Month: October 2012
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Quantum entanglement, locality, and a cute kitten
(Admittedly, the cute kitten was added by my editor.) Albert Einstein described quantum entanglement in 1935, along with colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, and used it as an argument against quantum mechanics. Entanglement is the phenomenon by which two widely separated systems act as a single system, due to interactions in the past; a […]
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Pulsar eats companion star, burps gamma rays
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars—the dense remnants of stars much more massive than the Sun. Some pulsars are in binary systems, and when they feed off their companion star, their rotation rate can increase until they’re spinning hundreds of times per second. Known as millisecond pulsars, these are often also strong emitters of gamma […]
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Halo star haze helps hidden galaxies look huge
(Not fully alliterative, but it’s the best I can do after driving 6 hours today.) The halos of galaxies are best known for harboring dark matter, but they also contain stars. Only a tiny fraction of the total stars in a galaxy are in the halo, so usually they’re hard to spot, but astronomers are […]
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Twisted light on a silicon chip
(In honor of Terry Pratchett, I almost wrote that “Twisted light? Onna chip?”, but that would probably confuse 90% of my readers.) Light is used to carry data, but mostly we don’t use the properties of the photons themselves to convey information. Quantum communication, among other applications, could use the state of the photon to […]
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Radioactive titanium powers a supernova afterglow
(Yes, I’m inundating you all with writing. It’s a busy week, and I still have a few more things forthcoming to share with you.) Supernova 1987a was the death of a massive blue star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. Because of its relative proximity and occurrence […]
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Not quite ready for the Diamond Age
In his science fiction novel The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson describes a world filled with electronic paper, tiny flexible computers, and transparent displays. Graphene—a crystal comprised of a single layer of carbon atoms—is perhaps the most promising material to make that world real (though hopefully without the universal surveillance state and environmental collapse that are […]
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Alpha Centauri harbors an Earth-mass planet
Every exoplanet discovery seems to bring us closer to understanding the variety of planetary systems out there in our galaxy. The latest find is particularly exciting: an Earth-mass planet orbiting around Alpha Centauri B, one of three stars in the closest system to the Solar System. The planet isn’t very Earthlike in most respects, but […]
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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
For Ada Lovelace Day, I compiled a list of many of the best science writers I know: Last year, I celebrated Emmy Noether, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th century. This year (largely because I’m swamped with other work), I’m stealing a great idea from Ed Yong, and celebrating living writers who are my […]
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Quantum communication without entanglement
Information in quantum physics is carried in a system’s quantum state, which is basically a list of all the important properties. An atom’s state, for example, contains the relative orientation of the nucleus and electrons, the energy levels the electrons occupy, and the like. Quantum computing manipulates these states in prescribed ways for calculation purposes, […]
Bowler Hat Science 