What is it? Where is it? When is it? (Shareware)

Until his relativistic views emerged as the new physics of the 20th century and beyond, scientists, thinkers and science fiction writers let the human imagination run wild with the most elusive phenomena in the universe – time. But what is it? Where is it? When is it?

The space-time continuum described by Einstein is four dimensional.

The three dimensions of space include width, breadth and depth, which can all be measured. The fourth dimension is time, which we cannot see or touch. Time is experienced.

Read complete article here. {via Science Alert}

Einstein

If time and space are similar and space is fractalled then time fractals are not far away.

Challenging Einstein might be blasphemy, but there are a host of papers and published scientific features asking the same question. Was Einstein wrong? Even if he was wrong, what’s that got to do with markets and economics? We already talked about self similarity of research in ‘The Time Fractal’. Physicists and economists have more in common than what is being published or talked about.

If the ongoing research proves that the thinker (Einstein) was wrong, it would bring old schools down and erect new institutions. Though this is not a very comfortable truth, there is nothing wrong in challenging an idea. Moreover, how much truth do we know anyway? And don’t new ideas come from old ideas? Is this not what research is about, learning from the past and unearthing the future?

Read complete article here. {via Business Standard}

Quantum

In this extract from Quantum, shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, Manjit Kumar delves into one of the greatest controversies in the history of physics

Paul Ehrenfest was in tears. He had made his decision. Soon he would attend the week-long gathering where many of those responsible for the quantum revolution would try to understand the meaning of what they had wrought. There he would have to tell his old friend Albert Einstein that he had chosen to side with Niels Bohr. Ehrenfest, the 34-year-old Austrian professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University in Holland, was convinced that the atomic realm was as strange and ethereal as Bohr argued.

In a note to Einstein as they sat around the conference table, Ehrenfest scribbled: ‘Don’t laugh! There is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum theory, where they will be obliged to listen to lectures on classical physics ten hours every day.’ ‘I laugh only at their naivete,’ Einstein replied. ‘Who knows who would have the [last] laugh in a few years?’ For him it was no laughing matter, for at stake was the very nature of reality and the soul of physics.

Read the complete article here. {via Telegraph}

Okay, here’s a kind of freaky Friday quantum strangeness post. Now try to wrap your skull around this state of matter which isn’t a solid, liquid, or gas. I’m not even going to attempt to explain it. What I will do is give you the Wikipedia link to the Bose-Einstein Condensate, where you can try and get the concept this weekend. But if it was up to me I wouldn’t waste the time, and just let Professor Daniel Kleppner of the MIT Physics department sort it all out for ya.

Some of the physicists who made early contributions to quantum mechanics (left to right, top row first): Neils Bohr, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg [Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild183-R57262

In a recent paper published in the European Journal of Physics, Marin has written a short history, based on a longer analysis, of the mysticism controversy in the early quantum physics community. As Marin emphasizes, the controversy began in Germany in the 1920s among physicists in reaction to the new theory of quantum mechanics, but was much different than debates on similar issues today. At the turn of the last century, science and religion were not divided as they are today, and some scientists of the time were particularly inspired by Eastern mysticism. In his analysis, Marin lays out each player’s role and perspective in the controversy, and argues that studying the original interpretations of quantum mechanics can help scientists better understand the theory, and could also be important for the public in general.

“Becoming aware of this subject would help general audiences realize that there are many other alternatives besides the ones offered by the disjunction between science and religion,” Marin told PhysOrg.com. “Science vs. religion is a very recent forced choice that the founders of quantum mechanics would have never recognized, much less accepted.”

Read complete article here. {via physorg.com}