The Matter Of Everything is a feature documentary that challenges us to see beyond our everyday sense of experience into the unseen universe. From the quantum to the cosmos, The Matter Of Everything journeys deep out of the foundations of nature to reveal what we are, at billionths of the human scale. At that level, physicists at Fermilab, one of the largest particle research facilities in the world, describe a universe that is more unified than ever imagined. {source: RiverchoirFeed}

Milky Way Galaxy. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

(PhysOrg.com) — 95%. That is the percentage of the known Universe that is missing. As in it is not there. Or at least if it is there, we can’t see it. We call this unseen stuff “dark matter”. That has been well known for sometime. What is trickier in answering is why? Why is it that 95% of the universe is made up of this so-named “dark matter?” An even trickier question is where? As in where is this dark matter? It is those two questions that have plagued physicists for decades. Dark matter, by its own definition cannot be seen, hence its name. So how do we “see” it, how do we know “where” to look?
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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.
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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.

Down the Wormhole

More mysterious quantum forces.

Quantum particles entering a wormhole may experience an entirely new class of force

There is a gangrenous rot at the heart of modern physics. The two most successful pillars of modern physics, quantum theory and general relativity, are at loggerheads and something has to give.

There is no clearer demonstration of this than in the study of quantum mechanics in curved spaces. Quantum mechanics works well in the flat Euclidian space in which we appear to live but nobody knows how it fares in the curved space that general relativity predicts. And surprisingly, physicists have spent little time bothering to find out.
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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.
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Punk Science

The paradigm of science has come to a grinding halt. Some are complaining that there are no big discoveries to find. Although technology advances at a rapid pace, these are simply improvements on previous discoveries. There have been no radical changes in the way we see the universe for decades…until now!
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Debate between skeptic and believer highlights differences in how controversial science is understood and accepted

Global Consciousness

Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences. Professor Sonoma State University and Saybrook Graduate School. Author and co-author of over 200 journal articles and technical reports. Author of The Conscious Universe.