Una cámara a 100 mil millones de fotogramas por segundo permite “ver” la luz desplazándose

Microsiervos

El vídeo muestra una haz de luz rebotando en un espejo. Está grabada con una cámara que capta, sin necesidad de flash ni luces estroboscópicas, 100.000 millones de fotogramas por segundo. En Motherboard, The Fastest Camera Ever Created Will Be Used to Study Invisibility Cloaks, «puedes ver la luz moviéndose y cómo pasa a través y alrededor de los objetos».

La cámara utiliza tecnología de las cámaras de barrido cuyo sensor se desplaza lateralmente a gran velocidad. En esta variante denominada CUP (Compressed Ultrafast Photography) la lente capta los fotones y los envía a través de un tubo hasta una superficie del tamaño de una moneda recubierta con un millón de microespejos. El proceso descompone los fotones que forman la luz en electrones que son recogidos según llegan a un sensor CCD: World's fastest 2D camera can capture 100 billion frames per second.

Esta tecnología tiene numerosas aplicaciones en ciencia, incluyendo medicina, y tecnología, incluyendo el desarrollo de capas de invisibilidad o de «ocultación óptica, en los que la luz se curva o se deforma en torno a los objetos en lugar de pasar a través de ellos.»

jasontpkoebler 

How This Special Sand from Cuba Created a New Physics Phenomenon

 Complexperiments

Read at kinja >>

'Smoking Gun' Reveals How the Inflationary Big Bang Happened

VideoFromSpace

Read on NBC News >>

Quantum engineers make a major step towards a scalable quantum computer

KurzweilAI

Quantum interference on a chip

Photonic quantum computer: two spontaneous photon-pair source are integrated within a tuneable Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The system is capable of generating and manipulating path-entangled two-photon states (credit: J. W. Silverstone et al./Nature Photonics)

Scientists and engineers from an international collaboration led by Mark Thompson from the University of Bristol have, for the first time, generated and manipulated single photons on a silicon chip — a major step forward in the race to build a quantum computer, achieved by shrinking down key components and integrating them onto a silicon microchip, according to the researchers.

Previous attempts have required external light sources to generate the photons; this new chip integrates components that can generate photons inside the chip.

Potential for scaling

“We were surprised by how well the integrated sources performed together,” admits Joshua Silverstone, lead author of the paper. “They produced high-quality identical photons in a reproducible way, confirming that we could one day manufacture a silicon chip with hundreds of similar sources on it, all working together. This could eventually lead to an optical quantum computer capable of performing enormously complex calculations.”

“Single-photon detectors, sources and circuits have all been developed separately in silicon but putting them all together and integrating them on a chip is a huge challenge,” said Thompson.

“Our device is the most functionally complex photonic quantum circuit to date, and was fabricated by Toshiba using exactly the same manufacturing techniques used to make conventional electronic devices. We can generate and manipulate quantum entanglement all within a single millimeter-sized microchip.”

[+]

The group, which, includes researchers from Toshiba Corporation (Japan), Stanford University (US), University of Glasgow (UK) and TU Delft (The Netherlands), now plans to integrate the remaining necessary components onto a chip, and show that large-scale quantum devices using photons are possible.

“Our group has been making steady progress towards a functioning quantum computer over the last five years,” said Thompson. “We hope to have within the next couple of years, photon-based devices complex enough to rival modern computing hardware for highly-specialized tasks.”

Bristol’s newly established Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Engineering will train a new generation of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs to harness the power of quantum mechanics and lead the quantum technology revolution. This innovative center bridges the gaps between physics, engineering, mathematics and computer science, working closely with chemists and biologists while interacting strongly with industry.

Babbage: What is Google up to?

The Economist

Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

Follow The Money

en.wikipedia.org

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621

Researchers at a US lab have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion.

Harnessing fusion – the process that powers the Sun – could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion.

NIF, based at Livermore in California, uses 192 beams from the world’s most powerful laser to heat and compress a small pellet of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place.

The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.

This is a step short of the lab’s stated goal of “ignition”, where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known “inefficiencies” in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel.

But the latest achievement has been described as the single most meaningful step for fusion in recent years, and demonstrates NIF is well on its way towards the coveted target of ignition and self-sustaining fusion.

For half a century, researchers have strived for controlled nuclear fusion and been disappointed. It was hoped that NIF would provide the breakthrough fusion research needed.

Cuantos atomos tiene un humano de 70 kg

microsiervos

El físico Enrico Fermi, además de su contribución al desarrollo de la primera boma atómica, era conocido por su afición a plantear problemas que en principio parecían irresolubles pero que a fuerza de irlos descomponiendo en otros más simple a menudo era capaz de solucionar con una precisión bastante razonable, por lo que son conocidos como problemas de Fermi.

Un problema de este estilo es el de calcular cuantos átomos hay en un cuerpo humano, y a fuerza de calcular el peso de cada uno de los elementos que lo componen basado en su porcentaje y sabiendo cuantoss caben ese peso es posible estimar que un cuerpo humano está compuesto por 6,7 * 10^27 átomos de hidrógeno, oxígeno, carbono, nitrógeno, calcio, fósforo, cloro y potasio. [Fuente: El tercer precog.]

The trouble with teleportation: It could take quadrillions of years

NBC News.com

Alan Boyle, Science Editor/

theworldisurban.com

Bad news, "Star Trek" fans: Even if you found a way to teleport a human being, sending the required data would take longer than the age of the universe. At least that's what fourth-year physics students from the University of Leicester concluded in the latest of a series of studies on way-out topics.

Teleportation transmission rates get the technical treatment in the Journal of Physics Special Topics, an online publication created by the British university to answer burning questions on the fringes of science, such as: Could Batman really use a cape to fly? What would Han Solo see when he made the jump to hyperspace?

"A lot of the papers published in the journal are on subjects that are amusing, topical or a bit off-the-wall. ... But to be a research physicist — in industry or academia — you need to show some imagination, to think outside the box, and this is certainly something that the module allows our students to practice," University of Leicester physicist Mervyn Roy said in a news release.

The teleportation question is certainly outside the box: Researchers James Nelms, Declan Roberts, Suzanne Thomas and David Starkey started out by calculating how much data it would take to represent a human being. They went with 10 billion bits, the amount of data encoded by DNA base pairs in the human genome.

Then they calculated how much information would have to be fed into the human brain to restore the traveler's pre-teleportation mental state. That inflated the total to a truly astronomical number: 2.6 tredicillion bits, or 2.6 x 10^42 in scientific notation.

The time required to transmit that data depends on how much bandwidth you have. If you're using the 30 GHz microwave band that's standard for satellite communications, it'd take 4.85 quadrillion years (4.85 x 10^15 years). That's about 350,000 times longer than the universe's current estimated age of 13.8 billion years.

You could boost the bandwidth, but then you'd need more power to get an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio. (Glitchy data would definitely be a bad thing if you're transmitting the information to rebuild humans and their brains.) And at a certain point, the power requirements for higher bandwidth hit a theoretical limit.

"Our results indicate the time scales to complete a full teleport of an individual are a little too lengthy at this time," Starkey said. "Current means of travel remain more feasible."

That's basically what a researcher concluded back in 2004, in a $25,000 study that was funded by the U.S. Air Force. The British students worked much cheaper. 

A few additional twists went unconsidered by Starkey and his colleagues. For example, even if you transmitted the full DNA code for a human, you'd still have to turn that into a person who's big enough to fill a Starfleet uniform. That person would actually be a clone of the traveler, reprogrammed to think exactly like the person who was teleported. Going through such a process would take years — but what's a few decades when you're talking about quadrillions of years of transmission time?

You could also argue that quantum physics will someday point the way to breakthroughs that eliminate the need for bit-by-bit transmission and reconstruction. But if we're assuming that "Star Trek" technology has made the jump from fiction to fact, there would be far easier ways to get people back and forth: You could just open up a wormhole and walk through, or step on a spaceship and fire up the warp drive.

What do you think? Should "Star Trek" screenwriters get rid of the transporter room and pull Spock through a wormhole instead? Rev up your imagination to warp speed, and feel free to speculate in a comment below. 

Físicos logran entrelazar dos partículas a través del tiempo

www.sciencedirect.com

La Patilla

Un grupo de físicos israelíes acaba de conseguir entrelazar dos fotones que nunca habían coincidido en el tiempo, esto es, que existieron en momentos diferentes. Primero generaron un fotón y midieron su polarización, un procedimiento que destruye la partícula que se quiere medir. Después generaron un segundo fotón, y a pesar de no haber existido al mismo tiempo que el primero, comprobaron que tenía exactamente la polarización opuesta, lo que demuestra que ambos estaban entrelazados. El hallazgo acaba de publicarse en arXiv.org.  abc.es

A pesar de que el experimento parece más propio de la ciencia ficción que de un laboratorio real, no hay que olvidar que en el mundo de la física cuántica, el de las partículas subatómicas, las reglas no son las mismas que en el mundo que nos rodea. De hecho, las leyes de la física clásica, las que gobiernan la realidad que vemos a diario, dejan de funcionar a pequeñísima escala. Allí, en el reino de lo infinitamente pequeño, nuestra percepción y nuestra lógica, basados en la mecánica clásica, sencillamente, no sirven.

A pesar de ello, y por extraño que parezca, la mecánica cuántica no tiene problema alguno con el comportamiento observado por los físicos israelíes en su experimento. El entrelazamiento cuántico, en efecto, no es una propiedad que pueda explicarse con las leyes físicas a las que estamos acostumbrados. Se trata de un estado en el que dos partículas (por ejemplo, dos fotones) entrelazan sus propiedades de forma tal que cualquier cambio que sufra una de ellas es inmediatamente “sentido” por la otra, que reacciona al instante y sin importar cual sea la distancia que las separa.

Y es que las partículas subatómicas, debido a un principio llamado de “superposición cuántica”, pueden existir en cualquier estado teóricamente posible al mismo tiempo. Un fotón, por ejemplo, es capaz de girar horizontal y verticalmente (polarizaciones diferentes) simultáneamente. Solo cuando se efectúa una medición concreta la partícula observada adopta un estado determinado. Y cuando se trata de partículas entrelazadas, como las del experimento, cuando se mide una de las dos y ésta se “congela” en un estado determinado, podemos estar seguros de que la otra ha asumido, en el mismo instante, el estado opuesto. Si medimos un fotón y observamos que tiene una polarización vertical, su “alter ego” tendrá una polarización horizontal.

Relaciones complejas

La técnica usada por los físicos israelíes para entrelazar dos fotones que nunca habían coincidido en el tiempo es bastante compleja. El experimento empezó produciendo dos fotones (que llamaremos 1 y 2) y entrelazándolos. El fotón 1 fue inmediatamente medido, por lo que quedó destruido, aunque no sin fijar antes el estado del fotón 2. Entonces los físicos generaron otra pareja de fotones entrelazados (3 y 4) y enlazaron a su vez el fotón 3 con el “superviviente” de la primera pareja, el fotón 2. Lo cual, por asociación, también entrelazó el fotón 1 (que ya no existía) con el 4. A pesar de que los fotones 1 y 4 no habían coincidido en el tiempo, el estado del 4 era exactamente el opuesto del 1. Es decir, ambos estaban entrelazados.

El entrelazamiento funciona de forma instantánea sin importar cual sea la distancia entre las dos partículas, ya sea de pocos cm. o que ambas se encuentren en extremos opuestos del Universo. Ahora, este experimento ha demostrado que el entrelazamiento no solo existe en el espacio, sino también en el tiempo o, más propiamente dicho, en el espaciotiempo.

Es pronto para decir cuáles podrían ser las aplicaciones prácticas del descubrimiento, aunque su potencial es enorme en el campo de la computación y de las telecomunicaciones. Por ejemplo, en lugar de esperar que una de las dos partículas entrelazadas llegue a su destino a través de una fibra óptica, esta técnica de “dobles parejas” permitiría al emisor manipular sus fotones, y por lo tanto su comunicación, de forma instantánea.

A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

IBM

Speed of light may not be constant, physicists say

science

www.news.com.au

By Jesse Emspak, LiveScience contributor

The speed of light is constant, or so textbooks say. But some scientists are exploring the possibility that this cosmic speed limit changes, a consequence of the nature of the vacuum of space.

The definition of the speed of light has some broader implications for fields such as cosmology and astronomy, which assume a stable velocity for light over time. For instance, the speed of light comes up when measuring the fine structure constant (alpha), which defines the strength of the electromagnetic force. And a varying light speed would change the strengths of molecular bonds and the density of nuclear matter itself.

A non-constant speed of light could mean that estimates of the size of the universe might be off. (Unfortunately, it won't necessarily mean we can travel faster than light, because the effects of physics theories such as relativity are a consequence of light's velocity). [ 10 Implications of Faster-Than-Light Travel ]

Two papers, published in the European Physics Journal D in March, attempt to derive the speed of light from the quantum properties of space itself. Both propose somewhat different mechanisms, but the idea is that the speed of light might change as one alters assumptions about how elementary particles interact with radiation. Both treat space as something that isn't empty, but a great big soup of virtual particles that wink in and out of existence in tiny fractions of a second.

Cosmic vacuum and light speedThe first, by lead author Marcel Urban of the Université du Paris-Sud, looks at the cosmic vacuum, which is often assumed to be empty space. The laws of quantum physics, which govern subatomic particles and all things very small,  say that the vacuum of space is actually full of fundamental particles like quarks, called "virtual" particles. These matter particles, which are always paired up with their appropriate antiparticle counterpart, pop into existence and almost immediately collide. When matter and antimatter particles touch, they annihilate each other.

Photons of light, as they fly through space, are captured and re-emitted by these virtual particles. Urban and his colleagues propose that the energies of these particles — specifically the amount of charge they carry — affect the speed of light. Since the amount of energy a particle will have at the time a photon hits it will be essentially random, the effect on how fast photons move should vary too.

As such, the amount of time the light takes to cross a given distance should vary as the square root of that distance, though the effect would be very tiny — on the order of 0.05 femtoseconds for every square meter of vacuum. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. (The speed of light has been measured over the last century to high precision, on the order of parts per billion, so it is pretty clear that the effect has to be small.)

To find this tiny fluctuation, the researchers say, one could measure how light disperses at long distances. Some astronomical phenomena, such as gamma-ray bursts, produce pulses of radiation from far enough away that the fluctuations could be detected. The authors also propose using lasers bounced between mirrors placed about 100 yards apart, with a light beam bouncing between them multiple times, to seek those small changes.

Particle species and light speedThe second paper proposes a different mechanism but comes to the same conclusion that light speed changes. In that case, Gerd Leuchs and Luis Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany, say that the number of species of elementary particle that exist in the universe may be what makes the speed of light what it is.

Leuchs and Sanchez-Soto say that there should be, by their calculations, on the order of 100 "species" of particle that have charges. The current law governing particle physics, the Standard Model, identifies nine: the electron, muon, tauon, the six kinds of quark, photons and the W-boson. [ Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature ]

The charges of all these particles are important to their model, because all of them have charges. A quantity called impedance depends on the sum of those charges. The impedance in turn depends on the permittivity of the vacuum, or how much it resists electric fields, as well as its permeability, or how well it supports magnetic fields. Light waves are made up of both an electric and magnetic wave, so changing those quantities (permittivity and permeability) will change the measured speed of light.

"We have calculated the permittivity and permeability of the vacuum as caused by those ephemeral virtual unstable elementary particles," Soto-Sanchez wrote in an email to LiveScience. "It turns out, however, from such a simple model one can discern that those constants contain essentially equal contributions of the different types of electrically charged particle-antiparticle pairs: both, the ones known and those so far unknown to us."

Both papers say that light interacts with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs. In Leuchs' and Sanchez-Soto's model, the impedance of the vacuum (which would speed up or slow down the speed of light) depends on the density of the particles. The impedance relates to the ratio of electric fields to magnetic fields in light; every light wave is made up of both kinds of field, and its measured value, along with the permittivity of space to magnetic fields, governs the speed of light.

Some scientists are a bit skeptical, though. Jay Wacker, a particle physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, said he wasn't confident about the mathematical techniques used, and that it seemed in both cases the scientists weren't applying the mathematical tools in the way that most would. "The proper way to do this is with the Feynman diagrams," Wacker said. "It's a very interesting question [the speed of light]," he added, but the methods used in these papers are probably not sufficient to investigate it.

The other issue is that if there really are a lot of other particles beyond what's in the Standard Model, then this theory needs some serious revision. But so far its predictions have been borne out, notably with the discovery of the Higgs boson. This doesn't mean there aren't any more particles to be found — but if they are out there they're above the energies currently achievable with particle accelerators, and therefore pretty heavy, and it's possible that their effects would have shown up elsewhere.

The quantum internet

kurzweilai

Artist’s impression: the atom’s quantum information is written onto the polarization state of the photon (credit: Harald Ritsch)

A University of Innsbruck research team has directly transferred the quantum information stored in an atom onto a particle of light for the first time.

---

Background

Thanks to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, quantum computers would be able to carry out certain computational tasks much faster than conventional computers. Among the most promising technologies for the construction of a quantum computer are systems of single atoms, confined in ion traps and manipulated with lasers.

In the laboratory, these systems have already been used to test key building blocks of a future quantum computer. “Currently, we can carry out successful quantum computations with atoms,” explain Andreas Stute and Bernardo Casabone, both PhD students at the University of Innsbruck’s Institute for Experimental Physics.

“But we are still missing viable interfaces with which quantum information can be transferred over optical channels from one computer to another.”

What makes the construction of these interfaces especially challenging is that the laws of quantum mechanics don’t allow quantum information to be simply copied. Instead, a future quantum internet — that is, a network of quantum computers linked by optical channels — would have to transfer quantum information onto individual particles of light, known as photons.

These photons would then be transported over an optical-fiber link to a distant computing site.

---

Quantum networkers

A calcium ion is confined in a linear Paul (ion) trap (between two trap tips) and positioned in an optical cavity, and excited by a laser. The atom’s quantum information is captured in the polarization state of the photon, which is reflected by mirrors (L/2 and L/4), transmitted by optical fibers (orange), and detected by photodiodes (APD1, APD2). (Credit: A Stute et al./Nature Photonics)

The  physicists first trap a single calcium ion in an ion trap and position it between two highly reflective mirrors. “We use a laser to write the desired quantum information onto the electronic states of the atom,” explains Stute. “The atom is then excited with a second laser, and as a result, it emits a photon.

At this moment, we write the atom’s quantum information onto the polarization state of the photon, thus mapping it onto the light particle.” The photon is stored between the mirrors until it eventually flies out through one mirror, which is less reflective than the other.

“The two mirrors steer the photon in a specific direction, effectively guiding it into an optical fiber,” says Casabone. The quantum information stored in the photon could thus be conveyed over the optical fiber to a distant quantum computer, where the same technique could be applied in reverse to write it back onto an atom.

Support for this research was provided by the Austrian Science Funds and by the European Union.

References:

• A. Stute et al., Quantum-state transfer from an ion to a photon, Nature Photonics, 2013, DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2012.358

Dr. Boaz Almog: Quantum Levitation

ForaTv/ In October 2011, Boaz Almog and Barak Deutscher from the superconductivity group at Tel-Aviv University led by Prof. Guy Deutscher, demonstrated how a superconductor disc is trapped in a surrounding magnetic field, a phenomenon called "Quantum Levitation" or "Quantum Locking". By using the exceptional large scale superconductors produced by Mishael Azoulay, they are able to demonstrate a quantum effect that, although well known to physicists worldwide, was never seen and demonstrated this way. In addition to developing new superconductor technologies and applications, the superconductivity group in Tel-Aviv University is dedicated to teaching and educating the young and adults about superconductivity, through the unique and counter-intuitive phenomena of 'quantum locking' and 'quantum levitation'.

CERN's Quest to Create a Microscopic Black Hole

ForaTv

Higgs Boson Likely a Boring Boson [and documentary]

Ian O'Neill  

The thing with physicists is that they love discovering something unexpected, strange or exotic. This mindset is what makes physics, and indeed all science disciplines, awesome. But in light of the grand announcement of the probable discovery of the elusive Higgs boson in July, it looks like the particle that was discovered is likely a "standard" Higgs boson. As in, it's a little bit boring.

Of course, "boring" is a relative term. The story of the hunt for the Higgs -- the 'exchange particle' that endows matter with mass -- reads like a Dan Brown novel, culminating in the construction of the biggest, boldest and most complex machine mankind has ever conceived: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There's more twists, turns and subplots than you can shake a lepton at.

But the famous Higgs boson, that until recently has been purely a theoretical particle only appearing in equations, looks like it comes from the Standard Model of physics and not something more exotic.

The Standard Model is a set of equations and particles that underpin our known Universe. It's a recipe book of sorts and works like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle C plus some energy -- we know what will come out of a particle interaction even before the interaction takes place. There's nothing unexpected in this recipe book; so it doesn't work like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle Q and -- what the #$%@?! -- a small elephant playing with a black hole!

The latter scenario would violate our known laws of physics, suggesting something more exotic is going on. In that case, there would be some kind of new physics, something beyond the Standard Model at play -- perhaps an exotic result from the LHC would provide evidence of "supersymmetry." One interpretation of supersymmetry suggests there may be an entire family of Higgs bosons that cannot be explained by the Standard Model. However, supersymmetry has recently been dealt a "hospitalizing" blow. 

Read  More >>

TheNovadex On the 4th July 2012 the Higgs Boson was found with a mass of 125-126 GeV.
Why was it soo important to create a multi billion dollar device to detect it.  

Powerful camera seeks snapshots of dark energy

ReutersVideo

Nov. 09 - The most powerful sky-mapping instrument ever built is about to embark on a far-reaching survey of deepest space to find evidence of the theoretical force called Dark Energy. From a high plateau in Chile, the Dark Energy Camera is being pointed billions of light years into the cosmos in an effort by astronomers to answer questions about Dark Energy's influence over the expansion of our universe. Elly Park reports.

Elusive dark energy is real, study says

The galaxy cluster Abell 1689 is famous for the way it bends light [gravitational lensing]

Dark energy, the mysterious substance thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, almost certainly exists despite some astronomers' doubts, a new study says.

After a two-year study, an international team of researchers concludes that the probability of dark energy being real stands at 99.996 percent. But the scientists still don't know what the stuff is.

"Dark energy is one of the great scientific mysteries of our time, so it isn’t surprising that so many researchers question its existence," co-author Bob Nichol, of the University of Portsmouth in Engalnd, said in a statement. "But with our new work we’re more confident than ever that this exotic component of the universe is real — even if we still have no idea what it consists of."

The roots of dark energy Scientists have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. Most assumed that gravity would slow this expansion gradually, or even cause the universe to begin contracting one day. [8 Baffling Astronomy Mysteries]

But in 1998, two separate teams of researchers discovered that the universe's expansion is actually speeding up. In the wake of this shocking find — which earned three of the discoverers the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 — researchers proposed the existence of dark energy, an enigmatic force pushing the cosmos apart.

Dark energy is thought to make up 73 percent of the universe, though no one can say exactly what it is. (Twenty-three percent of the universe is similarly strange dark matter, scientists say, while the remaining 4 percent is "normal" matter that we can see and feel.)

Still, not all astronomers are convinced that dark energy is real, and many have been trying to confirm its existence for the past decade or so. More >>

Higgs’ big loser: Why Stephen Hawking is such a bad gambler

CERN file

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking visits the Large Hadron Collider's underground tunnel in 2006. He bet against the discovery of the Higgs boson but is now willing to pay up.

 By Alan Boyle

When it comes to betting on cosmic outcomes like the discovery of the Higgs boson, British physicist Stephen Hawking is a three-time loser. But there's a good reason for that.

Hawking's latest loss was to Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan who worked out some of the ways that the Higgs boson could be detected in a particle-smasher like the Large Hadron Collider. About 10 years ago, Kane was discussing some of the issues while he and Hawking were together at a physics conference.

"Stephen interrupted, and said he would like to bet me that there was no Higgs boson," Kane recalled today. It took a while to work out the conditions of the $100 bet, and at one point things looked so dim for the search that Kane sent Hawking a check, according to The Detroit News.

But this week, when researchers at the LHC announced that a subatomic particle matching the Higgs boson's general description had been discovered, it was Hawking's turn to concede the bet. "It seems I have just lost $100," he told the BBC's Pallab Ghosh.

Waiting for the check
Kane told me he's heard from several third parties that Hawking is acknowledging his loss, but said Hawking himself "hasn't sent me anything yet." He figures that Hawking will eventually make good on the gambling debt.

"The important thing is the discovery of the Higgs," Kane said. "But it's fun to win a bet from Stephen, and I'm guessing he doesn't mind losing a little money."

This isn't the first time Hawking has lost a small-stakes, high-profile bet on a scientific proposition.

Back in 1975, he bet Caltech physicist Kip Thorne that there was no black hole at the center of the X-ray source known as Cygnus X-1. By 1998, he conceded that the black hole was there, and got Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse magazine as a payoff.

In 1997, Thorne and Hawking bet Caltech's John Preskill that information is completely lost when something falls into a black hole. But in 2004, Hawking changed his mind and said that information could conceivably leak out of a black hole. Hawking paid up by sending Preskill the repository of information he requested: a baseball encyclopedia. At last report, Thorne had not yet conceded.

There's another wager still pending: Hawking is betting that primordial gravitational waves will be detected, resulting in the confirmation of inflationary big-bang theory. The Perimeter Institute's Neil Turok, a proponent of the cyclic model of cosmic origins, is betting against him.

"If these gravitational waves are seen, they will instantly disprove our model," Turok told Cambridge professor Alan Macfarlane. The terms of the bet, however, are still under negotiation.

More >>

Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs lives to see his boson

By Robert Evans

GENEVA — Peter Higgs was no good in the lab, but he never doubted that one day his theory of a powerful subatomic particle that bears his name would be proven right in practice. His surprise was that he lived to see that day.

Speaking at Geneva's CERN research center on Wednesday after experimental physicists announced the discovery of a new particle, a boson much as Higgs imagined half a century ago, he confessed to Reuters he felt "rather dazed but very pleased."

As a schoolboy in Bristol in the southwest of England, the now 83-year-old Higgs admitted to being "incompetent" at science in the laboratory. He went on, however, to specialize in the theoretical realm, applying mathematics to exploring the outer reaches of our understanding of the universe that makes us.

One paper he dispatched from Edinburgh University in 1964, as he was formulating a theory of an elusive particle to explain how an ordered universe emerged from Big Bang, was rejected by an academic physics journal edited at CERN.

But he gave no sign of bearing a grudge when he spent the day at the institution watching its experimental experts vindicate him.

"For me personally it is just the confirmation of something I did 48 years ago, and it is very satisfying to be proved right in some way," Higgs said in the interview. "I haven't been dreaming about it for 48 years because I had other things to do with my life. At the beginning, I had no expectation that I would still be alive when it happened."

That experimental proof had been delivered in his own lifetime was, he said, "incredible," and he suggested the moment would have greatly surprised his early science teachers: "I certainly did some lab work as a schoolboy in Bristol. I was incompetent," he said, a boyish grin flitting across his round face.

More >>

Higgs boson: La particula de Dios

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