Physics

Robert Wald has formulated QFT in curved space time in terms of it's algebra of observables on a manifold.  In doing so he has, perhaps unintentionally, provided framework in which very…

Readers familiar with this blog know that I am a die-hard skeptic on the issue of physics beyond the Standard Model. However, today I am wearing my fluctuation-enthusiast hat, and I will be trying to…

Call it irreversibility, call it time's arrow, call it the second law of thermodynamics. Fact is that everything evolves in such a way that things get more messy. Disorder rises. Entropy increases.…

Detailed balance is a simple and powerful rule to describe the dynamics of two-state systems. If you know the probability of a transition from a state A to the other state B of a physical system (in…

Previously thought to be indivisible, with negative charge for all, the electron is one of the fundamental building blocks of nature. A new experiment, however, has shown that electrons, if crowded…

Besides the usual share of random readers who google something and get directed here by mere chance (to be read: by the sheer amount of valuable information I have posted here), this blog is read by…

Time for a quick compare-and-contrast. Here is what "Physics Today" lists as their top stories and most popular articles for July 2009: Farewell to the bevatron Earliest astrophysical object yet…

Scientists at Penn State University, in collaboration with institutes in the US, Finland, Germany and the UK, have figured out the long-sought structure of a layer of C60 – carbon buckyballs – on a…

One year ago, a paper by a distinguished group of theorists announced first evidence of new physics from measurements of the properties of B_s mesons performed at the Tevatron by the CDF and DZERO…

An article in the latest (August 2009) edition of Scientific American describes an astronaut floating motionless with respect to his distant spaceship. He is not tethered to the spaceship and has no…