Articles

The ongoing search for the graviton—the proposed fundamental particle carrying gravitational force—is a crucial step in physicists’ long journey toward a theory of everything All the fundamental forces of the universe are known to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, save one: gravity. Finding a way to fit gravity into quantum mechanics would bring scientists […]

String theory permits a “landscape” of possible universes, surrounded by a “swampland” of logically inconsistent universes. In all of the simple, viable stringy universes physicists have studied, the density of dark energy is either diminishing or has a stable negative value, unlike our universe, which appears to have a stable positive value.  June 25, Timm

In recent weeks string theory has been again getting a lot of press attention, because of claims that new progress is being made in the study of the relation of string theory and the real world, via the study of the “swampland”. This is a very old story, and I’ve often written about it here.

Scientists have measured gravity at an extremely short distance, in what they hope will tell us more about extra dimensions. Published in Physical Review D, Japanese researchers used the world’s highest intensity neutron beamline facility at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) to probe gravitational interactions at just 0.1 nanometers. According to Newton’s law of universal

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner,

ABSTRACT The problem of the behavior of positrons and electrons in given external potentials, neglecting their mutual interaction, is analyzed by replacing the theory of holes by a reinterpretation of the solutions of the Dirac equation. It is possible to write down a complete solution of the problem in terms of boundary conditions on the

“Is it possible that our ‘elementary’ particles are actually large scale aggregations of a different set of something much smaller? Then, from a mathematical point of view, there could be an infinite sequence of smaller (and larger) building blocks and universes.”                             

Daniel An, Krzysztof A. Meissner, Roger Penrose (Submitted on 6 Aug 2018) This paper presents powerful observational evidence of anomalous individual points in the very early universe that appear to be sources of vast amounts of energy, revealed as specific signals found in the CMB sky. Though seemingly problematic for cosmic inflation, the existence of such anomalous