Is Our Culture Stopping Disruptive, Revolutionary Science?
How do we support today's Einsteins?
Is today’s academic and corporate culture stifling science’s risk-takers and stopping disruptive, revolutionary science from coming to the fore? In April’s Physics World the science writer Mark Buchanan looks at those who have shifted scientific paradigms and asks what we can do to make sure that those who have the potential to change our outlook on the world also have the opportunity to do so.
When Max Planck accidentally discovered quantum theory, he kick-started the most significant scientific revolution of the 20th century; his colleague, Wilhelm Röntgen’s experiments with cathode rays led inadvertently to the discovery of X-rays, which ultimately revolutionised modern medical practice; and US physicists at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, detected cosmic wave background radiation — the echo of the Big Bang — when trying to get rid of the annoying noise being picked up by their microwave receiver.
Would today’s physicists, plagued by the publish-or-perish ethic, have the same freedom to explore their findings? (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- World Crude Oil Production May Peak a Decade Earlier Than Some Predict
- Widening the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
- The Future of Energy: An Emerging Science by Dr. Thomas Valone
- Can a Plant Be Altruistic?
- Communicating Person to Person Through the Power of Thought Alone
March Launch Planned for ESA’s Gravity Mission
The GOCE satellite undergoing testing at the Russian Plesetsk Cosmodrome in August 2008. (ESA)
ESA is now gearing up to return to Russia to oversee preparations for the launch of its GOCE satellite – now envisaged for launch on 16 March 2009. This follows implementation of the corrective measures after the anomaly with the Rockot launcher that delayed the launch of GOCE by Eurockot Launch Services last October.
An advance party from ESA has just arrived at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia to arrange logistical matters while the team of engineers will arrive in mid-February.
The five metre-long GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) satellite has been in storage at the launch site since last October. Once the team of ESA and Thales Alenia Space engineers arrive, work will begin preparing the satellite for launch. As prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space has led an all-European consortium of over 40 companies to build the GOCE satellite.
ESA’s GOCE Project Manager Danilo Muzi commented that, “The team are really eager to resume the launch campaign and to finish the job interrupted last autumn. The launch in a few weeks time will be the deserved reward for all their efforts.” (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Princeton Scientists Say Einstein’s Theory Applies Beyond the Solar System
- New Asteroid Threat Reports Highlight Legal and Institutional Issues
- Wikipedia Quality Depends on How Authors Collaborate
- Can We Detect Quantum Behavior in Viruses?
- Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel
Cardiff Researchers Could Herald a New Era in Fundamental Physics
A recent image from the Hubble telescope.
Cardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicist.
Craig Hogan, a physicist at Fermilab Centre for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois is convinced that he has found proof in the data of the gravitational wave detector GEO600 of a holographic Universe – and that his ideas could explain mysterious noise in the detector data that has not been explained so far. (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Princeton Scientists Say Einstein’s Theory Applies Beyond the Solar System
- New Asteroid Threat Reports Highlight Legal and Institutional Issues
- Wikipedia Quality Depends on How Authors Collaborate
- Can We Detect Quantum Behavior in Viruses?
- Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel
“Spintronics” Could Replace Electronics
Many hopes are pinned on spintronics. In the future it could replace electronics, which in the race to produce increasingly rapid computer components, must at sometime reach its limits. Different from electronics, where whole electrons are moved (the digital “one” means “an electron is present on the component”, zero means “no electron present”), here it is a matter of manipulating a certain property of the electron, its spin. For this reason, components are needed in which electrons can be injected successively into the electron, and one must be able to manipulate the spin of the single electrons, e.g. with the aid of magnetic fields. Both are possible with a single electron pump, as scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have, together with colleagues from Latvia, now shown. They will present their results in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters. (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Princeton Scientists Say Einstein’s Theory Applies Beyond the Solar System
- New Asteroid Threat Reports Highlight Legal and Institutional Issues
- Wikipedia Quality Depends on How Authors Collaborate
- Can We Detect Quantum Behavior in Viruses?
- Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel
Researchers Cooking Up New Gelled Rocket Fuels
A new Purdue lab is to test gelled rocket fuels that have the consistency of orange marmalade, designed to improve the safety, performance and range of rockets for space and military applications. Standing in the new lab are, from left, are graduate students Tim Phillips, Mark James, and Pourpoint and Travis Kubal.(Purdue News Service photo/Andrew Hancock)
Engineers and food scientists are teaming up to develop a new type of gelled fuel the consistency of orange marmalade designed to improve the safety, performance and range of rockets for space and military applications.
“This is a very multidisciplinary project,” said Stephen Heister, the Purdue University professor of aeronautics and astronautics who is leading one of two teams on the project, which is funded by the U.S. Army Research Office.
Gels are inherently safer than liquids because they don’t leak, and they also would allow the military to better control rockets than is possible with solid fuels now used. Motors running on gelled fuels could be throttled up and down and controlled more precisely than conventional rockets that use solid propellants, Heister said.
“You can turn the engine on and off, you can coast, go fast or slow,” he said. “You have much greater control, which means more range for missiles. The gelled propellants also tend to have a little more energy than the solid propellants.”
Gelled fuels also could be used in thrusters to position satellites and on NASA space missions. (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Princeton Scientists Say Einstein’s Theory Applies Beyond the Solar System
- New Asteroid Threat Reports Highlight Legal and Institutional Issues
- Wikipedia Quality Depends on How Authors Collaborate
- Can We Detect Quantum Behavior in Viruses?
- Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel
Hubble Views Galactic Core in Unprecedented New Detail
This composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. This sweeping panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the Galactic core. It offers a nearby laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often violent nuclear regions of other galaxies. (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Princeton Scientists Say Einstein’s Theory Applies Beyond the Solar System
- New Asteroid Threat Reports Highlight Legal and Institutional Issues
- Wikipedia Quality Depends on How Authors Collaborate
- Can We Detect Quantum Behavior in Viruses?
- Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel
Lunar Rock-Like Material May Someday House Moon Colonies
A composite of simulated lunar regolith and powdered aluminum heats up via wires as part of the fusion process that forms a brick. A team of Virginia Tech students designed the brick as a potential building tool for future colonies on the moon. ( Eric J. Faierson)
Dwellings in colonies on the moon one day may be built with new, highly durable bricks developed by students from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.
Initially designed to construct a dome, the building material is composed of a lunar rock-like material mixed with powdered aluminum that can be molded into any shape. The invention recently won the In-Situ Lunar Resource Utilization materials and construction category award from the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES). The award was one of two prizes given out this year by the research center, which is dedicated to supporting life on the moon and beyond. (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Princeton Scientists Say Einstein’s Theory Applies Beyond the Solar System
- New Asteroid Threat Reports Highlight Legal and Institutional Issues
- Wikipedia Quality Depends on How Authors Collaborate
- Can We Detect Quantum Behavior in Viruses?
- Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel
Looking for Extraterrestrial Life in All the Right Places
Cold “Super-Earths” could potentially support life.
Pam Frost Gorder, Ohio State University, writes:
Scientists are expanding the search for extraterrestrial life — and they’ve set their sights on some very unearthly planets. Cold “Super-Earths” — giant, “snowball” planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems — could potentially support some kind of life, they have found. Such planets are plentiful; experts estimate that one-third of all solar systems contain super-Earths. (more…)
Possibly Related Posts:
- Princeton Scientists Say Einstein’s Theory Applies Beyond the Solar System
- New Asteroid Threat Reports Highlight Legal and Institutional Issues
- Wikipedia Quality Depends on How Authors Collaborate
- Can We Detect Quantum Behavior in Viruses?
- Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel
Loading... 
