Tag

Physics

All articles tagged with #physics

science3 days ago•133 min saved

Tap Myth Tilt: The Real Physics Behind Soda Foam

Tapping a shaken soda can isn’t reliably effective at preventing fizzing. The CO2 in carbonated drinks is supersaturated, and tapping can create pressure waves that briefly dislodge some bubbles, but it also can generate new nucleation sites, with studies showing little to no difference in foam or content loss between tapped and untapped cans. For fewer spills, let the can rest upright, keep it cold, and open slowly to vent gas before full opening.

via Live Science|

#carbonated-drinks #experiments #kitchen-science

science11 days ago•48 min saved

Energy peaks can outpace their carrier wave via interference without breaking relativity

Researchers say a wave’s energy peak can reach a detector before the pulse that carries it through interference between a direct path and a reflected path. This can make the energy seem to travel faster than light, but information remains limited to the direct path’s speed, preserving relativity. The analysis is theoretical, based on acoustic and optical models, with no lab confirmation yet.

via Yahoo|

#energy #faster-than-light #interference

physics13 days ago•5 min saved

Physicists report strongest evidence yet for the gluon-only glueball

A BESIII collaboration study analyzing about ten billion J/psi decays presents strong evidence that the X(2370) meson is predominantly a glueball—a bound state of gluons predicted by quantum chromodynamics. A 2024 spin-parity measurement (0−+) aligned with glueball predictions strengthens the case, though no single smoking-gun proof exists. If confirmed, this would demonstrate gluons interacting with themselves and shed light on the origin of mass in protons.

via Nature|

#besiii #glueball #gluons

physics-and-chemistry13 days ago•15 min saved

Ten Thousand Colloids Temporarily Break Newton’s Third Law in an Electric Field

Japanese researchers suspended thousands of colloidal particles in water between microfabricated electrodes and applied an alternating electric field, which caused mixed-size particles to form self-propelled pairs and chase one another, effectively breaking action–reaction symmetry for about an hour. When all particles were the same size, interactions remained reciprocal and the system crystallized; with mixed sizes, particles clustered and then split repeatedly. The finding could inform programmable materials and microrobotics.

via gizmodo.com|

#colloids #fluid-dynamics #non-equilibrium

physics14 days ago•8 min saved

Memory-Driven Theory Links Consecutive Rare Events

A new analytical framework shows that long-term memory in stochastic systems creates correlations between successive rare events and shifts the waiting-time distribution away from exponential, breaking the Arrhenius-Kramers paradigm. Biswas and Guérin's generalized Langevin approach reveals how power-law memory slows relaxation, producing event clustering and enabling parameter-free predictions of the full first-passage-time distribution from equilibrium measurements. The work has implications for climate risk, earthquakes, finance, and single-molecule experiments, offering a predictive theory of extreme events beyond memoryless models.

via American Physical Society|

#first-passage-time #long-term-memory #non-markovian

technology15 days ago•14 min saved

Modern Trebuchet Breaks the Sound Barrier with Drum-Driven Power

Tom Stanton’s video showcases a modernized trebuchet that uses a drum-wound rope and a release latch to convert the energy of a dropping weight into rapid arm rotation. Through several tests and redesigns, the launcher achieves speeds from about 528 km/h with a 10 kg weight to around 1,249 km/h with a 40 kg counterweight and a 4 g projectile, including an initial ~0.0025 second release window and notes of component stress—demonstrating a high-speed physics demonstration rather than battlefield practicality.

via Hackaday|

#engineering #physics #projectile

science16 days ago•9 min saved

From Chronos to Quantum Time: Can We Stop the Clock?

An interview with Guido Tonelli ties humanity’s long obsession with time to a journey from myth (Chronos) to modern science, explaining how relativity rewrites time for fast-moving particles and gravity, how time’s arrow emerges for macroscopic systems but can blur or reverse in microscopic realms, and how the Heisenberg principle lets physicists measure particle lifetimes (including the Higgs boson). Tonelli argues time remains fundamental but not necessarily ultimate, with future theories potentially reimagining or even abandoning it as a basic concept, a vision explored in his book Time: The Dream of Killing Chronos.

via Gizmodo|

#higgs-boson #physics #quantum-mechanics

science20 days ago•10 min saved

Nine Costly Science Endeavors That Pushed Humanity’s Knowledge Frontiers

The article catalogs nine of the costliest science projects ever undertaken—ISS, Apollo, Large Hadron Collider, Human Genome Project, Curiosity rover, Skylab, Manhattan Project, NEPTUNE, and the Very Large Array—outlining their price tags, aims, and outcomes, and noting their lasting impact and ongoing upgrades or decommissioning as science’s big bets continue to drive discovery.

via bgr.com|

#cern #genomics #nasa

science26 days ago•8 min saved

Time Dilation Made Simple: How Speed Alters Time and Space

Time is relative: moving through space changes how much time passes and how distances are measured, so fast travelers experience less elapsed time than those at rest, while light’s speed stays constant for all observers; massive objects can’t reach light speed, but time dilation and length contraction arise from different paths through spacetime, with practical implications from GPS accuracy to understanding simultaneity across moving frames.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#astronomy #physics #relativity

science26 days ago•6 min saved

Half-Turn Physics: Why Buttered Toast Lands Butter-Side Down

The buttered toast phenomenon isn’t superstition but physics: a slice slid off a table begins to rotate and, at typical kitchen heights, has just enough time to complete about half a turn before hitting the floor, landing butter-side down. If you raise the table height to around ten feet, the toast can execute a full rotation and land butter-up. The outcome is tied to the fall time and the observer’s height, with the butter’s weight deemed negligible; historical notes include the 1991 Q.E.D. experiment and Robert Matthews’ Ig Nobel Prize-winning explanation, which links the effect to human-scale limits and physics rather than chance.

via Boing Boing|

#buttered-toast #gravity #ig-nobel-prize

physics27 days ago•11 min saved

Muon g-2 Mystery Reborn: Lattice QCD Aligns with Experiments, Old Data-Driven Predictions Clash

New lattice QCD calculations explain the muon g-2 excess without invoking new particles, aligning with Fermilab’s precise measurement and challenging the older data-driven predictions that relied on electron-positron collision data; at the same time, fresh VEPP-2000 pion-production results and divergent collider measurements renew tensions across experiments, hinting at either unknown particles or overlooked experimental details and underscoring four decades of conflicting data that physicists still need to resolve.

via Quanta Magazine|

#data-driven-method #g-2 #lattice-qcd

physics28 days ago•8 min saved

Photonic Yang–Mills Electric Field Triggers Zitterbewegung and Bloch Oscillations

A fiber-ring photonic platform realizes a purely non-Abelian Yang–Mills electric field in a synthetic frequency lattice. Polarization control encodes the vector and scalar potentials, producing Zitterbewegung of a light pulse; detuned modulation activates an Abelian field and induces Bloch oscillations. The two fields interfere, demonstrating programmable non-Abelian dynamics in a tabletop setup with potential on-chip signal processing and quantum photonics applications.

via American Physical Society|

#bloch-oscillations #non-abelian-electric-field #photonic-synthetic-dimensions

physics29 days ago•7 min saved

Competing Material Memories: Directional and Amplitude Cues in Suspensions

Researchers show that non-Brownian suspensions can simultaneously store directional memory from stirring and amplitude memory from rocking; as rocking intensity increases past a threshold, directional memory is erased and, at higher intensities, a new directional memory is written, illustrating competitive memory dynamics with potential parallels to neuroscience and geophysics.

via Neuroscience News|

#amplitude-memory #directional-memory #memory

science1 month ago•6 min saved

Backwards Sprinkler Mystery Solved: Water Momentum Spins the Device, But Very Slowly

Researchers tested both standard and 'silly' sprinklers to resolve Feynman’s reverse-sprinkler puzzle. They found a reverse sprinkler does rotate in the opposite direction to a forward one, but at roughly 50 times slower. The motion arises from incoming water jets colliding off-center inside the central chamber, transferring angular momentum and producing a torque in line with momentum-flux theory; this held across varied arm shapes. The work strengthens a general framework for predicting fluid-driven rotation in turbines, pumps and energy-harvesting devices.

via The Times of India|

#experiments #fluid-dynamics #momentum-flux

science1 month ago•6 min saved

Lab recreates Penrose-like energy extraction with synthetic rotation

Researchers at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center built a radio‑frequency device whose rapidly timed parameter changes create a traveling, synthetic rotation, allowing waves to extract energy and become amplified in a way that mirrors the Penrose–Zel’dovich process. The experiment uses a ring of tunable resonators and engineered metamaterials to simulate extreme rotational dynamics without any physical spinning, providing a controllable platform for exploring high‑energy physics, optics, and quantum technologies—and suggesting future tech applications.

via ScienceDaily|

#black-holes #metamaterials #physics