Lifeboat Foundation

Physics tells us that a hammer and a feather, dropped in a vacuum, will fall at the same rate – as famously demonstrated by an Apollo 15 astronaut on the Moon. Now, CERN scientists are preparing to put a spooky new spin on that experiment, by dropping antimatter in a vacuum chamber to see if gravity affects it the same way it does matter – or if antimatter falls upwards instead.

100 years ago Einstein first described his general theory of relativity. This theory had a profound effect on physics and our understanding of the universe.

The news we had finally found ripples in space-time reverberated around the world in 2015. Now it seems they might have been an illusion.

LIGO’s detectorsEnrico Sacchetti

THERE was never much doubt that we would observe gravitational waves sooner or later. This rhythmic squeezing and stretching of space and time is a natural consequence of one of science’s most well-established theories, Einstein’s general relativity. So when we built a machine capable of observing the waves, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before a detection.

Continue reading “Exclusive: Grave doubts over LIGO’s discovery of gravitational waves” »

This AI can explain the physical laws of virtual worlds.

Teaching AI how to combine smaller models to understand complex situations has been a major stumbling block for machine learning research.

“The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on February 11, 2016, spawned headlines around the world, snagged the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and officially launched a new era of so-called “multi-messenger” astronomy. But a team of physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, is calling that detection into question…”

“Andrew Jackson and his group have been saying for the past few years that LIGO’s detections are not real,” says LIGO Executive Director David Reitze of Caltech. “Their analysis has been looked at by many people who have all concluded there is absolutely no validity to their claims.” Reitze characterized the New Scientist article as “very biased and sensational.”

“Nothing they’ve done gives us any reason to doubt our results.”

Continue reading “Danish physicists claim to cast doubt on detection of gravitational waves” »

New research into a very weird type of ice known as Ice VII has revealed how it can form at speeds over 1,000 miles per hour (1,610 kilometres per hour), and how it might be able to spread across yet-to-be-explored alien worlds.

This ice type was only discovered occurring naturally in March, trapped inside diamonds deep underground, and this latest study looks in detail at how exactly it takes shape – apparently in a way that’s completely different to how water usually freezes into ice.

Based on a mathematical model devised by researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, there’s a certain pressure threshold across which Ice VII will spread with lightning speed. This process of near-instantaneous transformation is known as homogeneous nucleation.

Continue reading “This Bizarre Form of Ice Grows at Over 1,000 mph, And Now Physicists Know How” »

Physicists detail how “Ice VII” forms for the first time and what this means for life elsewhere in the galaxy.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist extraordinaire who helped discover radio pulsars while a graduate student in 1967 (though only her adviser was recognized when the discovery snagged a Nobel Prize in physics in 1974), is getting long-overdue recognition.

Bell Burnell, now a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford and chancellor of Scotland’s University of Dundee, was awarded the weighty Breakthrough Prize in physics in September for her pulsar discovery and science leadership.

Continue reading “Robbed of Nobel, Female Physicist Blazed Her Own Amazing Trail: Watch Her Speak Tonight” »