Need Superpowers? Check 10 Amazing Animal Organs That Would Give You Superpowers

It’s interesting to imagine ourselves with abilities that far surpass what a human can do. Just visualize yourself lifting 10 times your own weight or being able to see radiation with your own eyes.

In a way, that’s not as crazy as it might sound. If it were possible to implant certain animal organs into our own bodies, they could give us these powers and much more.

10 Planarian Cells

First, let us look at the planarian’s cells. These amazing flatworms have one distinct ability that we all wish we had. They can regenerate limbs at will. In addition, scientists have cut up planarians into several pieces and found that each piece will grow into its very own worm, complete and intact.

It even retains its memories from when it was just a single organism. So the planarian can essentially clone itself and still retain all its memories. (Now we really wish we had this ability.)

You can chop off the worm’s head, and the head will grow its own new body. The original body, which can detect light even without the original head, will grow a new head with a brain and nervous system.^[1]

Remember those multiheaded dragons from cartoons? Planarians also have this distinct ability. If cut up in a certain way, they have been found to grow multiple heads—in some cases, up to 10! Pretty neat, huh?

9 Snakes’ Vomeronasal Organs

A snake’s vomeronasal organ (aka Jacobson’s organ) can help it to track down prey even over long distances. (If this organ worked the same for humans, it would help us track a wife or husband in a crowded mall or our child at Walmart, for example.)

This is done by detecting non-volatile chemical substances (which need direct contact with the epithelium to be detected) such as pheromones or the scent of a prey, which are left by every animal. Snakes use their tongues to collect those particles onto their vomeronasal organs. The bifurcated tongue of a snake will even allow them to analyze the data collected and determine which way their prey went.^[2] This would be a great thing for a human in a law enforcement agency.

8 Wood Frog’s Liver

While freezing to death is not the most painful way to die, it could very well be the most uncomfortable way to go. Thousands of people have attempted to climb Mount Everest; almost every year someone succumbs to the freezing climate, and thousands more expire from the cold all over the world.

But what if we could find a way around this? Instead of succumbing to the cold, what if we could thaw out and be fully alive once spring came?

Well, this is exactly what the wood frog does every year. Instead of raising its metabolic rate to create internal heat like we mammals do, the wood frog does exactly the opposite. This unique animal slows its own metabolism dramatically so that it can survive, even without energy or oxygen.

The heart and almost every other organ in the wood frog’s body stops completely. Individual cells stay alive, but they would have no way of communicating with each other.

To quote Don Larson, who was a University of Alaska grad student at the time, “On an organismal level, they are essentially dead.”^[3]

The frog secretes glucose from its liver into the bloodstream, focusing the glucose on all its internal organs. Acting as a natural antifreeze, the glucose keeps the frog’s insides from freezing until it can thaw out in the spring.

7 Ophiocoma Wendtii‘s ‘Eyes’

The Ophiocoma wendtii is an exceptionally amusing creature. Its visual capabilities surpass almost anything that humanity has ever created. Roy Sambles of the University of Exeter said, “It’s astonishing that this organic creature can manipulate inorganic matter with such precision—and yet it’s got no brain.”^[4]

This brittle star has an incredible ability to see in almost any direction from just about anywhere on his body. This is because the Ophiocoma wendtii is covered in tiny, crystalline, ball-like lenses that turn its whole body into an all-seeing eye.

To put this into perspective, that would be the equivalent of humans being able to see from every hair follicle on our bodies. For the brittle star, this means that it can run away from predators while looking for a spot to hide and everything else in between. A human going to a haunted house with this ability would certainly ruin the experience.

6 Mantis Shrimp Eyes

If you thought that the previous brittle star had amazing visual capabilities, then you’re in for a treat. With its 12 to 21 photoreceptors, the mantis shrimp has some of the best eyes in the world. For comparison, a human’s eyes have only three photoreceptors.

Unlike us, the mantis shrimp can see ultraviolet light as well as different shades of the light. Its visual capabilities are like those of out-of-orbit satellites. This discovery initially baffled scientists because the mantis shrimp has the best naturally occurring UV light–detecting mechanisms in the world but an odd way of distinguishing colors.^[5]

Although researchers have figured out what the mantis shrimp’s eyes do, how it happens and why the animal evolved like that remains a mystery. By the way, this creature isn’t really a shrimp. It’s more closely related to lobsters and crabs.

5 Green Basilisk Feet

Our feet travel great distances. They get us from point A to point B. But what if we could walk on water? Even if it was just for a short distance, it’d be a great thing to be able to do, right?

Well, the feet of the green basilisk can do just that. Being able to sprint 4.6 meters (15 ft) on water, this creature has been dubbed the “Jesus Christ lizard” for obvious reasons. It manages this due to its fringed feet. They unfurl as the lizard runs, trapping air inside and thus allowing the creature to run on water.

Just imagine how cool it would be if we could walk on water like this.

4 Owl’s Wings

Flight and stealth are hard to manage even with today’s technology. Sure, we have stealth jets, but how many millions (or even billions) do we spend making one of these?

Imagine if we could fly anywhere in almost complete silence undetected by our enemies. Well, the owl does just that.

Being a nocturnal hunting creature, it captures its prey with near 100 percent success due to two things—its sight (which shouldn’t come as a surprise) and its wings. The noiseless flight has baffled many, so how does the owl do it?

It’s mostly due to the structure of its broad wings, which cover a large surface area. As a result, the owl doesn’t have to flap its wings often, which brings about its near noiseless flight.^[7]

More importantly, the owl’s primary feathers are also serrated, breaking down turbulence. Then the edges of those feathers muffle the sound of air, aiding in the bird’s unique mystical ability.

3 Platypus Snout

It’s pitch-black, and you can’t hear anything. If you were looking for someone, how would you go about it?

We humans are limited to five senses: sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell. It would be hard to detect someone in that situation given our current abilities. So, what if we were able to detect a person (or any living being) through their electrical signals?

Most, if not all, living things have electricity running through them, generated by their hearts, brains, and nervous systems. A platypus’s bill can detect all those signals even in the dark, cold water.

Its bill uses two mechanisms, electroreception and mechanoreception, to detect moving prey in the water. The bill has striped pores that send out electrical signals to detect the electricity in its prey. The mechanical receptors send out signals that detect and predict where its prey will be headed.^[8]

2 Bombardier Beetle’s Gland

Bombardier beetles possess a unique and extremely effective way of defending themselves against would-be predators. If humans were to possess a power like this, crime rates would probably drop exponentially. If only we could look past the fact that this ability originates from the insects’ butts.

The bombardier beetle uses its behind to spray scalding, corrosive liquid right into its enemy’s face. A team of researchers from MIT, the University of Arizona, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory used high-speed synchrotron X-ray imaging to see exactly how this bug managed its unique feat.^[9]

Benzoquinone is made in the bug’s behind by mixing two liquids together. This results in a chemical reaction in which these liquids boil while simultaneously creating the pressure needed to expel the benzoquinone in a pulsating spray. The chamber that held the liquid shuts itself off from the compartment that provided the liquid, giving the chamber walls enough time to cool off before the spray is expelled again.

Isn’t nature amazing?

1 Sperm Whale’s Circulatory System

A Badjao tribesman was documented going as far as 20 meters (65 ft) underwater for about five minutes. At that depth, water causes a lot of pressure on your body. To be able to hold your breath for that long under that pressure without any equipment is not easy.

The longest time that someone has held his breath voluntarily is 24 minutes and 3.45 seconds, which was achieved by Aleix Segura Vendrell in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2016, according to Guinness World Records.

Now, imagine being able to hold your breath for close to two hours instead. The sperm whale does this as part of its natural life. Every 90 minutes or so, the whale will float to the surface, blow the air out of its lungs at 300–500 kilometers per hour (185–310 mph), and inhale as much oxygen as possible before going back down.^[10]

The common misconception is that the whale has huge lungs, but that’s far from the truth. Proportionately speaking, a whale’s lungs aren’t that much bigger than those of any land mammal. Instead, the whale achieves this by having a modified circulatory system.

First, the sperm whale’s circulatory system carries far more red blood cells (which hold oxygen) than other mammal. Also, while the whale is underwater, its heartbeat slows down, rising slightly only when surfacing for more air.

While the animal dives, the blood flow becomes restricted, nearly stopping in some areas. Despite this, the whale can still be active because large amounts of oxygen are stored in its muscles.

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Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri Life Story

The Little Known Calcutta Scientist Whose Shoulders Hawking Stood On

Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri described the dynamics of light’s motion through the curved parts of spacetime. It was “perhaps the single most important input” for one of Hawking’s major findings.

Stephen Hawking (left; source: hawking.org.uk) and Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri (source: YouTube)

One of Stephen Hawking’s more celebrated contributions to physics had to do with the dynamics of blackholes’ ‘surfaces’. His passing on March 14 was mourned by scientists and non-scientists alike, and people around the world remembered his research as much as they remembered Hawking himself. But what many don’t know is the influence the work of a Calcutta-born scientist had on Hawking’s own.

We all know that massive bodies exert a gravitational pull on objects around them. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity reimagined this scenario – stating that massive bodies curve the fabric of spacetime around them, and that the force of gravity is just the force experienced when other bodies move through this curved area.

When a certain kind of star implodes under its own weight, all its mass falls inward to the star’s centre and forms a core of ‘dead’ matter called a supernova remnant. If the remnant is more than two to four times as heavy as our Sun, then the remnant itself collapses inwards, its entire mass forced into a vanishingly small point of spacetime called a singularity. (Note: there are other ways in which blackholes form.)

In this context, there is a link between the theoretical investigations of Hawking and the late Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri from Calcutta (now Kolkata). Raychaudhuri was a brilliant but less-well-known physicist. While his work recast the landscape of general relativity, he spent a chunk of his life being forced to do mundane lab work – something he admitted in a 2005 documentary. In fact, it is a miracle that he managed to do meaningful theoretical work despite compulsions from university authorities. (This is akin to the reprimand Vainu Bappu received from Indian diplomats after he co-discovered the Bappu-Bok-Newkirk comet in 1949.)

Hawking’s doctoral thesis begins with his work on the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravitation, which was quite popular in those days as an alternative to Einstein’s framework. In the second and last chapters, Hawking makes use of some of Raychaudhuri’s findings in 1955 while arriving at results on the existence of singularities in general relativity. Published research papers based on his thesis and later work quote Raychaudhuri’s contribution extensively.

In fact, the first mention of the term ‘Raychaudhuri equation’ appears in a 1965 paper by Hawking and George F.R. Ellis. More notably, in 1970, Hawking and Roger Penrose also refer to a “Raychaudhuri effect”, according to Sayan Kar, a theoretical physicist at IIT Kharagpur and the president of the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation.

Raychaudhuri’s most important finding “embodies the physical intuition that the gravitational force is always attractive,” Ghanashyam Date, a physicist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, said.

The theorem concerning singularities made Hawking famous – and this, according to Kar, “very rightly has its roots in the Raychaudhuri equation.” He added that, in fact, “Hawking’s work was largely responsible for highlighting the importance of the Raychaudhuri equation.”

In the 1950s, Raychaudhuri was studying how a bundle of light rays might move through the curved parts of spacetime. Would the curvature force the bundle to contract in size or to shear?

“Raychaudhuri described this dynamics through an equation that was perhaps the single most important input for Hawking’s area theorem, and the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems,” said Suvrat Raju, a physicist at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru. The ‘area theorem’ describes a connection between a blackhole’s entropy and its surface area; the singularity theorems describe the conditions in which gravitational singularities are produced in the cosmos.

“The Raychaudhuri equation continues to be a key tool to investigate the behavior of blackhole horizons” in modern physics.

Further, the equation has its roots in simple geometry and not in Einstein’s theory of relativity. This means that Raychaudhuri’s insights will endure even should Einstein’s theory become replaced with a different or more advanced paradigm – an idea that Kar thinks is “remarkable”.

In other words, Raychaudhuri’s work was as fundamental as it could have got. Yet we remember Hawking – and C.V. Raman, Meghnad Saha, S.N. Bose and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, etc. – more than we do him. It is true that Hawking admired Raychaudhuri’s contributions to physics, but we should not have to appreciate a homegrown star through the admiration of others. It is about time the government created an institution in his honour so students in India can specialise in relativity and carry on his great legacy.

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The 11 Greatest Unanswered Questions of Physics

http://royalphysicist.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-11-greatest-unanswered-questions-of.html

By Sagar Rawal

By Sagar Rawal

Here's a tale of modern physics: Two scientists work at the same university in different fields. One studies huge objects far from Earth. The other is fascinated by the tiny stuff right in front of him. To satisfy their curiosities, one builds the world's most powerful telescope, and the other builds the world's best microscope. As they focus their instruments on ever more distant and ever more minuscule objects, they begin to observe structures and behaviors never before seen—or imagined. They are excited but frustrated because their observations don't fit existing theories.

One day they leave their instruments for a caffeine break and happen to meet in the faculty lounge, where they begin to commiserate about what to make of their observations. Suddenly it becomes clear to both of them that although they seem to be looking at opposite ends of the universe, they are seeing the same phenomena. Like blind men groping a beast, one scientist has grasped its thrashing tail and the other its chomping snout. Comparing notes, they realize it's the same alligator.

This is precisely the situation particle physicists and astronomers find themselves in today. Physicists, using linear and circular particle accelerators as their high-resolution "microscopes," study pieces of atoms so small they can't be seen. Astronomers, using a dozen or so new supersize telescopes, also study the same tiny particles, but theirs are waiting for them in space. This strange collision of information means that the holy grail of particle physics—understanding the unification of all four forces of nature (electromagnetism, weak force, strong force, and gravity)—will be achieved in part by astronomers.

The implications are exciting to scientists because bizarre marriages of unrelated phenomena have created leaps of understanding in the past. Pythagoras, for example, set science spinning when he proved that abstract mathematics could be applied to the real world. A similar leap occurred when Newton discovered that the motions of planets and falling apples are both due to gravity. Maxwell created a new era of physics when he unified magnetism and electricity. Einstein, the greatest unifier of them all, wove together matter, energy, space, and time.

But nobody has woven together the tiny world of quantum mechanics and the big world we see when we look through a telescope. As these come together, physicists realize they are getting very close to a single "theory of everything" that accounts for the fundamental workings of nature, the long-sought unified field theory.

About two years ago, after a presentation by the National Research Council's board on physics and astronomy that showed the converging agendas of the two fields, NASA administrator Daniel Goldin suggested a special report that would detail how much astronomers and physicists could benefit from one another's insight. Recently, the council's committee on the physics of the universe released that report. It details 11 profound questions, some of which may be answered within a decade. If so, science is likely to make one of its greatest leaps in history.

But first, what we don't know.

Question 1

What is dark matter?
All the ordinary matter we can find accounts for only about 4 percent of the universe. We know this by calculating how much mass would be needed to hold galaxies together and cause them to move about the way they do when they gather in large clusters. Another way to weigh the unseen matter is to look at how gravity bends the light from distant objects. Every measure tells astronomers that most of the universe is invisible.

It's tempting to say that the universe must be full of dark clouds of dust or dead stars and be done with it, but there are persuasive arguments that this is not the case. First, although there are ways to spot even the darkest forms of matter, almost every attempt to find missing clouds and stars has failed. Second, and more convincing, cosmologists can make very precise calculations of the nuclear reactions that occurred right after the Big Bang and compare the expected results with the actual composition of the universe. Those calculations show that the total amount of ordinary matter, composed of familiar protons and neutrons, is much less than the total mass of the universe. Whatever the rest is, it isn't like the stuff of which we're made.

The quest to find the missing universe is one of the key efforts that has brought cosmologists and particle physicists together. The leading dark-matter candidates are neutrinos or two other kinds of particles: neutralinos and axions, predicted by some physics theories but never detected. All three of these particles are thought to be electrically neutral, thus unable to absorb or reflect light, yet stable enough to have survived from the earliest moments after the Big Bang.

Question 2

What is dark energy?
Two recent discoveries from cosmology prove that ordinary matter and dark matter are still not enough to explain the structure of the universe. There's a third component out there, and it's not matter but some form of dark energy.

The first line of evidence for this mystery component comes from measurements of the geometry of the universe. Einstein theorized that all matter alters the shape of space and time around it. Therefore, the overall shape of the universe is governed by the total mass and energy within it. Recent studies of radiation left over from the Big Bang show that the universe has the simplest shape—it's flat. That, in turn, reveals the total mass density of the universe. But after adding up all the potential sources of dark matter and ordinary matter, astronomers still come up two-thirds short.

The second line of evidence suggests that the mystery component must be energy. Observations of distant supernovas show that the rate of expansion of the universe isn't slowing as scientists had once assumed; in fact, the pace of the expansion is increasing. This cosmic acceleration is difficult to explain unless a pervasive repulsive force constantly pushes outward on the fabric of space and time.

Why dark energy produces a repulsive force field is a bit complicated. Quantum theory says virtual particles can pop into existence for the briefest of moments before returning to nothingness. That means the vacuum of space is not a true void. Rather, space is filled with low-grade energy created when virtual particles and their antimatter partners momentarily pop into and out of existence, leaving behind a very small field called vacuum energy.

That energy should produce a kind of negative pressure, or repulsion, thereby explaining why the universe's expansion is accelerating. Consider a simple analogy: If you pull back on a sealed plunger in an empty, airtight vessel, you'll create a near vacuum. At first, the plunger will offer little resistance, but the farther you pull, the greater the vacuum and the more the plunger will pull back against you. Although vacuum energy in outer space was pumped into it by the weird rules of quantum mechanics, not by someone pulling on a plunger, this example illustrates how repulsion can be created by a negative pressure.

Question 3

How were the heavy elements from iron to uranium made?
Both dark matter and possibly dark energy originate from the earliest days of the universe, when light elements such as helium and lithium arose. Heavier elements formed later inside stars, where nuclear reactions jammed protons and neutrons together to make new atomic nuclei. For instance, four hydrogen nuclei (one proton each) fuse through a series of reactions into a helium nucleus (two protons and two neutrons). That's what happens in our sun, and it produces the energy that warms Earth.

But when fusion creates elements that are heavier than iron, it requires an excess of neutrons. Therefore, astronomers assume that heavier atoms are minted in supernova explosions, where there is a ready supply of neutrons, although the specifics of how this happens are unknown. More recently, some scientists have speculated that at least some of the heaviest elements, such as gold and lead, are formed in even more powerful blasts that occur when two neutron stars—tiny, burned-out stellar corpses—collide and collapse into a black hole.

QUESTION #4: The number of neutrinos in the universe is almost uncountable. If each one has even the tiniest mass, represented here by the ball on the right, which weighs just a bit more than the zero-mass ball on the left, this weight could account for a lot of the universe's missing dark matter.

Dan Winters & Gary Tanhauser

Question 4

Do neutrinos have mass?

Nuclear reactions such as those that create heavy elements also create vast numbers of ghostly subatomic bits known as neutrinos. These belong to a group of particles called leptons, such as the familiar electron and the muon and tau particles. Because neutrinos barely interact with ordinary matter, they can allow a direct look into the heart of a star. This works only if we are able to capture and study them, something physicists are just now learning to do.

Not long ago, physicists thought neutrinos were massless, but recent advances indicate that these particles may have a small mass. Any such evidence would also help validate theories that seek to find a common description of three of the four natural forces—electromagnetism, strong force, and weak force. Even a tiny bit of heft would add up because a staggering number of neutrinos are left over from the Big Bang.

Question 5

Where do ultrahigh-energy particles come from?
The most energetic particles that strike us from space, which include neutrinos as well as gamma-ray photons and various other bits of subatomic shrapnel, are called cosmic rays. They bombard Earth all the time; a few are zipping through you as you read this article. Cosmic rays are sometimes so energetic, they must be born in cosmic accelerators fueled by cataclysms of staggering proportions. Scientists suspect some sources: the Big Bang itself, shock waves from supernovas collapsing into black holes, and matter accelerated as it is sucked into massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Knowing where these particles originate and how they attain such colossal energies will help us understand how these violent objects operate.

 
Question 6

Is a new theory of light and matter needed to explain what happens at very high energies and temperatures?
All of that violence cited in question 5 leaves a visible trail of radiation, especially in the form of gamma rays—the extremely energetic cousins of ordinary light. Astronomers have known for three decades that brilliant flashes of these rays, called gamma-ray bursts, arrive daily from random directions in the sky. Recently astronomers have pinned down the location of the bursts and tentatively identified them as massive supernova explosions and neutron stars colliding both with themselves and black holes. But even now nobody knows much about what goes on when so much energy is flying around. Matter grows so hot that it interacts with radiation in unfamiliar ways, and photons of radiation can crash into each other and create new matter. The distinction between matter and energy grows blurry. Throw in the added factor of magnetism, and physicists can make only rough guesses about what happens in these hellish settings. Perhaps current theories simply aren't adequate to explain them.

QUESTION #7: Add a little heat, and molecules can be easily transformed from solids into liquids and then gases. But what happens at extreme temperatures? Does matter break down into a soup of subatomic particles—called a quark-gluon plasma—and then into energy?

Dan Winters & Gary Tanhauser

Question 7

Are there new states of matter at ultrahigh temperatures and densities?
Under extreme energetic conditions, matter undergoes a series of transitions, and atoms break down into their smallest constituent parts. Those parts are elementary particles called quarks and leptons, which as far as we know cannot be subdivided into smaller parts. Quarks are extremely sociable and are never observed in nature alone. Rather, they combine with other quarks to form protons and neutrons (three quarks per proton) that further combine with leptons (such as electrons) to form whole atoms. The hydrogen atom, for example, is made up of an electron orbiting a single proton. Atoms, in turn, bind to other atoms to form molecules, such as H2O. As temperatures increase, molecules transform from a solid such as ice, to a liquid such as water, to a gas such as steam.

That's all predictable, known science, but at temperatures and densities billions of times greater than those on Earth, it's possible that the elementary parts of atoms may come completely unglued from one another, forming a plasma of quarks and the energy that binds quarks together. Physicists are trying to create this state of matter, a quark-gluon plasma, at a particle collider on Long Island. At still higher temperatures and pressures, far beyond those scientists can create in a laboratory, the plasma may transmute into a new form of matter or energy. Such phase transitions may reveal new forces of nature.

These new forces would be added to the three forces that are already known to regulate the behavior of quarks. The so-called strong force is the primary agent that binds these particles together. The second atomic force, called the weak force, can transform one type of quark into another (there are six different "flavors" of quark—up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom). The final atomic force, electromagnetism, binds electrically charged particles such as protons and electrons together. As its name implies, the strong force is by far the most muscular of the three, more than 100 times as powerful as electromagnetism and 10,000 times stronger than the weak force. Particle physicists suspect the three forces are different manifestations of a single energy field in much the same way that electricity and magnetism are different facets of an electromagnetic field. In fact, physicists have already shown the underlying unity between electromagnetism and the weak force.

Some unified field theories suggest that in the ultrahot primordial universe just after the Big Bang, the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and other forces were one, then unraveled as the cosmos expanded and cooled. The possibility that a unification of forces occurred in the newborn universe is a prime reason particle physicists are taking such a keen interest in astronomy and why astronomers are turning to particle physics for clues about how these forces may have played a role in the birth of the universe. For unification of forces to occur, there must be a new class of supermassive particles called gauge bosons. If they exist, they will allow quarks to change into other particles, causing the protons that lie at the heart of every atom to decay. And if physicists prove protons can decay, the finding will verify the existence of new forces.

That raises the next question.

QUESTION #8: All the atoms in the universe are built around an essential particle—the proton. But unified field theory predicts that time may eventually run out for protons, and they could decay into a spray of subparticles.

Dan Winters & Gary Tanhauser

Question 8

Are protons unstable?
In case you're worried that the protons you're made of will disintegrate, transforming you into a puddle of elementary particles and free energy, don't sweat it. Various observations and experiments show that protons must be stable for at least a billion trillion trillion years. However, many physicists believe that if the three atomic forces are really just different manifestations of a single unified field, the alchemical, supermassive bosons described above will materialize out of quarks every now and then, causing quarks, and the protons they compose, to degenerate.

At first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking these physicists had experienced some sort of mental decay on the grounds that tiny quarks are unlikely to give birth to behemoth bosons weighing more than 10,000,000,000,000,000 times themselves. But there's something called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that you can never know both the momentum and the position of a particle at the same time, and it indirectly allows for such an outrageous proposition. Therefore, it's possible for a massive boson to pop out of a quark making up a proton for a very short time and cause that proton to decay.

Question 9

What is gravity?
Next there's the matter of gravity, the odd force out when it comes to small particles and the energy that holds them together. When Einstein improved on Newton's theory, he extended the concept of gravity by taking into account both extremely large gravitational fields and objects moving at velocities close to the speed of light. These extensions lead to the famous concepts of relativity and space-time. But Einstein's theories do not pay any attention to quantum mechanics, the realm of the extremely small, because gravitational forces are negligible at small scales, and discrete packets of gravity, unlike discrete packets of energy that hold atoms together, have never been experimentally observed.

Nonetheless, there are extreme conditions in nature in which gravity is compelled to get up close and personal with the small stuff. For example, near the heart of a black hole, where huge amounts of matter are squeezed into quantum spaces, gravitational forces become very powerful at tiny distances. The same must have been true in the dense primordial universe around the time of the Big Bang.

Physicist Stephen Hawking identified a specific problem about black holes that requires a bridging of quantum mechanics and gravity before we can have a unified theory of anything. According to Hawking, the assertion that nothing, even light, can escape from a black hole is not strictly true. Weak thermal energy does radiate from around black holes. Hawking theorized that this energy is born when particle-antiparticle pairs materialize from the vacuum in the vicinity of a black hole. Before the matter-antimatter particles can recombine and annihilate each other, one that may be slightly closer to the black hole will be sucked in, while the other that is slightly farther away escapes as heat. This release does not connect in any obvious way to the states of matter and energy that were earlier sucked into that black hole and therefore violates a law of quantum physics stipulating that all events must be traceable to previous events. New theories may be needed to explain this problem.

Question 10

Are there additional dimensions?
Wondering about the real nature of gravity leads eventually to wondering whether there are more than the four dimensions we can easily observe. To get to that place, we might first wonder if nature is, in fact, schizophrenic: Should we accept that there are two kinds of forces that operate over two different scales—gravity for big scales like galaxies, the other three forces for the tiny world of atoms? Poppycock, say unified theory proponents—there must be a way to connect the three atomic-scale forces with gravity. Maybe, but it won't be easy. In the first place, gravity is odd. Einstein's general theory of relativity says gravity isn't so much a force as it is an inherent property of space and time. Accordingly, Earth orbits the sun not because it is attracted by gravity but because it has been caught in a big dimple in space-time caused by the sun and spins around inside this dimple like a fast-moving marble caught in a large bowl. Second, gravity, as far as we have been able to detect, is a continuous phenomenon, whereas all the other forces of nature come in discrete packets.

All this leads us to the string theorists and their explanation for gravity, which includes other dimensions. The original string-theory model of the universe combines gravity with the other three forces in a complex 11-dimensional world. In that world—our world—seven of the dimensions are wrapped up on themselves in unimaginably small regions that escape our notice. One way to get your mind around these extra dimensions is to visualize a single strand of a spiderweb. To the naked eye, the filament appears to be one dimensional, but at high magnification it resolves into an object with considerable width, breadth, and depth. String theorists argue that we can't see extra dimensions because we lack instruments powerful enough to resolve them.

We may never see these extra dimensions directly, but we may be able to detect evidence of their existence with the instruments of astronomers and particle physicists.

Question 11

How did the universe begin?
If all four forces of nature are really a single force that takes on different complexions at temperatures below several million degrees, then the unimaginably hot and dense universe that existed at the Big Bang must have been a place where distinctions between gravity, strong force, particles, and antiparticles had no meaning. Einstein's theories of matter and space-time, which depend upon more familiar benchmarks, cannot explain what caused the hot primordial pinpoint of the universe to inflate into the universe we see today. We don't even know why the universe is full of matter. According to current physics ideas, energy in the early universe should have produced an equal mix of matter and antimatter, which would later annihilate each other. Some mysterious and very helpful mechanism tipped the scales in favor of matter, leaving enough to produce galaxies full of stars.

Fortunately, the primordial universe left behind a few clues. One is the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang. For several decades now, that weak radiation measured the same wherever astronomers looked at the edges of the universe. Astronomers believed such uniformity meant that the Big Bang commenced with an inflation of space-time that unfolded faster than the speed of light.

More recent careful observation, however, shows that the cosmic background radiation is not perfectly uniform. There are minuscule variations from one small patch of space to another that are randomly distributed. Could random quantum fluctuations in the density of the early universe have left this fingerprint? Very possibly, says Michael Turner, chairman of the astrophysics department at the University of Chicago and chairman of the committee that came up with these 11 questions. Turner and many other cosmologists now believe the lumps of the universe—vast stretches of void punctuated by galaxies and galactic clusters—are probably vastly magnified versions of quantum fluctuations of the original, subatomic-size universe.

And that is just the sort of marriage of the infinite and the infinitesimal that has particle physicists cozying up to astronomers these days, and why all 11 of these mysteries might soon be explained by one idea.

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How Did We Get Here?

Astronomers cannot see all the way back in time to the origin of the universe, but by drawing on lots of clues and theory, they can imagine how everything began.

Their model starts with the entire universe as a very hot dot, much smaller than the diameter of an atom. The dot began to expand faster than the speed of light, an expansion called the Big Bang. Cosmologists are still arguing about the exact mechanism that may have set this event in motion. From there on out, however, they are in remarkable agreement about what happened. As the baby universe expanded, it cooled the various forms of matter and antimatter it contained, such as quarks and leptons, along with their antimatter twins, antiquarks and antileptons. These particles promptly smashed into and annihilated one another, leaving behind a small residue of matter and a lot of energy. The universe continued to cool down until the few quarks that survived could latch together into protons and neutrons, which in turn formed the nuclei of hydrogen, helium, deuterium, and lithium. For 300,000 years, this soup stayed too hot for electrons to bind to the nuclei and form complete atoms. But once temperatures dropped enough, the same hydrogen, helium, deuterium, and lithium atoms that are around today formed, ready to start a long journey into becoming dust, planets, stars, galaxies, and lawyers.

Gravity—the weakest of the forces but the only one that acts cumulatively across long distances—gradually took control, gathering gas and dust into massive globs that collapsed in on themselves until fusion reactions were ignited and the first stars were born. At much larger scales, gravity pulled together huge regions of denser-than-average gas. These evolved into clusters of galaxies, each one brimming with billions of stars.

Over the eons fusion reactions inside stars transformed hydrogen and helium into other atomic nuclei, including carbon, the basis for all life on Earth.

The most massive stars sometimes exploded in energetic supernovas that produced even heavier elements, up to and including iron. Where the heaviest elements, such as uranium and lead, came from still remains something of a mystery.
—E. H.

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8 Ways to Win the Nobel Prize in Physics

 http://royalphysicist.blogspot.com/2018/01/8-ways-to-win-nobel-prize-in-physics.html

By Sagar Rawal

It’s 5 a.m. and you’re sitting by the phone, hoping for that “magic call” from Stockholm that bears the news you’ve waited so long for: You’ve won the Nobel Prize in Physics! Whom will you tell first? How will you celebrate? And what color Bugatti should you buy with your prize money?1 But while you’re mentally debating the relative merits of Obsidian Black and Italian Red, you realize that the sun has come up and the phone still sits silent: You’ve been passed over once again. How can you turn things around in 2013? With the announcement of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics expected to come on Tuesday, October 8, we consulted with winners and watchers of the Nobel Prize to prepare this helpful guide to nabbing your very own physics Nobel.

Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921, the year of his Nobel Prize. Image credit: Ferdinand Schmutzer, via Wikimedia

1. Think big: What kind of discovery is most likely to earn Nobel laurels? Prize-winning work “runs the gamut” from basic to applied science and from lone-wolf labor to cast-of-thousands collaborations, says Adam Riess, who, along with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt, received the award in 2011 for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Says Riess: “I think the key is its importance must be fundamental, generally involving new physics.”
2. Do an experiment: Physicists are often divided into two camps: theorists, who need nothing more than paper, pencil, and their prodigious brains to do their work, and experimentalists, who toil and tinker with arcane equipment in their attempts to prove (or disprove) the ideas thought up by the theorists. So, which group bags more Nobels? In The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige, science historian Burton Feldman lands firmly on the side of experiment. Tallying up the winners from 1901 through 1999, he finds that experimentalists scooped up 87 awards while the theorists made do with a measly 51. Even Einstein, despite a bushel of nominations, was rejected year after year for the Nobel because his relativity theories were just that—theories. (He eventually won the 1921 prize, for his work on the photoelectric effect.) Experimentalists have continued to dominate in the last decade, with a few notable exceptions, like the 2004 award, which went to David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek for developments in the theory of the strong force, one of the fundamental forces of physics.
3. Keep it in the family: Marie Curie shared the prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, and five father-son pairs have won the award (though only William and Lawrence Bragg won it in the same year for work done collaboratively). As David Kaiser, a physicist and science historian at MIT, puts it: To win the award, “one should select one’s parents carefully.”
4. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your thesis advisor: “As the great sociologist of science Harriet Zuckerman demonstrated years ago, among all the Nobel laureates who conducted their prize-winning research in the United States (at least up through 1972), more than half had been mentored early in their careers by other Nobel laureates,” reports Kaiser. “The proportion was highest—nearly 2/3—among Nobel Prize-winners in physics.”
5. Be a man—and be eligible for the AARP: Of the 193 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, only two (Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer) were female. Average age: 55.
6. Get lucky: “They key to winning the Prize, I believe, is to be extremely lucky,” says Riess. Of course, as any fortune cookie can tell you, good luck alone isn’t enough: it has to be combined with the day-in, day-out hard work that often obscures the serendipitous path to the breakthrough. But it is possible to “court serendipity” by being open to surprising and unexpected new findings. The Institute of Physics has compiled a list of just such lucky breaks. There’s Jocelyn Bell’s “accidental” discovery of pulsars—radio signals so uncannily regular that she momentarily thought they might be beacons from an alien civilization. (They weren’t. Incidentally, Bell didn’t get the prize; it went to her supervisor, Anthony Hewish. See #5, above.) And then there’s the first detection of the radio buzz we now know as the cosmic microwave background radiation, which future Nobel laureates Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson chalked up to pigeon droppings before they realized it was actually an electromagnetic echo of the Big Bang.
7. Be patient: The Nobel committee is not much for instant gratification. Though some Nobel prizes come quick on the heels of the work that they honor—the 2010 award, for instance, went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work on graphene, just six years after the material was discovered—the prize more often comes a decade or two (or five) after the discoveries are first made. Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, for one, had to wait more than 40 years, and 53 years passed before Ernst Ruska was honored for building the first electron microscope that could out-magnify a traditional optical scope.
8. Be prepared for life after Nobel: “What happens now to the rest of my life? What comes after this?” said Tsung-Dao Lee, who received the physics prize in 1957, when he was just 31. Indeed, some laureates, particularly those who receive the award early in their careers, founder after making the trip to Stockholm. As Mitchell Wilson put it in a 1969 essay in The Atlantic, “If, before winning the prize, the man has received very few, if any, of the signs of the scientific world’s recognition of the worth of his work, the sudden rise to stardom can completely distort the pattern of the rest of his life.” But Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, asked to weigh in on how to up your Nobel odds, has a more spirited outlook: “I’m more confident giving this tip, about what to do immediately after winning a Nobel Prize. And that is, you should take some dancing lessons. They’ll pay off handsomely during the festivities.”

1Just kidding; I’m not aware of any Nobel laureates who plunked down their prize money on a supercar. Nobel winners typically spend the purse on serious and practical things, like charitable donations or their children’s college fund. 

Some of Questions, I collected So Far for you to look for and wonder why does this happen and who know you could be the Next Einstein from Nepal ( that sounds cool, right?? )

Question 1

What is dark matter?

Question 2

What is dark energy?

Question 3

How were the heavy elements from iron to uranium made?

Question 4

Do neutrinos have mass?

Question 5

Where do ultrahigh-energy particles come from?

Question 6

Is a new theory of light and matter needed to explain what happens at very high energies and temperatures?

Question 7

Are there new states of matter at ultrahigh temperatures and densities?

Question 8

Are protons unstable?

Question 9

What is gravity?

Question 10

>Are there additional dimensions?

Question 11

How did the universe begin?

Question 12

How Did We Get Here?

Question 13

Can we get energy from nothing?

Question 14

Why does space have three dimensions?

Question 15

Why do we move forward in time?

Question 16

Where does quantum weirdness end?

Question 17

Is the universe infinite or just very big?

OR Simply you can

Unify the four fundamental forces, unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a way that can be empirically verified within a short Framework of time and come up with a way of building the Infinite probability drive from Hichhiker’s guide.

Go Through The Below link to explore more Details and where we stand now from solving the puzzle of physics of above mentioned Questions

The 11 Greatest Unanswered Questions of Physics

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Why an Old Theory of Everything Is Gaining New Life

Twenty-five particles and four forces. That description — the Standard Model of particle physics — constitutes physicists’ best current explanation for everything. It’s neat and it’s simple, but no one is entirely happy with it. What irritates physicists most is that one of the forces — gravity — sticks out like a sore thumb on a four-fingered hand. Gravity is different.

Unlike the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity is not a quantum theory. This isn’t only aesthetically unpleasing, it’s also a mathematical headache. We know that particles have both quantum properties and gravitational fields, so the gravitational field should have quantum properties like the particles that cause it. But a theory of quantum gravity has been hard to come by.

In the 1960s, Richard Feynman and Bryce DeWitt set out to quantize gravity using the same techniques that had successfully transformed electromagnetism into the quantum theory called quantum electrodynamics. Unfortunately, when applied to gravity, the known techniques resulted in a theory that, when extrapolated to high energies, was plagued by an infinite number of infinities. This quantization of gravity was thought incurably sick, an approximation useful only when gravity is weak.

Since then, physicists have made several other attempts at quantizing gravity in the hope of finding a theory that would also work when gravity is strong. String theory, loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulation and a few others have been aimed toward that goal. So far, none of these theories has experimental evidence speaking for it. Each has mathematical pros and cons, and no convergence seems in sight. But while these approaches were competing for attention, an old rival has caught up.

The theory called asymptotically (as-em-TOT-ick-lee) safe gravity was proposed in 1978 by Steven Weinberg. Weinberg, who would only a year later share the Nobel Prize with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Abdus Salam for unifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear force, realized that the troubles with the naive quantization of gravity are not a death knell for the theory. Even though it looks like the theory breaks down when extrapolated to high energies, this breakdown might never come to pass. But to be able to tell just what happens, researchers had to wait for new mathematical methods that have only recently become available.

In quantum theories, all interactions depend on the energy at which they take place, which means the theory changes as some interactions become more relevant, others less so. This change can be quantified by calculating how the numbers that enter the theory — collectively called “parameters” — depend on energy. The strong nuclear force, for example, becomes weak at high energies as a parameter known as the coupling constant approaches zero. This property is known as “asymptotic freedom,” and it was worth another Nobel Prize, in 2004, to Frank Wilczek, David Gross and David Politzer.

A theory that is asymptotically free is well behaved at high energies; it makes no trouble. The quantization of gravity is not of this type, but, as Weinberg observed, a weaker criterion would do: For quantum gravity to work, researchers must be able to describe the theory at high energies using only a finite number of parameters. This is opposed to the situation they face in the naive extrapolation, which requires an infinite number of unspecifiable parameters. Furthermore, none of the parameters should themselves become infinite. These two requirements — that the number of parameters be finite and the parameters themselves be finite — make a theory “asymptotically safe.”

In other words, gravity would be asymptotically safe if the theory at high energies remains equally well behaved as the theory at low energies. In and of itself, this is not much of an insight. The insight comes from realizing that this good behavior does not necessarily contradict what we already know about the theory at low energies (from the early works of DeWitt and Feynman).

While the idea that gravity may be asymptotically safe has been around for four decades, it was only in the late 1990s, through research by Christof Wetterich, a physicist at the University of Heidelberg, and Martin Reuter, a physicist at the University of Mainz, that asymptotically safe gravity caught on. The works of Wetterich and Reuter provided the mathematical formalism necessary to calculate what happens with the quantum theory of gravity at higher energies. The strategy of the asymptotic safety program, then, is to start with the theory at low energies and use the new mathematical methods to explore how to reach asymptotic safety.

So, is gravity asymptotically safe? No one has proven it, but researchers use several independent arguments to support the idea. First, studies of gravitational theories in lower-dimensional space-times, which are much simpler to do, find that in these cases, gravity is asymptotically safe. Second, approximate calculations support the possibility. Third, researchers have applied the general method to studies of simpler, nongravitational theories and found it to be reliable.

The major problem with the approach is that calculations in the full (infinite dimensional!) theory space are not possible. To make the calculations feasible, researchers study a small part of the space, but the results obtained then yield only a limited level of knowledge. Therefore, even though the existing calculations are consistent with asymptotic safety, the situation has remained inconclusive. And there is another question that has remained open. Even if the theory is asymptotically safe, it might become physically meaningless at high energies because it might break some essential elements of quantum theory.

Even still, physicists can already put the ideas behind asymptotic safety to the test. If gravity is asymptotically safe — that is, if the theory is well behaved at high energies — then that restricts the number of fundamental particles that can exist. This constraint puts asymptotically safe gravity at odds with some of the pursued approaches to grand unification. For example, the simplest version of supersymmetry — a long-popular theory that predicts a sister particle for each known particle — is not asymptotically safe. The simplest version of supersymmetry has meanwhile been ruled out by experiments at the LHC, as have a few other proposed extensions of the Standard Model. But had physicists studied the asymptotic behavior in advance, they could have concluded that these ideas were not promising.

Related:

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Another study recently showed that asymptotic safety also constrains the masses of particles. It implies that the difference in mass between the top and bottom quark must not be larger than a certain value. If we had not already measured the mass of the top quark, this could have been used as a prediction.

These calculations rely on approximations that might turn out to be not entirely justified, but the results demonstrate the power of the method. The most important implication is that the physics at energies where the forces may be unified — usually thought to be hopelessly out of reach — is intricately related to the physics at low energies; the requirement of asymptotic safety connects them.

Whenever I speak to colleagues who do not themselves work on asymptotically safe gravity, they refer to the approach as “disappointing.” This comment, I believe, is born out of the thought that asymptotic safety means there isn’t anything new to learn from quantum gravity, that it’s the same story all the way down, just more quantum field theory, business as usual.

But not only does asymptotic safety provide a link between testable low energies and inaccessible high energies — as the above examples demonstrate — the approach is also not necessarily in conflict with other ways of quantizing gravity. That’s because the extrapolation central to asymptotic safety does not rule out that a more fundamental description of space-time — for example, with strings or networks — emerges at high energies. Far from being disappointing, asymptotic safety might allow us to finally connect the known universe to the quantum behavior of space-time.

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