We now have two overarching theories to explain just about every physical phenomenon: Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity) and quantum mechanics.
“What are the crucial parameters to avoid clogging?” Weirdly, an obstruction in the flow of traffic can, under certain conditions, actually reduce traffic jams. Kerstin Nordstrom, a physicist at Mount Holyoke College. “People have been asking, under what conditions does the entire system jam up or clog?” says Dr. Yet almost everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of ordinary matter. That suggests that the Big Bang must have created matter and antimatter in equal quantities. But when they do, they create an equal amount of matter. Physicists have created antimatter in the laboratory. The antiparticle corresponding to the negatively charged electron, meanwhile, is the positively charged positron. An antiproton is just like a proton, for example, but with a negative charge. We know that for each particle of ordinary matter, it's possible to have an identical particle with the opposite electrical charge.
While warp drive is pure fiction, antimatter is very real. Enterprise at faster-than-light velocities. On the original Star Trek, antimatter reacts with ordinary matter to power the warp drive that propels the U.S.S. Where did all the antimatter go?Īntimatter may be more famous in fiction than in real life. Related First-of-Its-Kind DNA Video Raises Big Question About Molecule of Heredity 4. (For example, a broken teacup has more entropy than an intact one - and, sure enough, smashed teacups always seem to arise after intact ones, not before.) It states that the entropy of a physical system (roughly, the amount of disorder) rises over time, and physicists think this increase is what gives time its direction. Some physicists suspect that the second law of thermodynamics provides a clue. Time, unlike space, seems to have a preferred direction - physicists call it the “arrow of time.” And we remember the past, but not the future.
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In space, we’re free to move about as we wish. Since Einstein, physicists have thought of space and time as forming a four-dimensional structure known as “spacetime.” But space differs from time in some very fundamental ways. Why does time seem to flow only in one direction? Some physicists hoped that experiments at the LHC would give a hint of these extra dimensions - but so far, no luck. “It could be that gravity is as strong as these other forces but that it gets rapidly diluted by spilling out into these other invisible dimensions,” says Whiteson. If these extra dimensions exist - and if gravity is able to “leak” into them - it could explain why gravity seems so weak to us. One possibility - speculative at this point - is that in addition to the three dimensions of space that we notice every day, there are hidden extra dimensions, perhaps “curled up” in a way that makes them impossible to detect. The last particle to be found this way was the Higgs boson, which LHC researchers discovered in 2012. The Standard Model has also been used to predict the existence of previously unknown particles. We do have something called the Standard Model of particle physics, which is very good at explaining the interactions between subatomic particles. Would probing deeper uncover particles even more fundamental? We don't know for sure. And we know that protons and neutrons are made up of smaller particles known as quarks. We know matter is made up atoms, and atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. (If you’re wondering why head-scratchers like dark matter and dark energy aren’t on the list, it’s because they were in our earlier story on the Five Biggest Questions about the Universe.) 1. What follows is a brief tour through seven of the biggest unsolved problems in physics. Daniel Whiteson, a University of California physicist and the co-author of the new book "We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe." “There are basic facts about the universe that we’re ignorant of,” says Dr. And yet physicists today are the first to admit they don’t have all the answers.
But once he was up to speed, Newton would no doubt applaud what modern physics has achieved - from the discovery of the nature of light in the 19th Century to determining the structure of the atom in the 20th Century to last year’s discovery of gravitational waves.