Physics is amazing! It essentially explains how the entire universe functions and helps us to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. From the smallest subatomic particles to largest galaxies, everything around us works perfectly through our known laws of physics. But there are many curious ones amongst us who go on to challenge these laws that govern the universe and try to build things that defy physics.
While it is certainly not possible to circumvent the laws of physics, figuring out ways that try to break these laws often helps in learning something new about the universe. The term perpetual motion means a never-ending motion or a motion that will never cease.
Perpetual motion machines have remained the dream of scientists for a long time, and if practically possible will kick out the second law of thermodynamics. The perpetual motion see-saw is a concept in which two golf balls and a designed structure is used to create repeating see-saw motion. The continuous left-right motion of the balls causes a change in the center of mass of the structure, which results in an oscillatory motion without requiring any external influences. This mind-bending machine clearly violates the Work-Energy Principle which states that the work done on a system is equal to the change in energy.
In this case, the Net Work done will be zero, which is practically not possible for a closed system like a perpetual motion machine. There is an obvious use of some external energy input, maybe in the form of magnets placed under the table that are doing the job of providing the oscillatory motion. The idea of an object without a brain, automatically correcting itself to rest on a single position can only make you scratch your head.
The Gomboc often described as the object which should not exist is one such object, the only one of its kind. This unique object clearly makes us question the physics behind it. The Uphill water fountain was created by the famous James Dyson, the same guy known for inventing the vacuum machines. In , he built a structure at the Chelsea Garden Show in England in which water was seen flowing on an upward slope.
It could be an illusion, or we might need to rescue the flow of time by meddling with our concept of space. The universe might go awry if not for the familiar three dimensions, but theories of everything say there should be more. What are we missing? The Casimir effect suggests that the vacuum is fizzling with ephemeral particles.
Is it real? And can we harness this energy concealed in empty space? Glass is a weird kind of solid liquid — and how it comes to be like that defies all explanation. The size of the observable universe is easy enough to measure, but what lies beyond the cosmic horizon? We have a long way to go to find out.
For example, the repulsive force between two electrons can be visualized as an exchange of photons. QED asks us to consider all possible ways that two electrons might exchange a photon, which in practice would mean that physicists have to solve an infinite sum of great complexity.
Since this is a relatively small number, the terms with many exchanges make only a small contribution. We find these weakly coupled theories at the outposts of the landscape. Here the strength of the forces is small and it makes sense to talk about the shopping list of elementary particles and the recipe that computes their interactions.
But if we leave the immediate environment and travel more deeply into the wilderness, the couplings become large and each additional term in the expansion grows more important. Now we can no longer distinguish the individual particles.
Instead they dissolve into an entangled mesh of energy like the ingredients of a cake in a hot oven. However, not everything is lost. Sometimes the path through the dark wilderness ends at another outpost. That is, at a different well-controlled model, this time made out of a completely different set of particles and forces. These complementary descriptions are called dual models, and the relation between them a duality.
We can consider these dualities as a grand generalization of the famous particle-wave duality discovered by Heisenberg. For Alice and Bob, it takes the form of a translation between Chinese and Italian recipes. Why is this all so exciting for physics? First of all, the conclusion that many, if not all, models are part of one huge interconnected space is among the most astonishing results of modern quantum physics. In some sense, by studying one model deeply enough, we can study them all.
We can explore how these models are related, illuminating their common structures. It is important to stress that this phenomenon is largely independent of the question of whether string theory describes the real world or not. A more dramatic conclusion is that all traditional descriptions of fundamental physics have to be thrown out.
Particles, fields, forces, symmetries — they are all just artifacts of a simple existence at the outposts in this vast landscape of impenetrable complexity. And it's unlikely to be the result of error: The team found that there's only a 1 in 40, chance the discrepancy in their measurement was due to random chance. This isn't the first time muons have not behaved in the way science's best theories would predict. In , the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York ran a similar experiment using the same giant electromagnet.
Those results also showed that muons' wobble in the lab deviated from what it should have been. But those findings had a smaller statistical significance than Fermilab's: There was a 1 in 1, chance it could have been a fluke. Now, the Fermilab results confirm what Brookhaven physicists discovered 20 years ago — and that "has made the discrepancy which was already seen with the old result more intriguing," Teubner said. Fermilab is expected to release data from two more similar experiments within the next two years.
A fourth experiment is also already underway, and fifth is in the works. According to Teubner, it's possible that some force that's not in the Standard Model of physics could explain the muons' whack-a-doo wobbles. That force, he said, may also explain the existence of dark matter, and possibly even dark energy — which plays a key role in accelerating the expansion of the universe.
One hypothesis that could apply to both muons and dark matter, he added, is that muons and all other particles have almost identical partner particles that weakly interact with them. This concept is known as supersymmetry. But Fermilab's existing technologies aren't sensitive enough to test that idea. Plus, Teubner added, it's could be the case that the mysterious influence on muons isn't linked to dark matter at all — which would mean the rules of physics are inadequate in more ways than one.
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