Word: einstein
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...stay tuned, heeding the words of Einstein, who wrote to a child anxious about the fate of the world, "As for the question of the end of it I advise: Wait...
...Cosmologists take inflation seriously because it resolves problems that bedeviled older versions of the Big Bang, but inflation also has implications for the study of cosmic destiny. Among them is that the force that drove the inflationary spasm, sometimes tagged with the Greek letter lambda after its designation in Einstein's general-relativity equations, might not have subsided altogether back when the inflationary hiccup ended. Instead, it might still be there, lurking in empty space and urging expansion along, like an usher politely shooing playgoers back into the theater at intermission's end. Some observations of exploding stars in distant...
Denied a fair hearing by other scientists (so they always insist), these outsiders promote their work as best they can--through press releases, lectures and, in one gutsy case, a full-page ad in the journal Physics Today. Maybe someday a latter-day Einstein will overrule the energy laws we know. Until then, perpetual motion will be an impossible dream that's impossible to resist...
Forget it, though. You'll never go that fast. Albert Einstein said so. His special theory of relativity had at its heart an astonishing claim: the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same, for all observers. Shine a flashlight out into space and the light goes at 186,000 m.p.s. Jump into a spaceship and chase the beam at 185,000 m.p.s. and it recedes from you not at 1,000 m.p.s. but at 186,000 m.p.s. If you head in the opposite direction at 185,000 m.p.s., the light beam still moves away at...you guessed...
...colder atoms become, the more they draw warmth from anything in the vicinity--often from one another. In 1995, however, a team led by physicists Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado at Boulder used lasers and evaporation to achieve something known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, a supercold gas in which atoms overlap and begin to move in synchrony. "We get to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero," says Wieman...