Books Five Books Five Books Whose Physics Broke My Head Open From teleportation to time dilation, these 5 books push the boundaries of real-world physics. By Yoon Ha Lee | Published on July 23, 2024 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Weird things about (real) physics drew me to science fiction in the first place. I attempted to duplicate Young’s double slit experiment in elementary school in my bedroom using an index card and a flashlight. I begged my parents to let me mail-order lasers so I could take up holography in high school; my parents wisely said no. My boyfriend-now-husband had concerns about my interest in that hypothetical vacuum bubble instanton experiment where, if there exists a lower-energy-state parallel universe to our own, it would have the side effect of destroying our universe. These days I destroy fictional worlds. My YA novel Moonstorm (Delacorte) is the first in a mecha space opera trilogy and features outré physics, including temporarily breathable aether rather than vacuum, and gravity maintained through ritual. Moonstorm runs off the sci-fantasy metaphor that conformity = LOTS OF GRAVITY, but too much nonconformity = WORLDS FLY APART. I absolutely go to the MOAR GRAVITY = BLACK HOLE place with this book, although fortunately, real-world physics and high school do not work like this! But let me tell you about some books I read as a kid that inspired my space opera and which explore physics ideas in nifty ways. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight When we were young, my friend Gwyn got into McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy and was excited about fire lizards, but Dragonflight was the one I read first. A major plot point involves dragonriders who have mysteriously vanished from the past, leaving the present-day world of Pern in danger when they’re needed to defend the land from an interstellar spore. The heroine, Lessa, figures out that someone—herself—time-traveled via dragon ride to bring them to her present (their future). What’s interesting here is that Einstein’s insight that our three dimensions of space and one of time are woven together in a four-dimensional space-time fabric is relevant to the plot. Lessa lives on a lost colony where advanced science has been lost, but it’s established that dragons can teleport between places, which then implies that they can also travel between times, an epiphany Lessa comes to through clues she laid for herself. Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen The Snow Queen was my first encounter with consequences of relativity as a plot point. Moon is a sibyl of the world of Tiamat, ruled by the eponymous Snow Queen of whom she is unknowingly a clone. Access to Tiamat is limited by a destabilizing nearby star that shuts off access to the interstellar community for 150 years at a time—and Tiamat is valuable to the offworlders because it’s the source of an elixir that halts aging. The Snow Queen created Moon as part of a plan to free Tiamat from offworlder exploitation. Moon inadvertently leaves Tiamat and discovers the truth of the offworlders’ designs during a journey that takes weeks for her but several years for people back on Tiamat, including her estranged lover—an example of relativistic time dilation exploited narratively for plot and interpersonal implications. (Hint: Time dilation does not help Moon’s relationship problems, but in fairness, the lover doesn’t help Moon’s relationship problems.) Incidentally, I enjoy Lewis Carroll Epstein (physicist)’s explanation of time dilation in special relativity as, approximately, “You’re always traveling, but some is in the space directions and some is in the time direction, so if you go faster in the space directions, you slow down in the time direction.” Greg Bear’s Blood Music I read the short story version of this in an anthology back in high school and chased down the novel later. I have run into people espousing extremely bizarre and not even wrong interpretations of quantum physics (think “healing energies and vibrations”), but the late Greg Bear was a physicist! In Blood Music, a scientist creates and makes contact with sentient nanoscale biological organisms (noocytes). At first the noocytes “improve” their human hosts in a neighborly nanovirus way. Then the improvements go to the creepy body horror place. Then the noocytes multiply so wildly that they take over the world. It’s a “mad science, whoops” story, but not without moments of grace and humor: The carefully timed appearance of a can opener made me cry. That isn’t the brain-breaking bit! The brain-breaking bit is where the noocytes have become so numerous, their density so high, that their amassed, intentional control of the observer effect can collapse quantum states to the point of active reality warping. As you might imagine, the question of whether reality-warping nanocritters and humans can coexist, with or without dubcon body modifications, is a major source of tension. John E. Stith’s Redshift Rendezvous My first encounters with Stith’s science fiction were via his satiric sci-fi gumshoe tales “Naught for Hire” and “Naught Again.” Redshift Rendezvous is seasoned with that sardonic wit. It’s also a murder mystery with a spectacular premise: It takes place aboard a starship where, during hyperspace travel, the speed of light is 10 m/s as opposed to 3×108 m/s. Relativistic effects, such as red-shifted light, are now visible at human running speeds; you can even see light travel when you flip a switch. At first, the death of a crew member on this ship is ruled a suicide, but it emerges that there are hijackers with a darker agenda, and the story follows the ship’s first officer attempting to stop them on this unusual battleground. The book rigorously explores the implications of this counterfactual leading up to the solution in a way that I found extremely satisfying. Thematically, the slowness of light means everything that’s seen is notably in the past, and the past remains alive and visible in an eerie way. This idea is also famously explored in Bob Shaw’s story “Light of Other Days,” although the counterfactual mechanism there is different: “slow glass,” a material with a refractive index so high that it takes years for light to pass through it, and which reveals a years-old tragedy captured as though in amber. William Sleator’s The Boy Who Reversed Himself Surprise! You thought I’d name Sleator’s Singularity. I inhaled all the Sleator I could find during middle school. This one features a boy who has figured out how to reverse himself by walking through a fourth spatial dimension; he gives himself away to a girl because the reversed version of him has his hair parted on the other side. They become friends, and all’s fun and games in the fourth dimension until they encounter hostile fourth-dimension aliens and have to outwit the would-be invaders of Earth. There is a delightful detail that reversed ketchup tastes intriguingly weird. I suspect now that there would be possibly fatal biochemical implications involving chirality (left- vs. right-handed version of molecules), but chemistry is not my field. I imagine the antecedent to this book is Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, a mathematical exploration of spatial dimension as well as a satire/critique of Victorian culture and its hierarchies, including the roles of women. But Flatland’s narrator, A. Square, didn’t have to contend with a hostile visitor from a higher dimension! This book and Flatland were the first time I thought about dimension in a mathematical sense. Innocent of linear transformations or orientability, I spent a happy afternoon at the chalkboard in physics class a few years later trying to figure out how the left-right reversal worked. All of these books are fabulous and tremendously educational: Follow in their footsteps, and you, too, can earn a reputation for destroying readers![end-mark] Buy the Book Moonstorm Yoon Ha Lee Buy Book Moonstorm Yoon Ha Lee Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Five Books Whose Physics Broke My Head Open appeared first on Reactor.

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Theoretical dark matter particles could explain how supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the heart of galaxies merge. The idea could also make sense of some unexplained features of dark matter behavior on vastly larger scales.SMBHs are key to understanding many of the most important features of the universe, from the light of astonishingly distant quasars to the way elements are dispersed through the galaxy. However, we still don’t understand some of their most important behaviors, including how they merge. The so-called “final parsec problem” refers to the fact that models of galaxy mergers indicate that mergers of the supermassive black holes at their core should not be very rare. Instead, the models suggest, they should usually draw closer until they are a few light years apart, but only cross that last gap with glacial slowness.Although we see some examples of SMBHs orbiting each other, there are also plenty of cases of merged galaxies with a single SMBH. Moreover, if SMBHs hardly ever merge, it’s hard to explain how some get so staggeringly huge. There is also evidence, albeit not yet conclusive, of a gravitational wave background produced by such mergers affecting the timing of pulsars. Somehow, it seems, many find a way to cross that final parsec (3.26 light-years). A new paper proposes dark matter particles are key. SMBHs don’t repel each other like particles of the same charge, so one way for them to merge is through head-on collisions. This, however, is far too rare to account for the observed distribution. More frequently, they fall into a mutual orbit, just as their smaller counterparts, stellar black holes, sometimes do. In both cases, the distance slowly decays with gravitational waves carrying away some of the energy.However, SMBHs are so enormous that their orbits carry phenomenal amounts of energy. For this to be dispersed quickly requires the transfer to nearby matter, a process known as dynamical friction. Initially, dynamical friction works well, but the matter that receives the transferred energy quickly leaves the area, that being the inevitable consequence of a kinetic energy boost. Once the SMBHs have cleared their vicinity of matter, dynamical friction stops. If gravitational waves become the only method by which energy is dispersed, the pace of approach would slow to a point where mergers should take longer to occur than the current age of the universe.Therefore, physicists have reasoned, there must be some other process dispersing energy, but its nature has remained a mystery. A team led by Dr Gonzalo Alonso-Álvarez of the University of Toronto thinks they have the solution."We show that including the previously overlooked effect of dark matter can help supermassive black holes overcome this final parsec of separation and coalesce," Alonso-Álvarez said in a statement. "Our calculations explain how that can occur, in contrast to what was previously thought."Since we don’t know what dark matter is, we can’t be sure of how its particles will behave, particularly in circumstances as extreme as this. Previous models assumed any dark matter in SMBHs’ vicinity would also be accelerated out, so that by the time the SMBHs were a parsec or so apart there would not be enough left to cause much further orbital decay.However, Alonso-Álvarez and co-authors considered an alternative, that interactions between the dark matter particles prevent their dispersal. "The possibility that dark matter particles interact with each other is an assumption that we made, an extra ingredient that not all dark matter models contain," Alonso-Álvarez said. "Our argument is that only models with that ingredient can solve the final parsec problem."Without finding such particles and watching them interact, the team cannot be certain they are right, but there are more practical tests that would boost confidence. In particular, if they are right the low-frequency end of gravitational waves produced by SMBHs should show a specific signature. "The current data already hint at this behavior, and new data may be able to confirm it in the next few years,” said co-author Professor James Cline of McGill University.Dark matter particles can’t interact if they don’t exist. Most physicists are confident they do, but our failure to find these particles has, in recent years, led a minority who dispute the idea to become more vocal. If SMBH gravitational waves show the pattern the authors expect, it would set any doubts about dark matter’s existence to rest, even if we still couldn’t identify the particles themselves.Such confirmation would also expand the little we do know about dark matter, with wider implications. "Our work is a new way to help us understand the particle nature of dark matter," said Alonso-Álvarez. Such interactions would affect the shape of dark matter halos around galaxies, bringing models more in line with the way galaxies have been seen to group themselves in clusters. "This was unexpected,” Alonso-Álvarez said, "since the physical scales at which the processes occur are three or more orders of magnitude apart. That's exciting."The study is open access in Physical Review Letters.

A clay tablet engraved with what appears to be one of the world's oldest known sales receipts has been discovered by archaeologists in southern Türkiye. Written in cuneiform, the ancient document dates back to the 15th century BCE and records the purchase of large quantities of wooden furniture.Announcing the discovery, Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Ersoy explained that researchers had come across the remarkable relic at Eski Alalah, in the southern province of Hatay. Also known as the Aççana Mound, the ancient site is located in the old city of Alalah, where workers stumbled upon the tablet during restoration works following an earthquake.The oldest known writing system in the world, cuneiform was developed around 5,500 years ago and was used across ancient Mesopotamia for about three millennia. Formed by impressing reed styluses into clay, the text was adopted by cultures such as the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Sumerians, each of which had its own language.According to Ersoy, the newly discovered sales slip appears to be written in Akkadian, which was the lingua franca of the world’s oldest Empire. Existing for a little more than a century, the Akkadian Empire had its capital at an unknown location along the banks of the Euphrates River, and its now-extinct dialect was the most ancient of the Semitic languages – which include Hebrew and Arabic.         IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.Linguists are currently working on deciphering the text, the first few lines of which document the sale and purchase of a large number of chairs, tables, and stools, along with information about the identities of the buyers and sellers. “We believe that this tablet, weighing 28 grams [1 ounce], will provide a new perspective in terms of understanding the economic structure and state system of the Late Bronze Age,” said Ersoy in a statement.Curiously, this is far from the first mundane report to have been found in the Akkadian language. In 2018, researchers came across a similar clay tablet scribbled with a complaint from a disgruntled customer who was apparently unhappy with the quality of copper that he had purchased. And while scholars often struggle to decipher the messages imprinted onto these ancient tablets, the task of interpreting cuneiform may be about to get a whole lot easier thanks to the development of an artificial intelligence system that can translate Akkadian and other related languages with 97 percent accuracy. Reading between the lines, however, is an altogether different matter.

Rare-earth elements have some fantastic magnetic properties. The strongest magnets we know are based on rare-earths. They are found in many devices, including computing components such as hard disks. And still, tweaking the magnetic properties has not been a straightforward road. Scientists now have found a way to tweak them right at the subatomic level.You have probably seen the diagram of an atom where the electrons are like little balls orbiting the central nucleus, like little planets. Well, that is wrong. Electrons have negative charge, so they push each other around, while the positively charged nucleus keeps them close in. The interaction between the forces allows the electrons to be in certain areas more than others, depending on quantum mechanical properties. Electrons are not placed in orbits but rather in these regions that we call orbitals.Orbitals are filled in specific orders, and there are four types of orbitals: s, p, d, and f. The different labels refer to different spatial distributions. Basically, they have different shapes. Small common elements such as oxygen or carbon have just s and p orbitals. Metals have the d orbital, and these rare-earths can have both d and f orbitals. In the case of terbium, the orbitals present are f and s, with numbers in front of each to determine the energy of the specific orbital.Crucial to this work is the outermost 4f orbital that contains eight electrons in the case of the terbium. Scientists shot the atom with an ultrashort laser pulse and discovered that they can turn it into a completely different orbital called 5d. It's a little bit more energetic than the 4f and electrons are spread out in a different way.The change might seem small at a quantum level, but the magnetic properties of this element originate from this very orbital. This change alters terbium properties in a very specific way and using these X-ray pulses it is perfectly controllable. And this is extremely exciting.The standard approach to using these materials in magnetic storage media, for example, uses heat to alter them. HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) data storage devices use lasers for the heating. Rare-earth magnets and an X-ray laser could do that more quickly and more efficiently, without the need for HAMR.The study is published in Science Advances.

Not even 48 hours after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping his bid for a second term in office, Vice President Kamala Harris may have already secured enough delegate votes to become the Democratic Party's nominee for president in the 2024 election.On Monday, the AP published the results of a survey it had conducted, asking Democratic delegates whom they intend to support for their party's nomination. The choice was clear: More than 2,600 delegates said they planned to cast their votes for Harris, well beyond the 1,976 threshold needed to win the nomination.'When I announced my campaign for President, I said I intended to go out and earn this nomination.'Just 54 delegates professed to be undecided. None of the delegates who spoke with the AP named another possible candidate.Despite the lopsided survey results, the outlet still declined to declare Harris the "presumptive" Democratic nominee. For one thing, responses to surveys are not binding, and delegates still have to cast their votes officially — either at the upcoming Democratic National Convention or the "virtual roll call" that the party promised to hold in early August.Plus, another candidate needs just 300 electronic signatures from convention delegates to qualify for the first round of voting. With several high-profile Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), declining to endorse anyone in the race, a dark horse candidate could yet emerge.Such possibilities appear remote at this point, though — so remote, in fact, that Harris has already declared victory. Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, she posted a message on social media, claiming she had "earned the support needed to become [her] party’s nominee."In a statement attached to the post, Harris reiterated the idea that she had "earned" the nomination. "When I announced my campaign for President, I said I intended to go out and earn this nomination," she said.Harris did quickly garner support among her party in the hours after Biden bowed out. This truncated campaign in summer 2024 went much better than her first campaign for president nearly five years ago, when she announced her candidacy to much fanfare only to withdraw before the first Democratic primary votes were cast, citing lack of funds."My campaign for president simply doesn't have the financial resources we need to continue," she said in December 2019.For the moment, Harris may have many campaign problems — including a history of bailing violent suspects out of custody and a seeming inability to connect with voters on a personal level — but money isn't one of them. The Biden campaign formally changed its name to Harris for President, indicating that she will inherit the Biden campaign's $96 million war chest. Another $81 million from donors has likewise poured into her coffers in the last couple of days."Over the next few months, I'll be traveling across the country talking to Americans about everything on the line. I fully intend to unite our party and our nation, and defeat Donald Trump," Harris pledged.Harris will soon need to select a vice presidential candidate, and three swing-state governors appear to be on the short list of contenders: Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona has also been mentioned.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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