Latest news with #gravity
Sustainability Times
2 days ago
- Science
- Sustainability Times
'Quantum Reality Is Crumbling': Scientists Confirm Gravity and Space-Time Dramatically Alter the Quantum World in Astonishing New Findings
IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Scientists are exploring the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity using advanced quantum networks. are exploring the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity using advanced quantum networks. 🌌 Quantum networks could lead to a globally connected quantum internet, utilizing qubits and entanglement for secure communication. and for secure communication. 🔍 Research aims to determine if gravity can alter quantum mechanics, potentially contributing to a unified theory of quantum gravity. can alter quantum mechanics, potentially contributing to a unified theory of quantum gravity. 🚀 These efforts could revolutionize our understanding of the universe and redefine fundamental physics. In a groundbreaking exploration of physics, scientists are delving into the complex relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity. Their efforts could pave the way for a deeper understanding of the universe's fundamental laws. Utilizing advanced quantum networks, these researchers aim to uncover how the interaction between curved space-time and quantum theory might lead us closer to a unified theory of quantum gravity. As they push the boundaries of modern science, the potential implications for technology and our comprehension of the cosmos are profound. This endeavor could revolutionize both scientific theory and practical applications in ways we have yet to imagine. The Interplay Between Quantum Theory and Gravity The relationship between quantum theory and gravity has long intrigued scientists. Quantum networking is rapidly becoming a pivotal tool in this exploration, with the potential to revolutionize global communications. Unlike traditional methods that rely on electrons and photons, quantum networks utilize qubits and entanglement to transfer information. This transformative approach could lead to a globally connected quantum internet, offering unprecedented levels of security and reach. In a recent publication in PRX Quantum, researchers Igor Pikovski, Jacob Covey, and Johannes Borregaard highlighted the potential of quantum networks to test the interplay between quantum theory and gravity. Their work introduces a new protocol leveraging entangled W-states, showcasing how quantum effects can be observed across network nodes. By utilizing advanced techniques like quantum teleportation and entangled Bell pairs, these scientists are testing how quantum theory operates within the framework of curved space-time. 'They're Turning Pollution Into Candy!': Chinese Scientists Stun the World by Making Food from Captured Carbon Emissions Could Gravity Alter the Effects of Quantum Mechanics? The apparent disparity between Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics presents one of physics' most intriguing challenges. Quantum mechanics focuses on the behavior of matter at atomic and subatomic levels, while classical physics deals with larger objects. This dichotomy raises the question: could gravity influence quantum mechanics in ways we have yet to understand? Current experiments aim to determine if differences in space-time might alter atomic and subatomic behaviors. Igor Pikovski emphasizes that while quantum theory is assumed to be universally applicable, gravity could potentially modify its effects. The research being conducted with quantum networks suggests that these networks could extend beyond future technological applications to become critical tools for exploring fundamental physics in ways previously unattainable with classical computing. 'They Tried to Kick It Down—It Didn't Budge!': China's Two-Legged Robot Dog Defies Terrain, Attacks, and Gravity Quantum Networks: The Path to a Unified Theory Quantum networks are not only technological marvels but also powerful tools for scientific exploration. By facilitating the study of quantum effects within curved space-time, they may help bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity. This could lead to the long-sought unified theory of quantum gravity, offering insights into the fundamental nature of the universe. The researchers' innovative use of entangled states and advanced quantum techniques underscores the significant potential of quantum networks. These networks allow for the observation and analysis of phenomena that classical methods cannot address, positioning them as a cornerstone in the quest for a unified theory. As these networks evolve, they promise to transform both scientific understanding and practical applications, opening new frontiers in physics and technology. 'They're Making Space Drugs Now': Varda Space Unleashes Orbital Lab to Manufacture Medicines Earth's Gravity Could Never Allow The Future of Quantum Exploration The ongoing research into the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity is a testament to human curiosity and ingenuity. By harnessing the power of quantum networks, scientists are opening new avenues for exploration and discovery. As they continue to probe the complexities of space-time and quantum theory, the possibilities for technological advancement and scientific insight are limitless. As we stand on the brink of a new era in physics, the potential for quantum networks to reshape our understanding of the universe is both exciting and profound. Will these efforts ultimately lead to a unified theory that reconciles the principles of quantum mechanics with gravity? The journey is just beginning, and the answers may redefine our perception of reality itself. This article is based on verified sources and supported by editorial technologies. Did you like it? 4.3/5 (29)
South China Morning Post
5 days ago
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Chinese scientists thank Nasa for sharing data critical to deep-sea mining in Indian Ocean
When the United States' twin GRACE satellites spotted an anomaly southeast of India while mapping the oceans, Chinese researchers spotted an opportunity. Advertisement Over a relatively flat seabed thousands of metres deep, Nasa detected a spike in gravity readings and then put that data online, free for all to use. Chinese oceanographers who saw the data decided to find out more. In 2022, they loaded the Shiyan 6 vessel, one of the world's most advanced research ships, with cutting-edge equipment and sailed more than 12,000 nautical miles. 01:32 China confirms discovery of major natural gas field in South China Sea China confirms discovery of major natural gas field in South China Sea The ship's US-made DGS advanced marine gravimeter measured gravity's pull every second, with precision as high as 0.01 milligal, a measure of gravitational acceleration. The trip confirmed what they had suspected: thickened crust beneath the Indian Ocean's Ninety East Ridge. Dense rock in some seemingly flat areas along the ridge – which spans 5,600km and is the longest on Earth – is 5km (3.1 miles) thicker than normal. Advertisement That thickness matters. Where the crust swells, minerals – copper, nickel, cobalt, manganese, rare earths – rise as magma pushes them up from the deep. The Chinese researchers marked the spots, potentially saving them years of searching and millions of dollars.
Sustainability Times
06-07-2025
- Science
- Sustainability Times
'We're Closer Than Ever to Einstein's Dream': Scientists Edge Toward Unlocking Quantum Gravity After Decades of Searching
IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 Finnish researchers have introduced a groundbreaking theory that aims to unify gravity with other fundamental forces. with other fundamental forces. 🧬 This new approach employs a gauge symmetry for gravity, similar to the symmetries used in the Standard Model . for gravity, similar to the symmetries used in the . 🔬 The theory addresses the long-standing incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics . and . 🌌 Researchers invite global scientific collaboration to overcome technical challenges and further develop this promising theory. In the ever-evolving field of theoretical physics, a groundbreaking advancement has emerged that promises to bridge the elusive gap between gravity and the other fundamental forces of nature. This promising breakthrough, achieved by Finnish researchers, could potentially unlock new insights into the origins of the universe. The innovative approach, developed by physicists Mikko Partanen and Jukka Tulkki from Aalto University, offers a novel quantum perspective on gravity. Published in the esteemed journal Reports on Progress in Physics, their theory aligns with gauge theories akin to those of the Standard Model, marking a significant step toward a unified understanding of fundamental interactions. The Role of Gauge Theories in Physics A gauge theory is a theoretical framework in physics that describes how fundamental particles interact with one another. It is based on the invariance of equations under certain transformations, known as gauge transformations. In the Standard Model of particle physics, the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces are all described by gauge theories. Each force is associated with a particular type of symmetry and mediated by particles, such as the photon for electromagnetism. The challenge with incorporating gravity into this framework has been its apparent incompatibility with gauge symmetry. However, the new approach proposed by Partanen and Tulkki introduces a gauge symmetry for gravity, similar to those of other forces. If validated, this could pave the way for unifying all fundamental forces within a single theoretical framework. This would represent a monumental leap in our understanding of the universe, potentially leading to a comprehensive theory of everything. 'Trees Are Poisoning the Air': Shocking New Study Reveals Natural Plant Defenses May Be Making Pollution Worse The Critical Importance of Renormalization in Quantum Physics Renormalization is a mathematical technique used to address the infinities that arise in quantum field theory calculations. It allows physicists to obtain finite and predictive physical results, ensuring the practicality of theoretical models. In the realm of quantum gravity, renormalization presents a particularly formidable challenge. Due to the weakness of gravitational interactions, their quantum effects are notoriously difficult to observe and compute. For any theory of quantum gravity to be deemed viable, it must be demonstrably renormalizable across all levels of calculation. This is a crucial criterion for establishing the physical relevance of the theory. If Partanen and Tulkki's approach meets this requirement, it could provide a consistent framework for exploring extreme phenomena, such as black holes or the universe's nascent moments. Successfully addressing these challenges could revolutionize our understanding of cosmology and high-energy physics, opening novel avenues for scientific exploration. 'Ancient Gene Switch Flipped': Scientists Restore Limb Regeneration in Mice Using Dormant DNA Once Thought Lost Forever Bridging General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics The longstanding incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics has been a persistent obstacle in theoretical physics. General relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein, describes the gravitational force and the curvature of spacetime on large scales, while quantum mechanics governs the behavior of particles on the smallest scales. The Finnish researchers' theory aims to resolve this discord by employing a symmetry akin to that of the Standard Model, rather than the traditional symmetry of general relativity, to describe gravity. This innovative approach could potentially illuminate the enigmatic singularities associated with black holes and the Big Bang. Furthermore, it might offer explanations for the observed imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. By addressing these profound questions, the theory represents a significant stride toward a unified understanding of fundamental forces, potentially transforming our perception of the cosmos and its origins. 'Troops Could Vanish Like Squid': New Bio-Inspired Camo Lets US Soldiers Evade Sight and High-Tech Sensors Instantly Inviting Global Scientific Collaboration In publishing their groundbreaking work, Partanen and Tulkki have extended an invitation to the global scientific community to participate in the development of their theory. They express optimism that their approach will inspire further research, much like quantum mechanics and relativity have done in the past. By fostering collaboration, they hope to overcome current technical obstacles, such as the challenges of renormalization, in the coming years. This theory represents a critical step toward a unified comprehension of fundamental forces. If successful, it could ultimately revolutionize our understanding of the universe and its origins. As the scientific community continues to explore these possibilities, one must wonder: how soon will we witness the dawn of a new era in theoretical physics, where all forces are understood as one? Our author used artificial intelligence to enhance this article. Did you like it? 4.2/5 (22)
New York Times
28-06-2025
- Science
- New York Times
This Is Not the Way We Usually Imagine the World Will End
If our species manages to hang on for a few billion additional years, we might be in for a wild ride — stars passing in the vicinity of the sun could cause planets in our solar system to collide or even be ejected, according to a paper published last month in the journal Icarus. The findings even suggest a scenario in which our world ends not consumed by the sun, but in a carom prompted by the powers of gravity. The Milky Way is home to hundreds of billions of stars. Each one is in motion, zinging in its own orbit around the galactic center. Consider a long enough span of time — something astronomers are wont to do — and it's inevitable that another star will pass closer to the sun than Proxima Centauri, currently our nearest stellar neighbor. In fact, calculations based on orbits of stars cataloged by the Gaia spacecraft suggest that, every million years, 33 stars, give or take a few, do just that. But for another star's gravitational effects to have a sizable impact on our solar system, you need a much closer shave than that, according to Nate Kaib, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. 'Once you get a couple hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, you can really start to destabilize stuff,' he said. Dr. Kaib and Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the Bordeaux Astrophysical Laboratory in France, set about determining the likelihood and effects of such cosmic near misses. The researchers ran thousands of computer simulations, modeling the gravitational effects of passing stars on the solar system's eight planets and Pluto. The team considered stars with masses, velocities and orbits representative of objects in our stellar neighborhood. Each simulation modeled the passage of five billion years. Dr. Kaib said that such a long-term perspective is necessary because it often takes tens of millions of years or even longer for a planet's orbit to be perturbed by a passing star. 'You don't see the effects for a long, long time,' he said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dark Matter ‘Droplets' Could Solve Multiple Cosmic Mysteries
Dark matter is a real pain in the neck. The term dark matter itself refers to a hypothetical substance that seems to solely interact with the rest of the universe via gravity and to serve as the scaffolding for galaxies and other massive cosmic structures. Actual particles of dark matter have never been found, however—despite decades of intensive effort to discover them. Some critics consequently dismiss the concept as a mere fudge factor that physicists use to prop up their incomplete theories of how the universe works. But whether dark matter is a 'real' thing or a helpful figment of theorists' imaginations, there's simply too much evidence to just wish that the problem would go away. Call it what you will, there's obviously something very strange going on in the universe. Stars at the outskirts of galaxies orbit far too quickly. Galaxies buzz around in clusters much too fast. Matter-rich strands of the cosmic web coalesce too swiftly. And there are so many more examples. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] Every attempt to relegate dark matter to the basement of discarded physics ideas, such as modifying the force of gravity to accommodate all the associated observational quirks, has failed—hard. While it's impossible to rule out such approaches—you never know what a clever theorist might cook up tomorrow—a half-century of cultivation has yet to yield any satisfying fruit. Decades of evidence have largely ruled out the obvious candidates for dark matter that have been inspired by high-energy physics. But high-energy physics isn't the only game in town. There are other fields, including condensed matter physics, the branch of physics that examines the properties of large collections of matter, such as how all the atoms in a pane of glass conspire to make it transparent. This field of physics has its own strange corners, such as the weird world of superconductivity. And these corners are strange enough to provide some potentially useful inspiration for understanding the puzzle of dark matter. Our best guess as to the nature of dark matter is that there's some form of matter that does not interact with light—or really much of anything else or even itself. (Admittedly, this is not that great of a guess, but it's the best one we've got.) This matter takes up the bulk of almost every galaxy and larger structure, and it just, well, sits there, existing, making itself known only through its gravitational pulls on visible matter. Every line of cosmological inquiry points to the humbling realization that only a slim fraction of the matter in the universe lights up. After centuries of effort, developing the periodic table, the particle zoo, the Standard Model of particle physics, the forces of nature and all the rest, we now know that we've barely scratched the surface. But science is a journey only for the humble, so we have but one choice in front of us: onward. We have many powerful tools at our disposal in our journeys through the dark corners of the universe. One tool is our suite of observations, measurements taken at scales from the galactic to the cosmic that span the breadth of the observable universe and the depth of deep time. All of these observations inform, and ultimately judge, any candidate theory. We may be in the dark about what dark matter is, but we have a very good sense of what it does. If you have your own idea to explain dark matter, then it must come through the crucible of observations intact. If an idea fails anywhere along the way, we move on and try the next one. The other powerful tool is physics itself, our mathematical exploration of the world. We don't fully understand dark matter, its identity or characteristics or interactions with the rest of the universe. But we know, to varying degrees of confidence, what the rest of the universe is up to. Dark matter is like a missing piece in a puzzle; we don't know what the piece is, but we roughly know the shape it has to take. Whatever dark matter is, it must obey the laws of physics (even if we do not yet know all those laws). For example, when the universe was less than a minute old, dark matter must have somehow disconnected from normal matter (a process called 'freezing out') to get the right present-day amount we infer from observations. This is how we came up with our leading candidate for dark matter, the WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle. We had some hypothetical particles generated in theories of physics that, if they were active and abundant and generally around in the universe, would have naturally done exactly that. But we have yet to directly detect a WIMP, and its theoretical underpinnings have been shown to be on thin ice. So onward we go. There's also the axion, another hypothetical particle sourced from high-energy physics and one that is trillions of times lighter than the WIMP. If the axion exists and has the right properties, it, too, could do all the things that we know we need dark matter to do. But we have yet to directly detect an axion—although, to be fair, we haven't searched for axions nearly as extensively as we have for WIMPs, simply because WIMPs were thought to be a shoo-in for dark matter. So onward we go. In May Guanming Liang and Robert Caldwell, both at Dartmouth College, published a paper in Physical Review Letters in which they offered their own candidate for dark matter. A pessimist might look at this study and roll their eyes: 'Oh, joy, yet another proposal for a candidate particle, probably the umpteenth one this month alone, that is almost certainly wrong—just another random stab in the dark, another strand of spaghetti thrown against the fridge of cosmology.' That response would be fair. This model is probably—no, almost certainly—wrong. But that's because most models are wrong most of the time. If we knew the answer ahead of time, we wouldn't need to be doing science. We can only find the right answer by sifting through all the wrong ones, picking the wheat from the chaff, trying again and again until we find something worthy. But we only know when we try. And admirably, Liang and Caldwell's model not only tries but tries something truly new. Instead of drawing inspiration from high-energy physics, with hypothetical particles derived from this or that exotic interaction, the authors look to condensed matter physics and especially the bizarre nature of superconductivity. In a regular conductor, electrons carry electricity, but they also offer resistance. At low enough temperatures and in the right materials, however, the electrons condense—or, if you will, freeze out—arranging themselves in pairs in a lower-energy configuration. This eliminates electrical resistance and makes the magic of superconductivity happen. By analogy, the Liang and Caldwell model views dark matter as a soup of exotic particles born mere moments after the big bang, in the bizarre era before protons and neutrons arrived. This soup doesn't interact with normal matter but also doesn't necessarily have any mass on its own. As the cosmos expands and cools, the dark matter particles condense out and clump up, forming massive 'droplets' that go on to have their own separate evolution, disconnected from the rest of the visible matter in the universe except through their gravitational influence. The calculations are complex and tentative but promising. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows for a new mechanism to create dark matter in the heady conditions in the first few minutes after the big bang that isn't dependent on the same steps that the usual WIMP procedure follows. And this model doesn't just recapitulate existing dark matter evolution. If the exotic particles have some mass, then only some of them condense out to form dark matter. The rest get locked in place as a background that saturates the universe, potentially playing the role of dark energy, the mysterious force that appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. Crucially, in this model, dark energy can vary with time, which aligns with tentative results coming out of galaxy surveys. Studies like these are only the first step: a plausibility check that gets roughly the right amount of dark matter at roughly the right time. It still remains to be seen if this can account for the absolute mountain of evidence that we have for dark matter: Can it simultaneously explain the broad spectrum of behaviors we attribute to dark matter, from the earliest epochs of the cosmos to the modern star-filled universe? And can it pass the ultimate test of all? Can it predict the existence of a particle—or a condensation droplet of dark matter—that we could someday directly see for ourselves? The search for the true nature of dark matter is frustrating indeed because the hurdles any model has to clear are numerous, to say the least. We won't believe this model, or any other hypothesis, until it can succeed where so many others have failed. So onward we go.
