physicists

3Apr

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TECHNOLOGY

2021: ‘What Lies Beyond The Standard Model?’ Physicists Asked

If you ask a physicist like me to explain how the world works, my lazy answer might be: “It follows the Standard Model.” The Standard Model explains the fundamental physics of how the universe works. It has endured over 50 trips around the Sun despite experimental physicists constantly probing for cracks in the model’s foundations. With few exceptions, it has stood up to this scrutiny, passing experimental test after experimental test with flying colors. But this wildly successful model has conceptual gaps that suggest there is a bit more to be learned about how the universe works. I am a neutrino physicist. Neutrinos represent three of the 17 fundamental particles in the Standard Model. They zip through every person on Earth at all times of day. I study the properties of interactions...

Physicists Give Chances Of Faster-Than-Light Space Travel A Boost – Warp Drives

The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system. Faster than light travel is the only way humans could ever get to other stars in a reasonable amount of time. Les Bossinas/NASA/Wikimedia Commons If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than light. But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction. In Issac Asimov’s Foundation series, humanity can travel from...

Physicists hunt for room-temperature superconductors that could revolutionize the world’s energy system

Waste heat is all around you. On a small scale, if your phone or laptop feels warm, that’s because some of the energy powering the device is being transformed into unwanted heat. On a larger scale, electric grids, such as high power lines, lose over 5% of their energy in the process of transmission. In an electric power industry that generated more than US$400 billion in 2018, that’s a tremendous amount of wasted money. Globally, the computer systems of Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others require enormous amounts of energy to power massive cloud servers and data centers. Even more energy, to power water and air cooling systems, is required to offset the heat generated by these computers. Where does this wasted heat come from? Electrons. These elementary particles of an atom move arou...