Sinister Security: Albert Einstein

Scientists Have Finally Narrowed Down The Speed of Gravity

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Following the latest research about the space-warping bang of colliding neutron stars, merging of black holes may sound obsolete now. To determine how fast gravity swings, two teams of physicists worked on certain models of gravitational waves, giving peculiarly comforting results. Researchers are picking through the data collected from those ground-breaking thunderclaps.

Isaac Newton first contemplated that gravity's pull was instantaneous, this idea was then cogently negated by Albert Einstein by formulating that space is not just an empty medium for matter to exist, but is a major component itself. Mass stretches the fabric of space, curving time and distance causing objects to accelerate towards each other. Just as the speed of a photon in a vacuum is constrained by the Universe's upper speed limit, the massless space-time warps would also be energy whizzing along at maximum speeds. Specifically, gravity turns out to be something moving at 299,792,458 meters per second, or what we simply call ‘c’.

Objects, much heavier than Sun, when orbiting one another, lose energy by undulating space. Soon before total collision, the energy they emit equals something like 10 times the amount of energy drawn off from every star in the Universe. By the time it reaches us, each wave gets ten thousand times smaller than a proton, passing in just one fifth of a second.

We are reliant on a network of 4 kilometers long light beams positioned at right angles to detect those undulations. A physicist, Neil Cornish, from Montana State University, stated "Until the advent of gravitational wave astronomy, we had no way to directly measure the speed of gravity".

"The speed of gravity, like the speed of light, is one of the fundamental constants in the Universe," says Cornish.

Researchers can procure a handy insight of gravitational waves’ total speed by analyzing the exact timing when they hit different observatories across the globe. Cornish's team of researchers analyzed the timings of the first three detections and ascertained the speed of the waves between 55 and 142 percent of c, which could be narrowed down to 1 percent precision by measuring just another five gravitational waves this way.

Another team analyzed the gamma ray burst from neutron star collision, spotted last month, came up with their own evaluation using a bit precise method. They found the difference between the gamma ray burst and the thunderclap of the gravitational wave to be within - 3 x 10^-15 and 7 x 10^-16 of c.

Being impacted with Earth's strong hold, gravity is hard to measure. But obtaining comparable results using different methods is quite an assurance itself, allowing scientists to further explore from hidden dimensions to the basic properties of space.

You can read the research papers here and here.

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Physicists Say They've Found A Way To Detect Naked Singularities

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Black holes are weird: insanely dense objects that are crammed into such a small space they cause space-time to distort and the laws of physics to break down into a singularity.

Fortunately, the Universe shields us from this weirdness by wrapping black holes in event horizons. But now, physicists say they've found a way we could detect something even more extreme - a naked singularity - and most likely bend the laws of physics in the process.

"A naked singularity, if such a thing exists, would be an abrupt hole in the fabric of reality - one that would not just distort space-time, but would also wreak havoc on the laws of physics wherever it goes and lead to a catastrophic loss of predictability," explains Avaneesh Pandey for IB Times.

If that sounds a little too confronting, don't worry, this whole study is purely theoretical, and is hinged on one very big assumption - that naked singularities actually exist in our Universe, something that scientists haven ever confirmed.

But according to Einstein's theory of general relativity at least, and our best computer models to date, naked singularities are possible.

So, what are they? A singularity can form when huge stars collapse at the end of their lives into regions so small and dense, physics as we know it fails to explain what could happen there.

There are two general laws of physics that govern our understanding of reality: quantum mechanics, which explains all the small stuff, such as the behaviour of subatomic particles; and general relativity, which describes the stuff we can see, such as stars and galaxies.

When applied to singularities, both these schools of thought predict different and incompatible outcomes.

And we've never really had to deal with that conundrum, because all the singularities we know of are inside black holes, wrapped in an event horizon from which not even light can escape - or at the very birth of our Universe, shrouded by radiation we can't see past. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

But naked singularities are theoretical singularities that are exposed to the rest of the Universe for some reason.

Below you can see an illustration of a black hole wrapped in its event horizon (dotted line) on the left, and a naked singularity on the right. The arrows indicate light, which would be able to escape a naked singularity, but not a black hole.

Sudip Bhattacharyya/Pankaj Joshi

Assuming they do exist, the big question then is how would we be able to distinguish a naked singularity from a regular black hole, and this is where the new study comes in.

Researchers from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India have come up with a two-step plan based on the fact that singularities, as far as we know, are rotating objects, just like black holes.

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, the fabric of space-time in the vicinity of any rotating objects gets 'twisted' due to this rotation. And this effect causes a gyroscopic spin and makes the orbits of particles around the rotating objects 'precess', or change their rotational axis.

You can watch the hypnotic precession of a gyroscope below to see what we mean - its axis is no longer straight:

Gyrosco peprecession LucasVB/WikimediaCommons

Based on this, the researchers say that we could figure out the nature of a rotating objects by measuring the rate at which a gyroscope precesses - its precession frequency - at two fixed points close to the object.

According to the new paper, there are two possibilities:

The precession frequency of the gyroscope changes wildly between the two points, which suggests the rotating object in question is a regular black hole.

The precession frequency changes in a regular, well-behaved manner, indicating a naked singularity. Obviously getting a gyroscope close enough to a black hole to perform these experiments isn't exactly easy.

But that's okay, because the team has also come up with a way to observe the same effect from here on Earth - measuring the precession frequencies of matter falling into either black holes or naked singularities using X-ray wavelengths.

"This is because the orbital plane precession frequency increases as the matter approaches a rotating black hole, but this frequency can decrease and even become zero for a rotating naked singularity," the team's press release explains.

Again, we have to make it clear that all of this is wildly speculative at this time - we have never found any candidate naked singularities, and we're only just beginning to truly understand regular black holes.

It's also worth noting that last week, another team of researchers suggested that even if naked singluarities exist, strange quantum effects could keep them hidden from us.

So there's definitely no consensus right now on whether we'll ever get the chance to study naked singularities.

And that's not a terrible thing for now, because are we really ready to observe what goes on at the edge of our Universe?

Maybe, in our lifetime, we'll find out.

The research has been published in Physical Review D.

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Physicists Find a Way Information Can Escape From Black Holes

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Typically, one imagines a black hole as sort of a gigantic cosmic pit that sucks in everything around it. But physicists say a new kind of space structure is possible that allows some information to escape black holes.

Previously, wormholes, theoretical structures predicted by the theory of general relativity (as Einstein-Rosen bridges), have been considered as possible ways to escape black holes. But the physics of such potential tunnels between locations in space-time never panned out. The wormholes would collapse immediately upon forming. So scientists theorized that may be some advanced civilization could find a technology, perhaps utilizing an exotic material to stabilize the wormholes. Basically, pure sci-fi.

But now, physicists proposed that a new type of wormhole is possible, called traversable. It would be be free of exotic material and could stay open on its own.

The work on traversable wormholes was carried out by Ping Gao and Daniel Jafferies of Harvard University and Aron Wall of Stanford University. According to their 2016 paper, a repulsive negative energy can be generated by a special quantum connection between the black holes on both sides of the wormhole. With the right kind of connection, something could go from being in one black hole into the other one.

If this kind of wormhole is possible, it means there could be interiors to black holes and that you could theoretically get out of one and live to tell about it.

Interestingly, the math involved in the work by the physicists on the wormholes is similar to the process called quantum teleportation, which can be demonstrated in a lab.

Here's how a traversable wormhole would work, in a graphic from Quanta Magazine:

In case you're wondering, traversable wormholes do not seem to function as time machines. Rather they support the concept of unitarity - that no information is ever lost. As John Preskill, a black hole expert from Caltech noted to Quanta Magazine, the new wormholes also protect “what we call ‘black hole complementarity,’ which means that the interior and exterior of the black hole are not really two different systems but rather two very different, complementary ways of looking at the same system."

Traversable wormholes were further explored in a recent paper co-authored by Juan Maldacena, Douglas Stanford, and Zhenbin Yang.

It bears noting that no actual wormholes have been discovered yet.

Article was published originally on BigThink.

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An 11-Year-Old Boy Scored Higher in an IQ Test Than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking

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An 11-year-old boy has scored higher in an IQ test than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The so-called genius benchmark is set at 140 and Arnav Sharma gained a score of 162 – the maximum possible result you can achieve on the paper. It is a whole two points higher than German-born theoretical physicist Einstein and celebrated cosmologist Hawking.

Arnav, from Reading, passed the infamously difficult test a few weeks back with zero preparation and had never seen what a typical paper looked like before taking it. His mark in the exam, which primarily measures verbal reasoning ability, puts him in the top one per cent of the nation in terms of IQ level.

“The Mensa test is quite hard and not many people pass it so do not expect to pass,” Arnav confidently told The Independent from his home in Reading.

Genius Child

“I took the exam at the Salvation centre and it took about two and a half hours,” he recalled. “There were about seven or eight people there. A couple were children but the rest were adults. It was what I thought it would be.”

Arnav, who is of Indian origin, insisted he was not anxious before the sitting the test, saying: “I had no preparation at all for the exam but I was not nervous. My family were surprised but they were also very happy when I told them about the result.”

Meesha Dhamija Sharma, his mother, said she kept her “fingers crossed” for the whole exam.

“I was thinking what is going to happen because you never know and he had never seen what a paper looks like,” she explained.

When pressed about the point she became aware of his abilities, Ms Sharma cast her mind back to Arnav being in India as a toddler. Despite being told he was exceptional, she refused to believe it at the time.

“At one-and-a-half years old I took him to India for a holiday to see his grandparents, his grandmother told me about him and said Arnav is going to do very well with his studies,” she said. “I did not trust her, I just thought she was saying it to make me happy, but she was right.”

It was not until he was two-and-a-half years old that she became aware of his mathematical prowess.

“He was counting up to more than 100. That was when I stopped teaching him because I came to know that there is no end to his numbers.”

When asked about whether there was anyone else in the family with an unusually high IQ, she could not recall anyone, adding: “His dad is quite clever as well but not as clever.”

Arnav, who attends Crossfields School on the outskirts of Reading, has been selected for Eton College and Westminster, both highly competitive and sought-after schools, with no preparation.

But it’s worth noting his talents are not restricted to numbers. Arnav used to have a passion for singing and dancing and reached the semi-finals for Reading’s Got Talent for Dancing with a Bollywood act when he was eight.

Arnav, who also cites his hobbies as coding, badminton, piano, swimming and reading, also has an unusually good geographical knowledge, and can name all the capitals of the world.

A spokesperson for Mensa heaped praised on Arnav for the achievement, saying: “It is a high mark which only a small percentage of people in the country will achieve”.

Mensa is one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, as the only way to join is to prove your IQ is in the top two per cent of the nation.

It was founded in 1946 in Oxford by Lancelot Lionel Ware, a scientist and lawyer, and Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister, but the organisation later spread around the world.

Its mission is to “identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity”.

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The Three Meanings Of E=mc^2, Einstein's Most Famous Equation

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For hundreds of years, there was an immutable law of physics that was never challenged: that in any reaction occurring in the Universe, mass was conserved. That no matter what you put in, what reacted, and what came out, the sum of what you began with and the sum of what you ended with would be equal.

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But under the laws of special relativity, mass simply couldn't be the ultimate conserved quantity, since different observers would disagree about what the energy of a system was. Instead, Einstein was able to derive a law that we still use today, governed by one of the simplest but most powerful equations ever to be written down, E = mc2.

A nuclear-powered rocket engine, preparing for testing in 1967. This rocket is powered by Mass/Energy conversion, and E=mc^2.

There are only three parts to Einstein's most famous statement:

1. E, or energy, which is the entirety of one side of the equation, and represents the total energy of the system.

2. m, or mass, which is related to energy by a conversion factor.

3. And c2, which is the speed of light squared: the right factor we need to make mass and energy equivalent.

Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, discussing a great many topics in the home of Paul Ehrenfest in 1925. The Bohr-Einstein debates were one of the most influential occurrences during the development of quantum mechanics. Today, Bohr is best known for his quantum contributions, but Einstein is better-known for his contributions to relativity and mass-energy equivalence.

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What this equation means is thoroughly world-changing. As Einstein himself put it:

It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.

Here are the three biggest meanings of that simple equation.

The quarks, antiquarks, and gluons of the standard model have a color charge, in addition to all the other properties like mass and electric charge. Only the gluons and photons are massless; everyone else, even the neutrinos, have a non-zero rest mass.

Even masses at rest have an energy inherent to them. You've learned about all types of energies, including mechanical energy, chemical energy, electrical energy, as well as kinetic energy. These are all energies inherent to moving or reacting objects, and these forms of energy can be used to do work, such as run an engine, power a light bulb, or grind grain into flour. But even plain, old, regular mass at rest has energy inherent to it: a tremendous amount of energy. This carries with it a tremendous implication: that gravitation, which works between any two masses in the Universe in Newton's picture, should also work based off of energy, which is equivalent to mass via E = mc2.

The production of matter/antimatter pairs (left) from pure energy is a completely reversible reaction (right), with matter/antimatter annihilating back to pure energy. This creation-and-annihilation process, which obeys E = mc^2, is the only known way to create and destroy matter or antimatter.

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Mass can be converted into pure energy. This is the second meaning of the equation, where E = mc2 tells us exactly how much energy you get from converting mass. For every 1 kilogram of mass you turn into energy, you get 9 × 1016 joules of energy out, which is the equivalent of 21 Megatons of TNT. When we experience a radioactive decay, or a nuclear fission or fusion reaction, the mass of what we started with is greater than the mass we wind up with; the law of conservation of mass is invalid. But the amount of the difference is how much energy is released! That's true for everything from decaying uranium to fission bombs to nuclear fusion in the Sun to matter-antimatter annihilation. The amount of mass you destroy becomes energy, and the amount of energy you get is given by E = mc2.

The particle tracks emanating from a high energy collision at the LHC in 2014. Composite particles are broken up into their components and scattered, but new particles are also created from the available energy in the collision.

Energy can be used to make mass out of nothing... except pure energy. The final meaning is the most profound. If you take two billiard balls and smash them together, you get two billiard balls out. If you take a photon and and electron and smash them together, you get a photon and an electron out. But if you smash them together with enough energy, you'll get a photon, and electron, and a new matter-antimatter pair of particles out. In other words, you will have created two new massive particles:

a matter particle, such as an electron, proton, neutron, etc.,
and an antimatter particle, such as a positron, antiproton, antineutron, etc.,

Whose existence can only arise if you put in enough energy to begin with. This is how particle accelerators, like the LHC at CERN, search for new, unstable, high-energy particles (like the Higgs boson or the top quark) in the first place: by making new particles out of pure energy. The mass you get out comes from the available energy: m = E/c2. It also means that if your particle has a finite lifetime, then due to Heisenberg uncertainty, there's an inherent unknowability to its mass, since ∆E∆t ~ħ, and therefore there's a corresponding ∆m from Einstein's equation, too. When physicists talk about a particle's width, this inherent mass uncertainty is what they're talking about.

The warping of spacetime, in the General Relativistic picture, by gravitational masses.

The fact of mass-energy equivalence also led Einstein to his greatest achievement: General Relativity. Imagine that you've got a particle of matter and a particle of antimatter, each with the same rest mass. You can annihilate them, and they'll produce photons of a specific amount of energy, of the exact amount given by E = mc2. Now, imagine you had this particle/antiparticle pair moving rapidly, as though they had fallen from outer space, and then annihilated close to the surface of Earth. Those photons would now have extra energy: not just the E from E = mc2, but the additional E from the amount of kinetic energy they gained by falling.

If two objects of matter and antimatter at rest annihilate, they produce photons of an extremely specific energy. If they produce those photons after falling deeper into a gravitational field, the energy should be higher. This means there must be some sort of gravitational redshift/blueshift, the kind not predicted by Newton's gravity, otherwise energy wouldn't be conserved.

If we want to conserve energy, we have to understand that gravitational redshift (and blueshift) must be real. Newton's gravity has no way to account for this, but in Einstein's General Relativity, the curvature of space means that falling into a gravitational field makes you gain energy, and climbing out of a gravitational field makes you lose energy. The full and general relationship, then, for any moving object, isn't just E = mc2, but that E2 = m2c4 + p2c2. (Where p is momentum.) Only by generalizing things to include energy, momentum, and gravity can we truly describe the Universe.

When a quantum of radiation leaves a gravitational field, its frequency must be redshifted to conserve energy; when it falls in, it must be blueshifted. Only if gravitation itself is linked to not only mass but energy, too, does this make sense.

Einstein's greatest equation, E = mc2, is a triumph of the power and simplicity of fundamental physics. Matter has an inherent amount of energy to it, mass can be converted (under the right conditions) to pure energy, and energy can be used to create massive objects that did not exist previously. Thinking about problems in this way enabled us to discover the fundamental particles that make up our Universe, to invent nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and to discover the theory of gravity that describes how every object in the Universe interacts. And the key to figuring the equation out? A humble thought experiment, based on one simple notion: that energy and momentum are both conserved. The rest? It's just an inevitable consequence of the Universe working exactly as it does.

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A Mystery of Einstein's Relativity Has Been Resolved And It Broke Physics

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They're called "laws" for a reason. You aren't supposed to break the rules that make the universe work. So when researchers from the University of Glasglow found what appeared to be a basic contradiction in Einstein's (and Galileo's) physics, they got worried. And then they got to work fixing it.

So what's this rule that got broken? A pretty important one, as it turns out. Here's what was happening. The paper by Matthias Sonnleitner, Nils Trautmann, and Stephen M. Barnett described how they'd observed that when atoms in motion emitted small bursts of light, they sometimes generated a new, friction-esque force. When identical (but stationary) atoms were induced to spit out light beams, there was no corresponding force. It might not seem like a big deal, but physics relies on the basic assumption that the rules of the universe are consistent — they're not supposed to change just because you're moving.

To get to the bottom of the mystery, the same team first set out to identify where the extra energy was coming from. And this is where it really started blowing our minds. The secret is that the photons that go flying off these atoms act both as particles and as waves, and as waves, they are subject to the Doppler effect. In this case, what the researchers found was that the energy of the photons spat out in a forward-moving direction would be higher than the energy of a photon shot out the atom's backend. Now that all makes sense — but it still leaves the universe with some excess energy that didn't seem to come from anywhere.

The problem might have been wrapped up in the energy-mass confusion of general relativity, but the researchers found their solution by going back to a standard equation in classical physics: p = mv. Momentum (p) is equal to mass (m) times velocity (v). Now, the way that you run this calculation almost always involves keeping the mass static while the velocity changes, since for the most part the mass isn't going to change enough to have a meaningful effect. But in the case of these tiny atoms, allowing for the mass to change accounted for the excess energy.

In other words, what the researchers found was another way to arrive at the conclusion that mass and energy are interchangeable. What they found had the side effect of proving the theory of relativity instead of threatening it. And we can all breathe a sigh of relief that physics really does work.

Via Curiosity

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4th Dimension Discovery Shocks Scientists Around The World

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The concept of time travel may soon be possible as two different teams of scientists from the United States and Europe have shown the existence of a fourth spatial dimension.

It was in 1905 that legendary physicist Albert Einstein first introduced the concept of the fourth dimension where we can move in time. Since then, the concept has perplexed scientists and with the discovery of the new fourth spatial dimension, the big dream of humans to travel through time is showing signals of materialization.

The recent quantum experiments conducted by researchers from Switzerland, USA, Germany, Italy, and Israel revealed that in addition to the conventional three-axis where an object can move up-down, left-right or forward-backward to an observer, there is a hidden fourth dimension where the objects can move in new directions of motion.

Can 4D make time travel possible?

Oded Zilberberg, the lead author of the study says that the theoretical concept of this experiment indicates that the existence of the fourth dimension where objects move in new directions will help us to move forward and backward in time.

Penn University's Mikael Rechtsman, a researcher at the US-based team, reveals that the research team managed to get a glimpse of the 4D spatial system even though it cannot be felt physically.

Both the teams in the United States and Europe conducted quantum hall experiments to discover the fourth dimension. As per experts, if the quantum Hall effect can be generated, it is a solid indication of the presence of the fourth dimension.

After cooling down the atoms to absolute zero, the researchers placed it in a 2D lattice with the help of lasers. Using more lasers, the researchers trapped the atoms and made them move. The movements of the atoms matched the Quantum Hall effect, which signaled that the fourth spatial dimension is a reality.

Researchers claim that these new experiments cannot be used in real life as of now, but the new finding will lead to significant progress in the world of physics. As the experiments are now in their nascent stages, more research will shed light on the way in which the fourth dimension works, which will finally result in the materialization of 'time travel', the biggest dream of humankind.

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This Mind-Melting Thought Experiment Of Einstein Reveals How To Manipulate Time

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Czech Republic: "Last Address" project commemorates victims who were executed by Communist regime

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Einstein Was Wrong, Quantum Spookiness Confirmed

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An international group effort and a recently issued research paper may have just settled a century old physics debate. Quantum mechanics is, indeed, spooky. Quantum Entanglement, a part of quantum mechanics, tells us that two particles can be openly linked even across huge distances. If you measure the rotation of one particle, you will instantly know the spin of its entangled particle.

Physicists have considered this behavior as “spooky” as it doesn’t follow our daily logic at all. Common sense tells us that objects across the cosmos cannot possibly be linked, but in the quantum world, they are. Quantum mechanics also states that properties of particles are only stable when the particle is perceived.

Several physicists, counting Albert Einstein, opposed this idea as it went in contradiction of the very nature of the actual world. In the 1930s when quantum mechanics was a developing field, Einstein was a supporter of “local realism,” saying that only nearby objects could affect each other. Einstein and several other physicists established the ‘hidden variables theory’ to clarify the spooky behavior.

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They claimed that our knowledge of quantum mechanics was partial and there might be unseen variables that we didn’t yet understand. In the 1960s a physicist called John Bell formulated a mathematical expression, called an inequality, to check for these so-called unseen variables. He comprehended that if these unseen variables did certainly exist, there would be a boundary to how linked the particles were. If they surpassed the set limit then the hidden variables did not exist. Though, the experiment, called as Bell’s Inequality, did not ultimately close the door on local realism. The tests involved entangled photons, which can get lost along the way, and researcher conducting the experiments might not detect all photons produced.

In the recent experiment, directed by Professor Ronald Hanson of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, we have two scientists, we will name them Alice and Bob, in two workshops 1.3 kilometers apart. Each laboratory has a diamond chip, containing an electron whose rotation was entangled with a photon. The photons were then directed to a third lab in between Alice and Bob, where a sensor records the entrance time. If two photons reached at the same time they would be entangled, resulting in the electrons being entangled also. The experiment took time of nine days. In that time, scientists noted 245 positive entanglements. While other experiments over the last few decades have also maintained Bell’s limit, this new experiment acquires from their inadequacies to overcome experimental drawbacks. Previous test used incompetent detectors, only measuring a slight number of the particles passing through them.

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New experiments used near-perfect sensors, but the entangled particles were close enough to possibly connect. In the recent experiment, the team used high-quality sensors and measurements collected before the electrons could conceivably exchange signals with each other, creating it the first to close both loopholes. The outcomes of this experiment have big consequences for the world of quantum cryptography, meaning entangled photons could possibly generate safe encryption keys. Terminating the loopholes would guarantee that computer systems could sense if anyone tried to interrupt the keys, as it would halt the entanglement and activate an alarm.

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This Is Big: Astronomers Just Did What Einstein Said Was Impossible

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When the theory of relativity was being mapped out, Einstein didn’t think that one of his predictions, the prediction that the light of a distant star being warped and magnified by the gravity of an object in its path, would ever be observed. Astronomers have laid eyes upon Einstein’s prediction and used it to their incredible advantage. They used such an observation to figure out the mass of a white dwarf!

An idea inhabiting only theoretical dreams was dragged out into scientific reality in an incredibly fantastic manner. This idea was rejected by Einstein.

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With mathematical equations dragged into our physical world today, a new path of understanding galactic evolution and history is now here. It’s time for a story. In order to fully understand the significance of this finding, a portion of Einstein’s legend and legacy demands narration.

A key concept of Einstein’s theory of general relativity is gravitational lensing occurring when light bends around the gravitational field of another mass. A star, for example. Theoretically, light is deflected by twice the expected amount of the traditional, classic Newtonian laws of gravity.

The first piece of evidence in confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity was brought forth in the year of 1919. A total solar eclipse was due to occur- light from Hyades star cluster behind the sun could be detected in the darkness which was exactly what needed to deem Einstein’s hypothesis correct. As though it were meant to be, the measurements taken fell perfectly in line with Einstein’s prediction.

Einstein then went on to suggest that the light emitted by a distant star would appear to be brighter when it’s curved around the gravitational field of an object in its path. The prediction stated that the curved space surrounding the object mimics a magnifying glass of astronomical sizes, sizes applicable to space. Then, from earth, when a star in the foreground passes between the observer and a star behind it, gravitational microlensing forms an Einstein ring. The ring appears to be a perfectly shaped circle of light. An example is provided below:

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Unfortunately, die to the vast distances in space, the chances of such a fantastic, scientific spectacle are incredibly slim and the odds not in the favor of the Earth. Einstein himself said in a 1936 Science article that “there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly.” In the past 80 years physicists and researchers have been able to observe partial rings several time but wistfully, no complete, perfectly formed rings.

Another big prize in the world of great astronomy is the observation of an asymmetrical Einstein rings. Asymmetrical Einstein rings occur whenever two objects are slightly out of alignment which creates an illusion of a shift in the background stellar position. Other unfortunate news... no such rings were observed yet.

However, with many and great thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers of Space Telescope Science Institute saw such an asymmetric phenomenon in action in a star that isn’t our sun. Einstein didn’t think this was very likely and this is utterly brilliant!

Terry Oswalt, astronomer at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University said:

“The ring and its brightening were too small to be measured, but its asymmetry caused the distant star to appear off-centre from its true position.”

Such a feat took incredible dedication and long hours of studious work. Kailash Chandra Sahu, lead author and astronomer of US Space Telescope Institute, and his team searched through over 5,000 stars to spot the asymmetric alignment.

Their tedious work paid off in a way not predicted by anyone. In their search, dwarf star Stein 2051-B caught their eye. It was noticed to be asymmetrically aligned with another distant star in March 2014. Due to the shift of the apparent background of the star, researchers were then able to use the numbers and measurements to estimate the dwarf star’s mass. Their epic findings showed the mass of 2051-B to be approximately 68% of our sun.

New findings then showed that the perpetually enigmatic Stein 2051-B resembles the average white dwarf star, paired with a high mass and carbon-oxygen core. Scientists then went on to predict that at least 97% of stars in the galaxy are either white dwarfs or well on their way towards the end.

Oswalt then went on to state the white dwarfs are the fossils of all prior generations of stars which puts them as the ultimate factor to figuring out the history and evolution of galactic structures in our universe, including our very own Milky Way.

With massive sky surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope which is due to fly in 2019, the likelihood of the capture of such rare events using astrometric lensing increases greatly. This opens up a whole new pathway towards the understanding and investigation of our universe. This is legendary and Einstein would be incredibly proud. After all, it’s his work in action, guiding all current and future scientists.

The results have been published in Science.

Every day, the statement “we stand on the shoulder of giants” proves to be true. This serves as incentive to all of us to work harder because what is deemed nearly impossible always proves to be possible.

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Scientists Just Did Something Even Einstein Didn’t Think Was Possible

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Researchers just confirmed a theory originally proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago, and it’s something that even the famed physicist thought was impossible. A team of scientists led by Kailash Sahu has observed a gravitational phenomenon in which light from stars is bent as it makes its way past neighboring stars, and will publish their report in the journal Science on June 9th.

Einstein’s idea — that the gravitational pull of stars can actually manipulate light passing by from extreme distances — is commonly called “gravitational microlensing.”

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The famous scientist never actually observed the effect, and had no proof that it indeed existed, but his knowledge of the effects of gravity told him it was not only possible, but likely. In 1936, he wrote in Science that, because of the distance between stars, “there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly.”

Now, modern technology makes such an observation possible, and researchers have just confirmed that Einstein was indeed correct. That isn’t to say there was any doubt — examples of gravitation microlensing have been detected in space before, but never in this context, as Einstein predicted, and never studied and measured in this way.

“When a star in the foreground passes exactly between us and a background star, gravitational microlensing results in a perfectly circular ring of light – a so-called ‘Einstein ring’. The ring and its brightening were too small to be measured, but its asymmetry caused the distant star to appear off-center from its true position. This part of Einstein’s prediction is called ‘astrometric lensing’ and Sahu’s team was the first to observe it in a star other than the Sun.” said Terry Oswalt, astronomer with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and chair of the Department of Physical Sciences.

So what would Einstein think of this? “Einstein would be proud. One of his key predictions has passed a very rigorous observational test.” Oswalt said.

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The Quantum Experiment That Broke Reality

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She's Being Called the Next Albert Einstein

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One of the things the brilliant minds at MIT do — besides ponder the nature of the universe and build sci-fi gizmos, of course — is notarize aircraft airworthiness for the federal government. So when Sabrina Pasterski walked into the campus offices one cold January morning seeking the OK for a single-engine plane she had built, it might have been business as usual.

Except that the shaggy-haired, wide-eyed plane builder before them was just 14 and had already flown solo. “I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Peggy Udden, an executive secretary at MIT, “not only because she was so young, but a girl.”

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OK, it’s 2016, and gifted females are not exactly rare at MIT; nearly half the undergrads are women. But something about Pasterski led Udden not just to help get her plane approved, but to get the attention of the university’s top professors. Now, eight years later, the lanky, 22-year-old Pasterski is already an MIT graduate and Harvard Ph.D. candidate who has the world of physics abuzz.

She’s exploring some of the most challenging and complex issues in physics, much as Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein (whose theory of relativity just turned 100 years old) did early in their careers. Her research delves into black holes, the nature of gravity and spacetime. A particular focus is trying to better understand “quantum gravity,” which seeks to explain the phenomenon of gravity within the context of quantum mechanics. Discoveries in that area could dramatically change our understanding of the workings of the universe.

She’s also caught the attention of some of America’s brightest working at NASA. Also? Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and aerospace developer and manufacturer Blue Origin, who’s promised her a job whenever she’s ready. Asked by e-mail recently whether his offer still stands, Bezos told OZY: “God, yes!”

But unless you’re the kind of rabid physics fan who’s seen her papers on semiclassical Virasoro symmetry of the quantum gravity S-matrix and Low’s subleading soft theorem as a symmetry of QED (both on approaches to understanding the shape of space and gravity and the first two papers she ever authored), you may not have heard of Pasterski.

A first-generation Cuban-American born and bred in the suburbs of Chicago, she’s not on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram and doesn’t own a smartphone. She does, however, regularly update a no-frills website called PhysicsGirl, which features a long catalog of achievements and proficiencies. Among them: “spotting elegance within the chaos.”

Pasterski stands out among a growing number of newly minted physics grads in the U.S. There were 7,329 in 2013, double the four-decade low of 3,178 in 1999, according to the American Institute of Physics.

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Nima Arkani-Hamed, a Princeton professor and winner of the inaugural $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, told OZY he’s heard “terrific things” about Pasterski from her adviser, Harvard professor Andrew Strominger, who is about to publish a paper with physics rock star Hawking. She’s also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the Hertz Foundation, the Smith Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Pasterski, who speaks in frenetic bursts, says she has always been drawn to challenging what’s possible. “Years of pushing the bounds of what I could achieve led me to physics,” she says from her dorm room at Harvard. Yet she doesn’t make it sound like work at all: She calls physics “elegant” but also full of “utility.”

Despite her impressive résumé, MIT wait-listed Pasterski when she first applied. Professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman were aghast. Thanks to Udden, the pair had seen a video of Pasterski building her airplane. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it,” Haggerty said. “Her potential is off the charts.” The two went to bat for her, and she was ultimately accepted, later graduating with a grade average of 5.00, the school’s highest score possible.

An only child, Pasterski speaks with some awkwardness and punctuates her e-mails with smiley faces and exclamation marks. She says she has a handful of close friends but has never had a boyfriend, an alcoholic drink or a cigarette. Pasterski says: “I’d rather stay alert, and hopefully I’m known for what I do and not what I don’t do.”

While mentors offer predictions of physics fame, Pasterski appears well grounded. “A theorist saying he will figure out something in particular over a long time frame almost guarantees that he will not do it,” she says. And Bezos’s pledge notwithstanding, the big picture for science grads in the U.S. is challenging: The U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey shows that only about 26 percent of science grads in the U.S. had jobs in their chosen fields, while nearly 30 percent of physics and chemistry post-docs are unemployed. Pasterski seems unperturbed. “Physics itself is exciting enough,” she says. ”It’s not like a 9-to-5 thing. When you’re tired you sleep, and when you’re not, you do physics.”

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5 Ways You Can See Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Real Life

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Relativity is, without any doubt, one of the most well-known scientific theories of the 20th century, but how well can we see observe it in our daily lives? Here are 5 ways you can see Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in real life:

Global Positioning System

In order for your car's GPS navigation to work as precisely as it does, satellites in earth’s orbit have to take some relativistic effects into account even though satellites aren't moving at anything near to the speed of light, they are still going pretty fast. The satellites are also transferring signals to ground stations on Earth’s surface. These ground stations (and the GPS component fixed in your car) are all undergoing higher accelerations due to gravity than the satellites in orbit.

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To get that pinpoint precision, the satellites use clocks that are precise to a few billionths of a second. As each satellite is 12,600 miles (almost 20,300 kilometers) above Earth and travels at about 6,000 miles per hour (10,000 km/h), there's an awesome relativistic time dilation that tacks on almost 4 microseconds every day. After adding in the effects of gravity and the number goes up to nearly 7 microseconds. That's about 7,000 nanoseconds.

The variance is very real: if no relativistic effects were occurred, a GPS unit that tells you it's a half mile (0.8 km) to the next destination would be about 5 miles (8 km) off after simply one day.

Gold's Yellow Color

Many metals are glittery as the electrons in the atoms jump from diverse energy levels, or also known "orbitals." Some photons that smash the metal get absorbed and re-discharged, at a longer wavelength. Most detectable light, however, just gets reflected.

Gold is quite a heavy atom, so the inner electrons are stirring fast enough that the relativistic mass increase is noteworthy, along with the length contraction. As a consequence, the electrons are rotating around the nucleus in smaller paths, with extra momentum. Electrons in the inner orbitals transfer energy that is closer to the energy of outer electrons, and the wavelengths that get absorbed and reproduced quite are longer.

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Longer wavelengths of light mean that a little of the visible light that would typically just be redirected gets absorbed, and that light is in the blue end of the spectrum. White light is a combination of all the colors of the rainbow, but in case of gold, when light gets absorbed and redirected the wavelengths are generally longer. That means the combination of light waves we see tends to have seemingly less blue and violet in it. This is the reason gold look yellowish in color since yellow, orange and red light is a lengthier wavelength than blue.

Gold Doesn't Corrode Easily

The relativistic effect on gold's electrons is also accountable for one more property of gold that the metal doesn't rust or react with anything else quite easily. Gold has just one electron in its external shell, but it still is not as responsive or reactive as calcium or lithium. As an alternative, the electrons in gold, being "heavier", are all detained closer to the atomic nucleus. This is the reason that the outermost electron isn't expected to be in a place where it can react with whatsoever at all — it's just as probable as to be amid its corresponding electrons that are close to the nucleus.

Mercury Is a Liquid

Just like gold, mercury is also a heavy atom, with electrons seized close to the nucleus because of their speed and consequential mass upsurge. With mercury, the bonds between its atoms are weak, so mercury liquefies at lower temperatures and is normally a liquid when we see it.

Your Old TV

Few years ago maximum number of televisions and monitors had cathode ray tube (CRT) screens. A cathode ray tube works by firing electrons at a phosphor exterior with a huge magnet. Each electron creates a lighted pixel when it smashes the back of the screen. The electrons fired out to create the picture move at up to 30 percent the speed of light. Relativistic effects are obvious, and when makers made the magnets, they certainly had to take those effects into account.

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