What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory

One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time ?.

Dropping ultra-cold quantum gas down an elevator shaft could help prove Einstein wrong

Scientists have shown that it’s possible to keep sufficiently close tabs on quantum mechanical objects in free fall to tell whether two such objects experience gravity the same way. In 1907, Einstein suggested that if you were in a windowless elevator that was plunging towards Earth in free fall, you would feel the same weightlessness as if you were floating in outer space. This notion, known as the equivalence principle, laid the foundation for general relativity. It explains why a pebble and a piano fall at the same speed if dropped from the same roof, despite their different masses. It’s also a necessary first step toward describing the effects of gravity as curvature in spacetime.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/quantum-gravity-in-an-elevator/#ixzz0rBEhUpVj

Stretched molecule puts a new spin on electrons

Physicists in the US have invented a way of measuring the magnetic properties of a single molecule as it is being stretched. The technique provides a

new approach for studying quantum chemistry and how the spin of an electron affects its passage through tiny structures.

The technique could one day even be adapted for use in spintronic devices, which use the spin of the electron to process and store information.

Physicists build quantum amplifier with single artificial atom

By demonstrating how a single artificial atom can be used to amplify electromagnetic waves, physicists from Japan are opening up new possibilities for quantum amplifiers, which can be used in a variety of electronic and optical applications.

Entropy study suggests Pictish symbols likely were part of a written language

How can you tell the difference between random pictures and an ancient, symbol-based language ?

 A new study has shown that concepts in entropy can be used to measure the degree of repetitiveness in Pictish symbols from the Dark Ages, with the results suggesting that the inscriptions appear be much closer to a modern written language than to random symbols 

. The Picts, a group of Celtic tribes that lived in Scotland from around the 4th-9th centuries AD, left behind only a few hundred stones expertly carved with symbols. Although the symbols appear to convey information, it has so far been impossible to prove that this small sample of symbols represents a written language.

Physicsts reveal how to cope with 'frustration'

For most people, frustration is a condition to be avoided. But for scientists studying certain "frustrated" ensembles of interacting components -that is, those which cannot settle into a state that minimizes each interaction-

 it may be the key to understanding a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism.