Physics Today News Picks

Einstein wrote that religion was a childish superstition

2008-05-15T20:43:27Z

The Guardian: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.

A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.

Auctioned earlier today in London for 170,000 pounds after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".

Stephen Hawking in hunt for Africa's hidden talent

2008-05-15T20:39:21Z

The London Times: Stephen Hawking, who has devoted his career to finding the origins of the universe, is to begin a new search – for Africa’s answer to Einstein.

Despite suffering from motor neurone disease which has left him almost completely paralysed, Hawking, 66, has made the journey to South Africa to launch the project earlier this week.

Some of the world’s leading high-tech entrepreneurs and scientists have backed the £75m plan to create Africa’s first postgraduate centres for advanced maths and physics, after the British government declined to provide funding.

Hawking will be joined by eminent physicists and mathematicians including two Nobel laureates in physics, David Gross and George Smoot, and Michael Griffin, the head of Nasa. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s education minister, will also speak.

“The world of science needs Africa’s brilliant talents and I look forward to meeting prospective young Einsteins from Africa,” said Hawking.

Climate scientists call for major new modeling facility

2008-05-15T20:39:02Z

Nature News: At the end of a four-day summit held last week at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, the scientists made the case for a climate-prediction project on the scale of the Human Genome Project. A key component of this scheme, which would cost something up to, or over, a billion dollars, would be a world climate research facility with computer power far beyond that currently used in the field.

Volunteers asked to help find dead spacecraft on Mars

2008-05-15T15:17:49Z

New Scientist: Scientists have invited the public to trawl high-resolution images for signs of NASA's Mars Polar Lander, which went silent on arrival at Mars in 1999. Finding the wreckage might explain why the mission failed

Use of wind energy could equal nuclear power generation in 20 years

2008-05-15T15:17:09Z

Examiner.com: Two decades from now Americans could get as much electricity from windmills as from nuclear power plants, according to a government report that lays out a possible plan for wind energy growth.

The report, a collaboration between the Energy Department research labs and industry, concludes wind energy could generate 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030, about the same share now produced by nuclear reactors.

Such growth would pose a number of major challenges, but is achievable without the need of major new technological breakthroughs, said the report released Monday.

"The report indicates that we can do this nationally for less than half a cent per kilowatt hour if we have the vision," said Andrew Karsner, the Energy Department's assistant secretary for efficiency and renewable energy.

Dust blown off Mars sample return plans

2008-05-15T15:16:54Z

Space.com: International planning is under way to reinvigorate plans for a Mars sample return mission, with researchers assessing science priorities and strategies to maximize the scientific output from such an undertaking.

Over the last several years, an armada of orbital and surface missions has revealed Mars to be surprisingly more complex than once thought, imbued with a variety of distinct environments — each of value in terms of possible scientific payback given a sample return effort.

Mars scientists, space engineers and program planners met in Albuquerque, New Mexico between April 21-23 to take part in "Ground Truth from Mars: Science Payoff from a Sample Return Mission." Discussions focused on what scientific data can be extracted from the return of Mars samples to Earth. Another major topic was the packaging, care and handling of martian materials that would be needed to ensure that the specimens offer great payoff for their potential to reveal past and present conditions on the red planet.

Gamma ray observatory parts recycled for bomb detection

2008-05-15T15:16:40Z

Nature News: The 9-year mission of NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory ended in 2000 with a plunge into the Pacific Ocean. But its spare parts are living on — as a detector of dirty bombs.

James Ryan, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, has recycled parts from one of the space telescope’s old instruments, realizing that they can work just as well pointing horizontally as they did vertically up into the heavens.

Opinion: Scientists need to toughen up and get involved in politics

2008-05-14T19:44:57Z

Dallas Morning News: The idea that the Bush administration has placed science under attack is so commonplace now that it's almost cliché. It's hard to think of a government agency staffed by scientists that has not seen scandals over the past several years involving the suppression and twisting of information or the intimidation of researchers.

So scientists are resisting, right?

Well, there are a few pro-science organizations that ritually denounce the abuse. Angry statements have been signed by Nobel laureates. And government reforms have been proposed to curtail future misbehavior.

But when it comes to real political action – engaging in strategic communication campaigns on hot-button issues, rating politicians based on their science records, even trying to unseat some of science's greatest enemies – scientists have tended to back away.

If the science community wants to reclaim the ground lost during the Bush administration, it's going to have to accept that the old policy of political disengagement is showing its age.

Stopping quantum decoherence

2008-05-14T19:44:39Z

Nature: In the quest for a quantum computer, no obstacle is more formidable than decoherence — the 'collapse' of an information-encoding quantum wavefunction when it couples to its surroundings. We pressingly need to understand what causes it, how it works and how to get rid of it. Bertaina and colleagues have passed a milestone on that road. They report the first observation of Rabi oscillations, a signature of coherent spin dynamics, in a magnetic molecule of a kind envisaged as the basic physical carrier of a 'qubit' of quantum information in a quantum computer. Perhaps more importantly, they have also succeeded in pinpointing the sources of decoherence in their system, and so taken the first step towards eliminating them.

Three years after the Gathering Storm Report, science and education is still underfunded

2008-05-14T19:44:27Z

Science: Recently US academics and policy analysts met to assess the country's response to a 2005 report by the U.S. National Academies titled Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (RAGS).

A parade of speakers gave the federal government failing grades for not heeding the recommendations in RAGS for bigger research budgets, more undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships, changes in immigration policy, and an improved environment for innovation.

"We have … attract[ed] substantial bipartisan support for the notion of investing in research," notes Robert Berdahl, president of the 60-member Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C., "But we've made no progress in making it a reality. It's a failure of leadership by both the White House and Congress, and it's very disappointing."

Much of that disappointment stems from the last-minute collapse in December of plans to give several science agencies double-digit increases in 2008. So meeting organizers tried to rally support for adding up to $900 million for science as part of a supplemental spending bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush opposes the plan--even though he asked for the entire amount more than a year ago as part of his American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI).

The higher education community seemed especially disappointed that the report's warning of a "gathering storm" hasn't stirred public interest in strengthening U.S. science. Even the popular idea of a national project to achieve clean energy independence, as Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) proposed at the meeting, hasn't resonated with the public, notes C. D. "Dan" Mote, president of the University of Maryland, College Park.

"The country responds to a crisis, preferably one involving national security," says Mote. "But the country doesn't see a crisis. Congress doesn't see a crisis. People complain about $4-a-gallon gasoline, but nobody sees the connection to not developing enough alternative energy technologies. They blame it on not drilling in ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] or on gasoline taxes." Mote says that the cost of the recently passed economic stimulus package--$168 billion in checks of up to $600 to taxpayers--"could pay for RAGS for a decade. As it is, the money doesn't do a damn thing about the underlying problem."

A new way forward for silicon electronics

2008-05-14T19:33:59Z

Nature: Over the past three decades, as the components that make up integrated circuits have been made smaller and smaller, the power of computer chips has grown exponentially, even as their cost has fallen drastically. But sooner rather than later — by around 2020, according to one estimate1 — the scaling-down process will become difficult to maintain. The energy required to represent a bit of information will become larger than the heat that can be carried away from a tiny circuit element; what's more, as devices approach the size of atoms, quantum-physical phenomena will become important, changing even the ground rules of how bits are processed. Writing in Applied Physics Letters4, Nishiguchi et al. detail what might be one way to circumvent, and even exploit, these issues. They describe a circuit that allows them to perform the computing operation of pattern matching by harnessing the stochastic, quantum-mechanical tunnelling of single electrons into a transistor

The Chengdu Earthquake

2008-05-14T14:16:14Z

Physics Today: The magnitude-7.9 earthquake that struck near Chengdu city yesterday has caused thousands to lose their lives and made millions homeless. It is the largest earthquake to hit China since 1976. According to the US Geological Survey the quake occurred as the result of motion on a northeast striking reverse fault or thrust fault on the northwestern margin of the Sichuan Basin. The earthquake's epicenter and focal-mechanism are consistent with it having occurred as the result of movement on the Longmenshan fault or a tectonically related fault. The earthquake reflects tectonic stresses resulting from the convergence of crustal material slowly moving from the high Tibetan Plateau, to the west, against strong crust underlying the Sichuan Basin and southeastern China (see maps below). "Earthquakes in this part of China are infrequent but no unexpected" says Harley Benz, Scientist-in-Charge with the National Earthquake Information Center with the USGS.

The city of Chengdu has a population of 2 million, with another 9 million in the surrounding urban area, is about 90 km southeast of the epicenter. Many western companies such as IBM, Symantec, Microsoft, Intel, Fujitsu, NEC, Motorola, and Nokia have factories and offices in the region due to Chengdu's High-Tech Industrial Development Zone. None of these companies are reporting major damage to their staff or facilities. The sina web site has photos of the damage done in the city and surrounding towns.

View Larger Map

On a continental scale, the seismicity of central and eastern Asia is a result of northward convergence of the India plate against the Eurasia plate with a velocity of about 50 mm/y. The convergence of the two plates is broadly accommodated by the uplift of the Asian highlands and by the motion of crustal material to the east away from the uplifted Tibetan Plateau.

"For this earthquake, because of its size, we should expect to see lots of aftershocks," says Benz. "In the first few hours following the magnitude 7.8, we recorded more than 13 earthquakes, the largest being a magnitude 6. The earthquakes are being located along a northeast trending fault, and they extend over a region about 100 kilometers or 60 miles, which is consistent with the size of this earthquake."

"In terms of the total number of aftershocks, aftershocks form an earthquake, typically this size, will be occurring weeks and months from now, but typically with time, the number of earthquakes will go down, and the size of the earthquakes will go down, but there are chances of having other large, damaging earthquakes as part of this sequence occurring in the new few days and weeks."

Mysterious memristor: Electronics missing link?

2008-05-14T14:14:52Z

NPR: Introductory electronics classes focus on circuit diagrams involving different combinations of resistors, capacitors and inductors. Now, researchers say that they have discovered a fourth fundamental passive circuit element — one that fills in a gap in the basic equations that describe the relationships between voltage, current and magnetic flux.

The possibility of such a circuit element, known as the "memristor," was first described in 1971, but no one was able to find a device with the properties of that missing element. Now, a group of scientists at HP Labs has found that in nanoscale materials, the "memristance" property becomes easier to see.

The finding could lead to lower power, instant-on computers, as well as novel types of circuitry. HP Senior Fellow Stanley Williams, one of the discoverers of the modern memristor, talks about the find and its potential applications.

Testing the copernican principle

2008-05-14T14:14:23Z

Science News: For all the hand wringing among physicists about the nature of dark energy, the invisible stuff that appears to be revving up the rate of cosmic expansion, a nagging possibility remains. Dark energy could be a cosmic mirage — if humans live in a special place in the universe with a peculiar distribution of matter.

But that scenario violates the Copernican principle, say theorists Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College and Albert Stebbins of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Named after the 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who made the then heretical proposal that Earth does not have a favored, central position in the solar system, the principle states that humans are not privileged observers in the universe, but have just as good — or bad — a vantage point as any other observer in the cosmos.

“Although the Copernican principle may be widely accepted by fiat, it is imperative that such a foundational principle be proven,” Caldwell and Stebbins assert in an upcoming Physical Review Letters. The researchers suggest a concrete way to check once and for all whether our neck of the cosmic woods is different from other parts of the universe. Their test relies on observations of the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang that bathes all parts of the universe.

The heaviest element yet?

2008-05-14T14:13:51Z

Nature News: Could super-heavy elements be lurking in plain sight? One group of physicists says that they are, and claims to have seen the heaviest element yet found hiding amongst thorium atoms.

Some theories predict that some super-heavy elements might be unusually stable, thanks to a 'magic' number of protons and neutrons, and so could be lying around in nature. Several groups are now engaged in searches for them. If confirmed, this would be the first report of finding one.

But the team's claims, which are not peer-reviewed, are being heavily criticised by other physicists, who fear that their technique is flawed. "I have grave doubts," says Rolf-Dietmar Herzberg, a nuclear physicist at the University of Liverpool, UK.