Futurity.org » Albert Einstein

Superconductivity, Einstein team up

Gail Gallessich-UC Santa Barbara — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:51:22 +0000

UC SANTA BARBARA (US) — Scientists have used Einstein’s theory of relativity to demonstrate it is possible to reproduce the Josephson junction, a main ingredient in superconductivity applications.

Einstein’s theory—which was developed as a theory of gravity and is extremely successful in explaining a wide variety of gravitational phenomena—is now being used to explain several aspects of non-gravitational physics.

Gravity probe gives props to Einstein

Stanford — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:42:27 +0000

STANFORD (US) — One of NASA’s longest-running projects comes to a close, confirming two predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Known as Gravity Probe B, the experiment used four ultra-precise gyroscopes housed in a satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein’s theory about gravity. The first is the geodetic effect, or the warping of space and time around a gravitational body. The second is frame-dragging, which is the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates.

New model gives quantum theory a shove

Judy Holmes-Syracuse — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:14:15 +0000

SYRACUSE U. (US)—Physicists recently developed a new theoretical model to explain how, under certain rare conditions, more than one electron can simultaneously occupy the same quantum state.

Their model, published in Physical Review Letters, may help explain how matter behaves at the edges of black holes and contribute to the ongoing scientific quest for a unified theory of quantum gravity.

Quasar magnifies far-off galaxy

Kathy Svitil-Caltech — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:13:57 +0000

CALTECH (US)—Astronomers have discovered the first known case of a distant galaxy being magnified by a quasar acting as a gravitational lens.

The discovery was made by researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland based in part on observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. The findings are reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Physicists prove Einstein wrong

Tim Green-U. Texas — Mon, 24 May 2010 21:31:38 +0000

U. TEXAS-AUSTIN (US)—A century after Albert Einstein said we would never be able to observe the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles as they randomly shake and shimmy, so called Brownian motion, physicists have done just that.

“This is the first observation of the instantaneous velocity of a Brownian particle,” says Mark Raizen, the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair and professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s a prediction of Einstein’s that has been standing untested for 100 years. He proposed a test to observe the velocity in 1907, but said that the experiment could not be done.”

Einstein validated on cosmic scale

Kitta MacPherson-Princeton — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:08:52 +0000

Above, a partial map of the distribution of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, going out to a distance of 7 billion light years. The amount of galaxy clustering that we observe today is a signature of how gravity acted over cosmic time, and allows as to test whether general relativity holds over these scales. (Credit: M. Blanton/Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

PRINCETON / UC BERKELEY (US)—An analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies demonstrates that the universe—at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth—plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.

By calculating the clustering of these galaxies, which stretch nearly one-third of the way to the edge of the universe, and analyzing their velocities and distortion from intervening material, researchers have shown that Einstein’s theory explains the nearby universe better than alternative theories of gravity.

Race ends in dead heat; Einstein wins

Louis Bergeron-Stanford — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:47:21 +0000

In this illustration, one photon (purple) carries a million times the energy of another (yellow). Some theorists predict travel delays for higher-energy photons, which interact more strongly with the proposed frothy nature of space-time. Yet Fermi data on two photos from a gamma-ray burst fail to show this effect, eliminating some approaches to a new theory of gravity. (Credit: NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet)

STANFORD (US)—Racing across the universe for the last 7.3 billion years, two gamma-ray photons arrived at NASA’s orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope within nine-tenths of a second of one another. The dead-heat finish may stoke the fires of debate among physicists over Einstein’s special theory of relativity because one of the photons possessed a million times more energy than the other.

For Einstein’s theory, that’s no problem. In his vision of the structure of space and time, unified as space-time, all forms of electromagnetic radiation—gamma rays, radio waves, infrared, visible light, and X-rays—are reckoned to travel through the vacuum of space at the same speed, no matter how energetic. But in some of the new theories of gravity, space-time is considered to have a “shifting, frothy structure” when viewed at a scale trillions of times smaller than an electron.

Dark energy model suggests frozen universe

Futurity-Jenny Leonard — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:58:34 +0000

Artist’s concept of a frozen universe

VANDERBILT (US)—Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

The model was developed by Vanderbilt University scientists Sourish Dutta, a research associate, and Robert Scherrer, a professor of physics, working with Stephen Hsu, professor of physics, and graduate student David Reeb at the University of Oregon.