The more one probes the universe at smaller and smaller scales, the weirder matter and energy seem to behave.

But this strangeness may limit its own extent in quantum mechanics, the theory describing the behavior of matter at an infinitesimal level, according to a new study by an ex-hacker and a physicist.

“We’re interested in this question of why quantum theory is as weird as it is, but not weirder,” said physicist Jonathan Oppenheim of the University of Cambridge. “It was an unnatural question for people to have asked even 20 years ago. The reason we’re able to get these results is that we’re thinking of things in the way a hacker might think of things.”

A lot of eerie things happen in the quantum world. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, it’s impossible to know everything about a quantum particle. The more precisely you know an electron’s position, the less precisely you know its momentum. Stranger still, the electron doesn’t even have properties like position and momentum until an observer measures them. It’s as if the particle exists in a plurality of worlds, and only by making a measurement can we force it to choose one.

In another weirdness, two particles can be bound together such that observing one causes changes in the other, even when they’re physically far apart. This quantum embrace, called entanglement (or more generally, nonlocality), made Einstein nervous. He famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.”

But there’s a limit to how useful nonlocality can be. Two separated people can’t send messages faster than the speed of light.

Read complete article here. {via wired.com}

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}

(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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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.

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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Does mysticism have a place in quantum mechanics today, or is the idea that the mind plays a role in creating reality best left to philosophical meditations? Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin argues the former – not because physicists today should account for consciousness in their research, but because knowing the early history of the philosophical ideas in quantum mechanics is essential for understanding the theory on a fundamental level.

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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Seems like the study of many of these so-called fringe subjects are making their way into the mainstream on a daily basis now. Which is a good thing because I really like reading them. Punk Science by Dr Manjir Samanta-Laughton covers such topics as consciousness physics, the biology of belief, loop quantum gravity, the zero point field and hyperspace.

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

Del Mar, CA, May 30, 2009 –(PR.com)– The idea of “global mind” doesn’t sit right with skeptic, and host of the popular Skeptiod Podcast, Brain Dunning. Dunning’s not just uncomfortable with the idea of an interconnected planet, but with the science used to investigate such claims. He labels it, “fringe science”, and, “pseudoscience”. Not so for global consciousness believer, and Skeptiko host, Alex Tsakiris. Tsakiris believes the science behind global consciousness is solid, and the ten years of accumulated data, impressive.
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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.