier is so big that it would likely take many, many times the age of the universe for the transition to occur. So, theorists generally agreed that the Higgs field is "metastable," temporarily stuck in a "false vacuum" state, and that although the collapse is a problem in principle, practically it's nothing to worry about.
But now, Moss and theoretical physicists Philipp Burda and Ruth Gregory of Durham University in the United Kingdom contend that argument falls apart when you mix in mini black holes—microscopic regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. That’s because a mini black hole acts like a "seed" that can trigger formation of a bubble of true vacuum in a sea of false vacuum, just as a bit of grit can trigger the formation of a bubble of steam in boiling water, as they explain in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters.
Without such a seed, a bubble of true vacuum would inevitably shrink. That's because, even though the vacuum within the bubble has lower energy than the vacuum outside the bubble, the bubble wall at which the two meet has very high energy. So the bubble can lower its total energy by growing smaller and disappearing. For a bubble with a tiny black hole inside, however, it’s a different story. The black hole’s gravity can shift the energy balance, Moss explains, so that any bubble beyond a certain very small size could instead lower its energy by growing. Within a fraction of a second, the bubble would then expand to consume the entire visible universe, Moss says.
Those black holes have to be small, Moss and colleagues argue, and they could conceivably come from two sources. They could be "primordial" black holes lingering since the birth of the universe. Or they could be microscopic black holes created within particle collisions such as those at the LHC.
So should we worry? No, Moss says. The fact that the universe has been around 13.8 billion years shows that primordial black holes will not trigger such a collapse, he says. As for black holes at the LHC, even if they can be created they also won't create havoc, he says. The proof of that comes from cosmic rays, which crash into the atmosphere and create even higher energy particle collisions than the LHC can. So even if such collisions spawn black holes, the black holes don't trigger vacuum collapse, Moss says, or the cosmos would have vanished long ago.
The real point, Moss says, is that theorists can no longer shrug off the problem by assuming that the collapse of the vacuum would take a hugely long time. By showing that—according to the standard model—the collapse should happen quickly, the paper suggests that some new physics must kick in to stabilize the vacuum.
Others aren't so sure the argument is persuasive. The theorists make a number of questionable assumptions in their mathematics, says Vincenzo Branchina, a theorist with Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics at the University of Catania. John Ellis, a theorist at King's College London, questions the consistency of the calculation. For example, he says, it assumes that the standard model holds true to very high energy scales. However, he notes, the only way the LHC can make a mini black hole is if the standard model conks out and space opens up new dimensions at much lower energy, he says. Still, both Branchina and Ellis say that based on other arguments, they suspect that something does make the vacuum stable.
As for the presentation of the argument in the new paper, Ellis says he has some misgivings that it will whip up unfounded fears about the safety of the LHC once again. For example, the preprint of the paper doesn’t mention that cosmic-ray data essentially prove that the LHC cannot trigger the collapse of the vacuum—"because we [physicists] all knew that," Moss says. The final version mentions it on the fourth of five pages. Still, Ellis, who served on a panel to examine the LHC's safety, says he doesn't think it's possible to stop theorists from presenting such arguments in tendentious ways. "I'm not going to lose sleep over it," Ellis says. "If someone asks me, I'm going to say it's so much theoretical noise." Which may not be the most reassuring answer, either.
 

Evo linka do samog rada:



Gravity and the stability of the Higgs vacuum

[Meho Krljic]

The 2 most dangerous numbers in the universe are threatening the end of physics
 
 

A deeply disturbing and controversial line of thinking has emerged within the physics community.
 
It's the idea that we are reaching the absolute limit of what we can understand about the world around us through science.
 
"The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer," Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — better known as CERN — said during a recent TED talk in Geneva, Switzerland.
 
Equally frightening is the reason for this approaching limit, which Cliff says is because "the laws of physics forbid it."
 
At the core of Cliff's argument are what he calls the two most dangerous numbers in the universe. These numbers are responsible for all the matter, structure, and life that we witness across the cosmos.
 
And if these two numbers were even slightly different, says Cliff, the universe would be an empty, lifeless place.
 Dangerous No. 1: The strength of the Higgs field
The first dangerous number on Cliff's list is a value that represents the strength of what physicists call the Higgs field, an invisible energy field not entirely unlike other magnetic fields that permeates the cosmos.
 
As particles swim through the Higgs field, they gain mass to eventually become the protons, neutrons, and electrons comprising all of the atoms that make up you, me, and everything we see around us.
 
Without it, we wouldn't be here.
 
We know with near certainty that the Higgs field exists because of a groundbreaking discovery in 2012, when CERN physicists detected a new elementary particle called the Higgs boson. According to theory, you can't have a Higgs boson without a Higgs field.
 
But there's something mysterious about the Higgs field that continues to perturb physicists like Cliff.
 
According to Einstein's theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics — the two theories in physics that drive our understanding of the cosmos on incredibly large and extremely small scales — the Higgs field should be performing one of two tasks, says Cliff.
 
Either it should be turned off, meaning it would have a strength value of zero and wouldn't be working to give particles mass, or it should be turned on, and, as the theory goes, this "on value" is "absolutely enormous," Cliff says. But neither of those two scenarios are what physicists observe.
 
"In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on," says Cliff. "It's not zero, but it's ten-thousand-trillion times weaker than it's fully on value — a bit like a light switch that got stuck just before the 'off' position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe."
 
Why the strength of the Higgs field is so ridiculously weak defies understanding. Physicists hope to find an answer to this question by detecting brand-new particles at the newly upgraded particle accelerator at CERN. So far, though, they're still hunting.
 Dangerous No. 2: The strength of dark energy
Cliff's second dangerous number doubles as what physicists have called "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics."
 
This perilous number deals in the depths of deep space and a mind-meltingly complex phenomenon called dark energy.
 
Dark energy, a repulsive force that's responsible for the accelerating expansion of our universe, was first measured in 1998.
 
Still, "we don't know what dark energy is," Cliff admits. "But the best idea is that it's the energy of empty space itself — the energy of the vacuum."
 
If this is true, you should be able to sum up all the energy of empty space to get a value representing the strength of dark energy. And although theoretical physicists have done so, there's one gigantic problem with their answer:
 
"Dark energy should be 10¹²⁰ times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy," Cliff said. "This is a number so mind-boggling huge that it's impossible to get your head around ... this number is bigger than any number in astronomy — it's a thousand-trillion-trillion-trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. That's a pretty bad prediction."
 
On the bright side, we're lucky that dark energy is smaller than theorists predict. If it followed our theoretical models, then the repulsive force of dark energy would be so huge that it would literally rip our universe apart. The fundamental forces that bind atoms together would be powerless against it and nothing could ever form — galaxies, stars, planets, and life as we know it would not exist.
 
On the other hand, it's extremely frustrating that we can't use our current theories of the universe to develop a better measurement of dark energy that agrees with existing observations. Even better than improving our theories would be to find a way that we can understand why the strength of dark energy and the Higgs field is what it is.
 Getting answers could be impossible
Cliff said there is one possible way to get some answers, but we might never have the ability to prove it.
 
If we could somehow confirm that our universe is just one in a vast multiverse of billions of other universes, then "suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine-tuned values of these two dangerous numbers [because] in most of the multiverse dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form," Cliff said.
 
To prove this, physicists need to discover new particles that would uphold radical theories like string theory, which predicts the existence of a multiverse. Right now, there's only one place in the world that could possibly produce these particles, if they exist, and that's the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
 
And physicists only have two to three years before CERN shuts the LHC down for upgrades. If we haven't found anything by then, Cliff said, it could signal the beginning of the end.
 
"We may be entering a new era in physics. An era where there are weird features in the universe that we cannot explain. An era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly beyond our reach. An era where we will never be able to answer the question why is there something rather than nothing."
 

[Josephine]

 Ah, znala sam da je već kod ove rečenice:

for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer,

trebalo da posumnjam da je u pitanju arogantna kuknjava naučnika zbog zatvaranja LHC-a i gubitka poslova. Otherwise, ovo je pretenciozna i tabloidna izjava koja stanje stvari na planeti Zemlji, od njenog nastanka (postojanje pitanja na koja nemamo odgovor), svodi na ucenu da se LHC ne zatvori.

Svakako ne podržavam njegovo zatvaranje, naprotiv - izuzetno je bitno da kolajder nastavi da radi i shvatam značaj poruke u tekstu, ali ne volim manipulacije, makar i u ovakve svrhe. Mislila sam da je tekst o nečemu drugom. Potpuno misleading naslov.

[Meho Krljic]

pretenciozna i tabloidna

Izvinjavam se što nisam napomenuo da je u pitanju Business Insider, dakle ne neka ozbiljna naučna publikacija, mislio sam da se već iz naslova vidi da je ovo senzacionalizam. Tekst je grozan, ali ima tih par interesantnih informacija, pa reko da ga zakačim.

[Josephine]

Pa ja samo čekam dan kada će da se otkrije nešto što će da poljulja temelje svega što znamo. Mislila sam da je taj dan došao.

[Meho Krljic]

Einstein's most incredible prediction may be proven right on February 11 — or a wild rumor debunked
 
 

Gravitational waves may have been detected for the first time, but we won't know for sure until February 11, 2016 — when scientists will either confirm or dispel the rumors, sources close to the matter tell Tech Insider.

 
Detection of gravitational waves would be unprecedented. Whoever finds them is also likely to pick up a Nobel prize, since the phenomenon would confirm one of the last pieces of Albert Einstein's famous 1915 theory of general relativity.
 
Confirming they exist would tell us we're still on the right track to understanding how the universe works. Never detecting them would suggest our best explanation for gravity isn't correct.
 
"Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, predicted by Einstein 100 years ago," Szabi Marka, a physicist at Columbia University, told Tech Insider. "They can be created during the birth and collision of black holes, and can reach us from distant galaxies."
 
Black holes are the densest, most gravitationally powerful objects in existence — so a rare yet violent collision of two should trigger a burst of gravitational waves that we might detect here on Earth. Colliding neutron stars and huge exploding stars, called supernovas, are thought to generate detectable gravitational waves, too.
 
However, any sort of signal has eluded the planet's brightest minds and the most advanced experiments for decades.
 
Until now — maybe.
Columbia University in New York City is hosting a "major" event the morning of Thursday February 11, 2016, a source who is close to the matter, but asked not to be named, told Tech Insider.

 
Another source also confirmed the event but downplayed the significance of the event as anything "major."
 
Regardless, several physicists and astronomers with expertise in gravitational wave science are scheduled to attend.
 
The topic? The latest data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a $1 billion experiment that has searched for signs of the phenomenon since 2002.
 
LIGO has two L-shaped detectors that are run and monitored by a collaboration of more than 1,000 researchers from 15 nations, and Marka is one of them.
 
Marka said that he and his colleagues have worked in the field for more than 15 years, and that "these are very exciting and busy times for all of us."
 
He also said that Advanced LIGO, an upgrade that went online in September 2015, finished a period of hunting for gravitational waves on January 12, 2016. (That was one day after we saw the first alluring rumors of detection.)
 
But speaking on the phone with Tech Insider, Marka, along with his Columbia and LIGO physicist colleagues Imre Bartos and Zsuzsanna Marka (related), would neither confirm nor deny any information — either the Columbia event or related rumors. "We are prohibited" from doing so, the researchers said.
 
Thursday's LIGO-related event at Columbia wouldn't seem so unusual if it weren't for rumors of a LIGO-related study that's supposed to be published online the same day (February 11) by Nature — one of the foremost scientific journals in the world.
 
The Nature study rumor comes from a "Woohoo!" email that Cliff Burgess, a physicist at McMaster University and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (both in Canada), sent to his academic colleagues last week.
 
Burgess thinks a student probably leaked a screenshot of the email to Twitter, which Adrian Cho at Science Magazine reported on. (Burgess confirmed to Tech Insider that the email definitely came from him.)
 
Here's what it said:
If Burgess' sources are correct, then LIGO has detected gravitational waves traveling at the speed of light that came from two black holes colliding deep in space, each about 30 times the mass of the sun.
 
"If this is true, then you have 90% odds that it will win the Nobel Prize in Physics this year," Burgess told Science. "It's off-the-scale huge."
 But it's not over until it's over
When we told Burgess about the upcoming Columbia event, he said that was "very interesting" but seemed uncertain if the rumors he sent by email days before were still true.
 
"Whatever it is, it sounds like they are going to describe something," Burgess told Tech Insider. "It seems they've done a lot of checks and it's going to be important."
 
What could "important" mean? Anything from confirmation of gravitational wave detection to the fact that LIGO failed to find anything significant during its latest run — and might offer some corrections to our understanding of the physics of gravity and spacetime.
 
The rumors make it tempting to believe that LIGO made history and detected the gravitational waves of two colliding black holes, but a collaborator who asked not to be named said you can only hope this is true.
 
The reason: Leaders of the LIGO experiment sometimes inject fake gravitational wave data into the system to see if everyone is paying close enough attention.
 
Only after collaborators report the event does anyone reveal the ruse.
 
"You have no idea until then if the signal is astrophysical [from space] or fake," our source told us, noting that, in the past, LIGO collaborators had gone so far as to pop champagne bottles, write a study, and submit it to a journal before they found out the signal was actually just a test.
 
Tech Insider was also warned that a lot of the rumors circulating are patently wrong and "laughable," but our source would not elaborate further.
 How to find a gravitational waveBoth LIGO instruments are L-shaped arrays of lasers and mirrors that should be able to detect gravitational waves.
 
Szabi Marka compared them to a pair of giant ears that can "hear" the spacetime ripples that result from black hole mergers, or some other catastrophic event in space.
 
The closer a collision is to Earth, the "louder" the signal should be.
 
LIGO's hearing is sensitive enough to detect mind-blowingly small disturbances of space, "much smaller than the size of the atoms the detector is built of," he said.
 
PhD Comics says LIGO's level of sensitivity is "like being able to tell that a stick 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters long has shrunk by 5mm."
 
Put another way, detecting a gravitational wave is like noticing the Milky Way — which is about 100,000 light-years wide — has stretched or shrunk by the width of a pencil eraser.
 
It would be no wonder why it has taken researchers so long to find gravitational waves.
 
It would also be no wonder why scientists might try to stay tight-lipped about the discovery yet "suck at keeping secrets just like everyone else," as Jennifer Ouellette wrote at Gizmodo.
 
But at this point, there's only one way to know for sure if the latest rumors are true: Wait until Thursday.
 
LIGO spokesperson Gaby Gonzalez responded to Tech Insider's query but would not confirm our deny any of the rumors.
 
Tech Insider also reached out to Nature and Columbia University for comment but didn't hear back from them in time for publication. We'll update this post if and when we do.
 

[Meho Krljic]

Pošto su na svim televizijama i u novinama javili da je postojanje gravitacionih talasa iz prošlog posta potvrđeno, da vidimo zašto je to važno:
 
 Gravitational Waves: What Their Discovery Means for Science and Humanity
 

 People around the world cheered yesterday morning (Feb. 11) when scientists announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time whose existence was first proposed by Albert Einstein, in 1916.
 
 The waves came from two black holes circling each other, closer and closer, until they finally collided. The recently upgraded Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) captured the signal on Sept. 14, 2015. Not every scientific discovery gets this kind of reception, so what exactly is all the hype about, and what's next for LIGO now that it has spotted these elusive waves?
 
 First of all, detecting two colliding black holes is thrilling by itself — no one knew for sure if black holes actually merged together to create even more-massive black holes, but now there's physical proof. And there's the joy of finally having direct evidence for a phenomenon that was first predicted 100 years ago, using an instrument that was proposed 40 years ago. [Gravitational Waves Detected by LIGO: Complete Coverage]
 
 But what is truly monumental about this detection is that it gives humanity the ability to see the universe in a totally new way, scientists said. The ability to directly detect gravitational waves — which are generated by the acceleration or deceleration of massive objects in space — has been compared to a deaf person suddenly gaining the ability to hear sound. An entirely new realm of information is now available.
 
 "It's like Galileo pointing the telescope for the first time at the sky," LIGO team member Vassiliki (Vicky) Kalogera, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois, told Space.com. "You're opening your eyes — in this case, our ears — to a new set of signals from the universe that our previous technologies did not allow us to receive, study and learn from."
 
 "Up until now, we've been deaf to gravitational waves," LIGO Executive Director David Reitze, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), said during an announcement ceremony in Washington, D.C. "What's going to come now is we're going to hear more things, and no doubt we'll hear things that we expected to hear … but we will also hear things that we never expected."
 
 With this new sensory view of the universe, here are some of the things scientists hope to discover.
 LIGO is particularly sensitive to gravitational waves that come from violent cosmic events, such as two massive objects colliding or a star exploding. The observatory has the potential to locate these objects or events before light-based telescopes can do so, and in some cases, gravitational-wave observations could be the only way to find and study such events.
 
 For example, in yesterday's announcement, scientists reported that LIGO had identified two black holes spinning around each other and merging together in a final, energetic collision. As their name suggests, black holes don't radiate light, which means they are invisible to telescopes that collect and study electromagnetic radiation. Some black holes are visible with light-based telescopes, because material in their immediate vicinity radiates, but scientists haven't seen examples of merging black holes with radiating material around them.
 
 In addition, the black holes spotted by LIGO are 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, respectively. But Reitze said that as LIGO's sensitivity continues to improve, the instrument could be sensitive to black holes that are 100, 200 or even 500 times the mass of the sun that are further away from Earth. "There could be a really nice discovery space that opens up once we get out there," he said.
 
 Scientists already know that studying the sky in different wavelengths of light can reveal new data about the cosmos. For many centuries, astronomers could only work with optical light. But relatively recently, researchers built instruments allowing them to study the universe using X-rays, radio waves, ultraviolet waves and gamma-rays. Each time, scientists got a new view of the universe.
 
 In the same way, gravitational waves have the potential to show scientists totally new features of cosmic objects, LIGO team members said. [Study of Gravitational Waves Could Unravel Many Mysteries (Video)]
 
 "If we're ever lucky enough to have a supernova in our own galaxy, or maybe in a nearby galaxy, we will be able to look at the actual dynamics of what goes on inside the supernova," said LIGO co-founder Rainer Weiss of MIT, who spoke at the announcement ceremony. While light is often blocked by dust and gas, "gravitational waves come right out [of the supernova], boldly unimpeded," Weiss said. "As a consequence, you really find out what's going on inside of these things."
 
 Other exotic objects scientists hope to study with gravitational waves are neutron stars, which are mind-bogglingly dense, burned-out stellar corpses: A teaspoon of neutron-star material would weigh about a billion tons on Earth. Scientists aren't sure what happens to regular matter under such extreme conditions, but gravitational waves could provide extremely helpful clues, because these waves should carry information about the interior of the neutron star all the way to Earth, LIGO scientists said.
 
 LIGO also has a system set up to alert light-based telescopes when the detector seems to have spotted a gravitational wave. Some of the astronomical events that LIGO will study, such as colliding neutron stars, may produce light in all wavelengths, from gamma-rays to radio waves. With LIGO's alert system in place, it's possible that scientists could observe some astronomical events or objects in various wavelengths of light, plus gravitational waves, which would provide a "very complete picture" of those events, Reitze said.
 
 "When that happens, that'll be, I think, the next big thing in this field," he said.
  Relativity
 Gravitational waves were first predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which was published in 1916. That famous theory has stood up to all kinds of physical tests, but there are some aspects that scientists haven't been able to study in the real world, because they require very extreme circumstances. The extreme warping of space-time is one example of this.
 
 "Until now, we have only seen warped space-time when it is very calm — as though we had only seen the surface of the ocean on a very calm day, when it's quite glassy," Kip Thorne of Caltech, another founding member of LIGO and an expert on warped space-time, said at yesterday's ceremony. "We had never seen the ocean roiled in a storm, with crashing waves. All that changed on Sept. 14. The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time." [The History & Structure of the Universe (Infographic)]
 
 "This observation tests that regime beautifully, very strongly," Thorne continued. "And Einstein comes out with beaming success."
 
 But the study of general relativity via gravitational waves is far from over. Questions remain about the nature of the graviton, the particle believed to carry the gravitational force (just like the photon is the particle that carries the electromagnetic force). And scientists have many questions about the inner workings of black holes, which gravitational waves may help illuminate (so to speak). But all of that, the scientists said, will be revealed slowly, over the course of many years, as LIGO and related instruments collect more data on more events.
  A legacy for the futureLooking toward the next three years, Reitze said the collaboration is focused on increasing LIGO's sensitivity to its full potential. This will make the observatory — which consists of two big detectors, one in Louisiana and the other in Washington state — more sensitive to gravitational waves. But scientists don't know how many events LIGO will see, because they don't know how often many of these events occur in the universe.

 
 LIGO detected the binary black hole merger even before the instrument began its first official observation campaign after its recent upgrade, but it's possible that this was a lucky break. To get the gravitational astronomy train rolling, LIGO simply needs more data.
 
 When asked to comment on LIGO's impact on the world beyond the scientific community, and about how gravitational-wave science might influence people's daily lives, Reitze simply said, "Who knows?"
 
 "When Einstein predicted general relativity, who would have predicted that we'd use it every day when we use our cellphones?" he said. (General relativity provides an understanding how gravity influences the passing of time, and this information is necessary for GPS technology, which uses satellites that orbit further away from the gravitational pull of the Earth than people on the surface).
 
 LIGO is "the most sensitive instrument ever built," said Reitze, and the technological advances that have been made while building the observatory may feed into technologies that will be used in ways people can't yet predict.
 
 Thorne said he sees the larger contribution of LIGO slightly differently.
 
 "When we look back on the era of the Renaissance, and we ask ourselves, 'What did the humans of that era give to us that's important to us today?' I think we would all agree it's great art, great architecture, great music," he said.
 
 "Similarly, when our descendants look back on this era, and they ask themselves, 'What great things came to us?' … I believe there will be an understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe and an understanding of what those laws do in the universe, and an exploration of the universe," Thorne added. "LIGO is a big part of that. The rest of astronomy is a big part of that. And I think that cultural gift to our future generations is really much bigger than any kind of technological spin-off, than the ultimate development of technology of any kind. I think we should be proud of what we give to our descendants culturally."
 

[Meho Krljic]

I sad tu kreće špekulisanje:
 
 Hold Up, Did We Just Crack Time Travel?
 
 

strophysicists famously proved Einstein’s theory on the existence of gravitational waves last week. Here’s the less covered part of it all: It might, down the line, bring us closer to moving through time.A now-famous team of astrophysicists shocked the world Thursday after recording the gravitational waves of two black holes slamming into each other 1.3 billion light-years away.This detection supports Einstein’s general theory of relativity in a way that revolutionizes scientific understanding of how space and time behave in extreme environments, and astrophysics will never be the same.That includes mankind’s pursuit of time travel.Kip Thorne of the acclaimed Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) researchers deflected such assertions about his team’s finding at the press release by saying, “I don’t think [our detection of gravitational waves] is going to bring us any closer to being able to do time travel. ”But two things are certain: Humility is essential in the path to a Nobel Prize, and other renowned astrophysicists are giving the LIGO team more credit than they give themselves.David Spergel is a theoretical physicist and chair of Princeton University’s astronomy and astrophysics department and he’s one such admirer. Spergel concedes there is a long way to go before man comprehends the true plausibility of time travel, but he believes general relativity will be essential to that discovery, if the stars align for it.“There are still a lot of ifs there, starting with the existence of negative mass particles and wormholes being stable,” Professor Spergel tells The Daily Beast. “But general relativity’s equations—which gave us black holes, and we see very strong evidence for them with LIGO—are telling us that that would permit time travel.”
 Whether or not they want to claim it, the LIGO researchers just made great strides toward understanding time travel.A Brief Picture Of General RelativityEinstein’s general relativity explains gravity and how things move through space, and leading time-travel theories in the scientific community must account for it.Einstein explains gravity as the product of mass manipulating the fabric of space-time. This fabric is known as “space-time” because the two concepts are inseparably woven together throughout the universe, much in the same way that a mile is roughly six minutes away from a good runner.Like a bowling ball sitting amid a trampoline, black holes are massive objects that warp the fabric of space-time. Anything (say, a golf ball) that approaches a black hole (the bowling ball) gets faster the closer it gets because that is where the fabric of space-time (the trampoline) is most warped.This warping is caused by any and everything with mass, but is especially intense around the greatest objects in the universe: black holes. And that’s where the magic happens.“Time travel might be possible in situations that involve these very strong gravitational fields,” another Princeton astrophysicist, Edwin Turner, tells The Daily Beast. “You would only get time travel in the strong-field gravity.”
 LIGO’s Proof Of Strong-Field Gravity There’s never been anything like LIGO’s direct detection of strong-field gravity, which comes with a statistical significance of 5.1 sigma, meaning there’s only a one in 6 million chance that the finding is an error.
 It’s proof.It’s proof that gravitational waves exist, that black holes exist, and that two of the fat monsters—at 29 and 36 times the mass of our sun—smashed into each other 1.3 billion years ago in a collision so violently it sent out ripples across the universe like a brick thrown into a pool. Most importantly, it’s proof that Einstein’s most radical prediction, which mathematically allows for time travel, was correct in a remarkably precise way.Though this detection is the first of such, well, gravity, general relativity and even gravitational waves have been tested several times since Einstein’s 1915 formulation of general relativity.
 Sir Arthur Eddington launched Einstein to international stardom after his 1919 observations of a solar eclipse supported general relativity over classical Newtonian physics, and there have been myriad similar affirmations since. Most notably, Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse won a Nobel Prize in 1993 for discovering the effects of gravitational waves generated from a binary pulsar’s spin.
 However, what LIGO’s detection “did much better than anything that came before is test general relativity in what’s called the ‘strong-field limit,’ meaning the involvement of things dominated by speed-of-light effects,” Turner says. “These two black holes were approaching the speed of light.”Einstein says time stops for objects traveling at the speed of light and slows for anything nearing that speed.
 Where Strong-Field Gravity Meets Time TravelThe greater the warping of space-time, the closer point A on one side of a black hole gets to point Z on the other side. Theoretically, gravity can be so intense around a supermassive black hole that points A and Z can actually touch, allowing for points B through Y to be bypassed altogether.For time travel to be possible, “Trajectories through space-time have to be bent enough that they can close back on themselves—strong gravitational fields strongly distort the fabric of space and time,” Turner explains. “If the field is strong enough and complicated enough, there can exist paths through that distorted space-time that intersect themselves at different times—meaning you could travel along a path that connects points in the future to points in the past.“What’s that look like? Drop a heavy enough dumbbell in a leg of pantyhose, and you’ll see the hose stretch so much that it contracts near the opening until the sides touch. If you have to spin the dumbbell to make it happen, so be it. Black holes are the most violent vortexes in the universe after all.The ETA Of Time TravelInnovations in astrophysics and our understanding of the universe are chugging along like never before, but don’t hold your breath for George Carlin riding in on a magical phone booth anytime soon.Spergel predicts at least another 50 years of discovery are necessary before the implications LIGO’s findings can lead to any tangible advancement in how humans travel through space, but that’s just the pace at which astronomy evolves. To say it functions on a geological time scale would quite literally be an understatement.Whenever time travel does get proven or disproven, the discovery will have the LIGO researchers’ proof of Einstein’s 100-year-old prediction to thank for its path to logic.“General relativity has some really interesting mathematically allowed features, which includes things like warp space-time that potentially allows very fast space travel—travel even faster than what looks locally like the speed of light,” says Spergel. “Whether it’s possible to take advantage of those solutions is not clear yet, but this observation tells us that we should use general relativity.”

[Meho Krljic]

Black holes responsible for first gravitational wave detection came from ancient, massive suns  
 

 
In February, scientists at the LIGO observatory made history when they announced the first ever detection of gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time came from two black holes that spun around each other several times per second before merging in a violent, energetic explosion. Now, researchers have calculated the likely origins of those black holes. A new study argues that they probably came from two massive suns that formed about 12 billion years ago — or two billion years after the Big Bang.
Researchers came up with this origin story, published today in the journal Nature, by running a complex simulation called the Synthetic Universe; it’s a computer model that simulates how the Universe may have evolved since the start of the Big Bang. "We play God," said lead study author Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University. "We have a model of the entire Universe in our computer. We populate the computer with stars from the beginning, from the Big Bang, and you let them go ahead, evolve, produce black holes, etc."
Belczynski predicts that many more detections are headed our way
The simulation even includes a synthetic LIGO detector to determine the types of objects that the observatory would detect over time. Using this model, Belczynski and his team were able to look back to the start of the Universe and calculate the types of stars that formed the black holes that LIGO detected.
Not only has this tool been useful for tracing the origins of stars, but it has also been great for making predictions. Based on this computer model, Belczynski first estimated back in 2010 that LIGO would mostly be detecting gravitational waves coming from mergers of big black holes. It was a prediction that went against the prevailing idea at the time. "Most of the astronomy community believed that mergers of neutron stars, not black holes, would be detected first and dominate LIGO detections," said Belczynski. But so far, the three possible detections that LIGO has made — two confirmed ones and a potential third — all fit within what Belczynski predicted six years ago.
And thanks to the Synthetic Universe, Belczynski predicts that many more detections are headed our way. His models show that LIGO will pick up to 60 detections when it begins its next observation run this fall. And when the observatory is at its peak sensitivity, it could pick up to 1,000 detections of black hole mergers each year, according to the model.
 
Most of the black hole mergers LIGO detects will be of a certain size too, according to Belczynski’s calculations. Their combined masses will likely be between 20 and 80 times the mass of our Sun. That fits with what LIGO has detected so far. The first gravitational waves ever detected — dubbed GW150914 — came from two black holes that were 36 solar masses and 29 solar masses, respectively; combined, that’s 65 times the mass of the Sun.
"Both stars needed to be very massive, about 40 to 100 times more massive than our Sun."
Those are fairly large black holes. Normally, the black holes found in our galaxy are around five to 10 solar masses, said Belczynski. Since the black holes that created GW150914 were particularly big, they must have come from very massive stars. Black holes often form when a star dies and collapses in on itself. The bigger the star when it dies, the larger the black hole it creates. "Both stars needed to be very massive, about 40 to 100 times more massive than our Sun," Belczynski said about the stars behind GW150914.
Those stars were also probably very low in metals, meaning they didn’t have many elements heavier than helium. Stars that are high in metals produce a lot of solar wind — a constant flow of charged particles from the upper atmosphere of a star. This wind takes mass away from the star over time. "If there was a lot of wind, the wind would take a lot of mass away, and you’ll form a small black hole, not a big one," said Belczynski. Since these black holes were so big when they merged, they likely didn’t have much solar wind wearing them down over time.
That’s why Belczynski’s models indicate that these stars are probably from the early Universe. Right after the Big Bang, metals were fairly scarce; only hydrogen and helium made up the first generation of stars. But those stars created heavier metals inside of them, and whenever they died and exploded, they spread those metals throughout the Universe as gas. That metallic gas helped to create the second generation of stars, which in turn produced more metals themselves and spread them throughout the Universe when the stars died. That cycle has continued for billions of years up until now, so many recent stars have lots of metals and lose a lot of mass when they evolve.
These stars are probably from the early Universe
Of course, there is a small caveat. The Universe currently does have patches of galaxies with low-metal stars. "The universe is not uniform; evolution is not uniform," said Belczynski. So it’s possible that the stars that led to GW150914 could have formed more recently, though that’s less probable. "Our prediction is they formed way back in the past, and they were spiraling around each other and they hit each other just recently," he said.
Moving forward, Belczynski’s models show that LIGO will be detecting more black hole mergers similar to this one. And the more mergers that the observatory detects, the more it validates and refines what the Synthetic Universe model has predicted about star evolution. "We are now moving toward precision astronomical science with gravitational waves," said Christopher Fryer, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was not involved with the study.  "The detections are already telling us about the nature of massive star evolution."

[mac]

Naučnici su možda uočili novu fundamentalnu silu, koja možda može da objasni tamnu materiju

http://www.nature.com/news/has-a-hungarian-physics-lab-found-a-fifth-force-of-nature-1.19957

Nažalost, naslov članka se završava pitanjem, pa ne treba previše nade polagati u sve to.

[Meho Krljic]

Na istu temu:



http://phys.org/news/2016-08-physicists-discovery-nature.html

Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.                                                     "If true, it's revolutionary," said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy. "For decades, we've known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter."
The UCI researchers came upon a mid-2015 study by experimental nuclear physicists at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who were searching for "dark photons," particles that would signify unseen dark matter, which physicists say makes up about 85 percent of the universe's mass. The Hungarians' work uncovered a radioactive decay anomaly that points to the existence of a light particle just 30 times heavier than an electron.
"The experimentalists weren't able to claim that it was a new force," Feng said. "They simply saw an excess of events that indicated a new particle, but it was not clear to them whether it was a matter particle or a force-carrying particle."
The UCI group studied the Hungarian researchers' data as well as all other previous experiments in this area and showed that the evidence strongly disfavors both matter particles and dark photons. They proposed a new theory, however, that synthesizes all existing data and determined that the discovery could indicate a fifth fundamental force. Their initial analysis was published in late April on the public arXiv online server, and a follow-up paper amplifying the conclusions of the first work was released Friday on the same website.
The UCI work demonstrates that instead of being a dark photon, the particle may be a "protophobic X boson." While the normal electric force acts on electrons and protons, this newfound boson interacts only with electrons and neutrons - and at an extremely limited range. Analysis co-author Timothy Tait, professor of physics & astronomy, said, "There's no other boson that we've observed that has this same characteristic. Sometimes we also just call it the 'X boson,' where 'X' means unknown."
Feng noted that further experiments are crucial. "The particle is not very heavy, and laboratories have had the energies required to make it since the '50s and '60s," he said. "But the reason it's been hard to find is that its interactions are very feeble. That said, because the new particle is so light, there are many experimental groups working in small labs around the world that can follow up the initial claims, now that they know where to look."
Like many scientific breakthroughs, this one opens entirely new fields of inquiry.
One direction that intrigues Feng is the possibility that this potential fifth force might be joined to the electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces as "manifestations of one grander, more fundamental force."
Citing physicists' understanding of the standard model, Feng speculated that there may also be a separate dark sector with its own matter and forces. "It's possible that these two sectors talk to each other and interact with one another through somewhat veiled but fundamental interactions," he said. "This dark sector force may manifest itself as this protophobic force we're seeing as a result of the Hungarian experiment. In a broader sense, it fits in with our original research to understand the nature of dark matter."

 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-physicists-discovery-nature.html#jCpRecent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

"If true, it's revolutionary," said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy. "For decades, we've known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter."

The UCI researchers came upon a mid-2015 study by experimental nuclear physicists at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who were searching for "dark photons," particles that would signify unseen dark matter, which physicists say makes up about 85 percent of the universe's mass. The Hungarians' work uncovered a radioactive decay anomaly that points to the existence of a light particle just 30 times heavier than an electron.

"The experimentalists weren't able to claim that it was a new force," Feng said. "They simply saw an excess of events that indicated a new particle, but it was not clear to them whether it was a matter particle or a force-carrying particle."

The UCI group studied the Hungarian researchers' data as well as all other previous experiments in this area and showed that the evidence strongly disfavors both matter particles and dark photons. They proposed a new theory, however, that synthesizes all existing data and determined that the discovery could indicate a fifth fundamental force. Their initial analysis was published in late April on the public arXiv online server, and a follow-up paper amplifying the conclusions of the first work was released Friday on the same website.

The UCI work demonstrates that instead of being a dark photon, the particle may be a "protophobic X boson." While the normal electric force acts on electrons and protons, this newfound boson interacts only with electrons and neutrons - and at an extremely limited range. Analysis co-author Timothy Tait, professor of physics & astronomy, said, "There's no other boson that we've observed that has this same characteristic. Sometimes we also just call it the 'X boson,' where 'X' means unknown."

Feng noted that further experiments are crucial. "The particle is not very heavy, and laboratories have had the energies required to make it since the '50s and '60s," he said. "But the reason it's been hard to find is that its interactions are very feeble. That said, because the new particle is so light, there are many experimental groups working in small labs around the world that can follow up the initial claims, now that they know where to look."

Like many scientific breakthroughs, this one opens entirely new fields of inquiry.

One direction that intrigues Feng is the possibility that this potential fifth force might be joined to the electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces as "manifestations of one grander, more fundamental force."

Citing physicists' understanding of the standard model, Feng speculated that there may also be a separate dark sector with its own matter and forces. "It's possible that these two sectors talk to each other and interact with one another through somewhat veiled but fundamental interactions," he said. "This dark sector force may manifest itself as this protophobic force we're seeing as a result of the Hungarian experiment. In a broader sense, it fits in with our original research to understand the nature of dark matter."


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-physicists-discovery-nature.html#jCp

[Meho Krljic]

Scientists Blast Antimatter Atoms With A Laser For The First Time

[Meho Krljic]

New ideas on gravity would vanquish dark matter

[Meho Krljic]

Is Gravity Quantum?

[Truman]

Занимљива тема...сетих се једног гостовања Веље Абрамовића који је причао како је откривено на стотине тих честица и кад је он питао једног физичара која је разлика између њих и шта значи кад открију неку нов овај му рече да од тога нема никакве вајде.

[tomat]

u kom smislu "nema vajde"?

[Truman]

У смислу да између тих честица нема неке велике разлике и да не откривају ништа ново о томе како универзум функционише.

[Meho Krljic]

"Vite, to, taj elektron i pozitron, pa to je skoro isto, ako malo zažmirite kad ih gledate, praktično se ne razlikuju. E, sad, kao, jedan naelektrisan ovako, jedan onako, jaka stvar, jel' se to stavlja u traktor? Ne? Koga briga!!!!!"

Velja Abramović je filozof, ako se ne varam, tako da treba sa malo rezerve uzimati ovakve izjave o fizici čestica 

[Truman]

Па да, филозоф, ал он је питао физичара шта мисли о честицама и овај му одговорио да нема неке разлике.

[Meho Krljic]

Tj., to je njegova interpretacija odgovora koji mu je fizičar dao. A znaš kakvi su filozofi...

[tomat]

ne znam za stotine, ali standardni model trenutno prepoznaje 17, ako se ne varam.

ja sam neuk u kvantnoj fizici, ali valjda ih ne bi klasifikovali da nema neke razlike.

[mac]

Te stotine se grade pomoću tih osnovnih 17.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_baryons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mesons

[Truman]

мек, знаш да ме мрзи да користим мозак. Има л неке разлике међ тих 17?

[mac]

Ima.

[Truman]

Немогуће да Веља није у праву.

[mac]

To je već oblast o kojoj ne znam ništa.

[milan]

Velja Abramović je filozof, ako se ne varam, tako da treba sa malo rezerve uzimati ovakve izjave o fizici čestica 

I filmski reditelj. I jedan od najzasluznijih sto je stvorena Generacija Tesla pre dvaes i kusur godina.

[Meho Krljic]

Pa, da, on je meni i najpoznatiji po životnoj misiji da slavi Teslu i njegov legat. U koji spada i taj strip 

[Meho Krljic]

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity Just Survived a Massive Crash in Outer Space