Ghost Stories:

Top Ten Physics Newsmakers

We review the American Physical Society list of top ten physics news stories of the decade and add our own paranormal twist.

This page was last updated 01/21/2012 04:38:53 AM -0000

(STARpod.org) -- Never, ever underestimate how the power of physics might affect your life.

Older folks, born before the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, are aware of the immense power of physics to impact our world view.

Pandora's mythical box has been opened, and the nuclear Genius refuses to go away.

Is it possible we may experience another transcending moment?

The American Physical Society has published a list of the top ten physics newsmakers of the decade.

Here's what they left out:

The Large Hadron Collider: "With the potential to produce colliding beams of 7 TeV, it’s the most powerful particle accelerator in the world."

Fears that the LHC might produce a black hole and squeeze the Earth out of existence, generate planet destroying strange matter, or rip open the vacuum of spacetime and destroy the universe, have abated. The real shocker coming from the LHC might be the discovery of other dimensions of spacetime: brane worlds, floating next to our universe, less than a millimeter away. The key to solving this question would be evidence that the graviton, the particle of gravity, is not confined to our universe. If the LHC observes a graviton vanish into the bulk of higher dimensional space, the aliens might be closer to your skin than you can imagine!

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The Decade of Carbon: "Carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal lattices have shown remarkable electronic and structural properties. Many in the field say that these materials are poised to revolutionize electronics over the next century."

The control of atoms: the emergence of nanotechnology brings manufacturing face to face with the strange and counterintuitive world of the quantum, where a particle of matter can be in a superposition of being in more than one place at a time. We expect more surprises as the strangeness, which presents unique engineering problems, offers vast new opportunities for exotic technologies.

Negative index of refraction materials: "Tremendous advancements have been made over the last several years in creating meta-materials that can make objects seem to disappear."

Invisibility, once thought to be an impossible fantasy, will become a serious and essential military technology. Ghost machines -- spirit-like invisible entities -- will become common place extensions of this technology.

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe: "After a single year of observation, WMAP returned a map of the cosmic background so accurate, scientists were able to make precise measurements of the Hubble constant and the composition of the universe and were able to pin down the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years."

Our knowledge of the physical universe has brought us to the realization that the stuff we understand -- all the stuff we can see and the stuff we are made of -- is only about four percent of the universe. The ghostly invisible universe consists of mysterious dark matter, an invisible source of gravity, and an even more mysterious dark energy, an invisible source of antigravity. Stranger still: dark energy might be the stuff of empty space. The ability to manipulate dark energy, or vacuum energy, might bring about the next major revolution in physics, just as the discovery of quantum mechanics led to the atomic bomb and solid state electronics.

A more profound observation: our universe is flat and appears to extend to infinity. This leads to the idea of what Max Tegmark at MIT calls "Level I Parallel Universes": all possible outcomes are explored at vast distances from the Earth, in an infinite space filled with parallel worlds.

Quantum teleportation: "Taking advantage of the so-called spooky action at a distance inherent in quantum entanglement, physicists have been able to transmit quantum information from one system to another across macroscopic distances."

Beam me up Scotty: what was once a writer's device to move a science fiction story forward in less time has become a laboratory reality.  Don't expect teleportation to begin sending human beings from place to place any time soon -- although some have mused about an experiment to teleport something small, like a virus -- this technology is going to be the future of information processing.

Imagine a ghostly invisible cloud of tiny nano-scale robots -- swarming like insects -- communicating in a network powered by quantum teleportation.

Quark-gluon plasma: " For the first three minutes after the Big Bang, a strange form of matter known as quark-gluon plasma permeated all of space."

The quark gluon plasma shines light on the unsolved mysteries of the strong nuclear force that holds together the center of the atom. Reports continue to suggest that so-called cold fusion and related anomalous energy effects might be real: if this is the case, it is possible that new nuclear models might lead to a major advance in energy production.

Gravity Probe B: "Launched in April 2004 with much fanfare, Gravity Probe B carried onboard four spherical superconducting gyroscopes to measure the geodetic effect and frame dragging in general relativity."

Bottom line: Einstein was right about space and time. And that means we cannot yet rule out the possibility of time machines, wormholes connecting distant places in the universe, and other exotic effects that fall out of his theory.

"Light stopped": " In a vacuum, light is the fastest thing in the universe, travelling at nearly 300,000 kilometers per second. When it travels through other materials, such as water or glass, it slows down slightly."

This is the future of memory. The ability to encode information into frozen light will lead to breakthrough nano-computing technologies, along with the above mentioned quantum teleportation. Ghostly intelligent invisible smart light walls may wrap around future space travelers on their way to the stars, popping out of worm hole shortcuts into the universe next door.

One possible example: the strange paranormal events reported by Bob Bigelow's NIDS science team during their investigation of Utah's "Skinwalker Ranch."

Direct evidence for dark matter: "Astronomers tracking the movements of two colliding galaxies in the Bullet Cluster announced in August of 2006 that they had the first direct evidence of dark matter."

We already know there is something strange and unexplained out there. The question remains: what is invisible dark matter actually made of? A breakthrough discovery could redirect the efforts of the international physics community.

Advances in computing: "High speed supercomputers are changing the way that modern physics is done."

The next major advance in computing will likely involve the above mentioned quantum teleportation and slow light memory: According to quantum computing theorist David Deutsch, in the future, powerful quantum computers will eventually process more information than exists in our entire visible universe.

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