World's largest superconducting magnet switches on
And here we go! Another step towards the finalisation of the LHC (Large Hidron Collider) in 2007. This
huge magnet can suck 21.000 amperes, 500 more than needed for the future experiments. The stored magnetic energy was 1.1 GigaJoules, the equivalent of about 10 000 cars travelling at 70km/h. It's not the kind of magnet you would put on your fridge, eh? ;P
Open source games
This thursday will be the SPIE student evening and we will have some drinks all together. It was proposed to play some karaoke games on Playstation 2 (SingStar) but we want to broaden our gaming options, and play guitar and dance appart from just singing. So here I post a compilation of great open source games I hope we will be using (and you can download right now for training ;P)
Frets on Fire: Great game for playing the guitar like a rock star. The only difference is that you don't play a guitar but a keyboard. Strange, uh?
StepMania: Based on the popular dancing game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), you will need a dancing pad/carpet for it. I can asure you that after playing this you will be sweating!
UltraStar: Open-source version of the PS2 SingStar game that we will be using, also very nice and with lots of songs.
Flexible mirrors and yellow lasers for better telescopes
Esquire, one of those "Magazines for men", is running an interesting
article on the work on adaptive optics and directed energy being done at the U.S. Air Force's Starfire Optical Observatory. Big AO telescopes use a smart flexible mirror, one that can match the distortions of atmospherically whacked light waves with equal but opposite bends in its surface.
This works great when aimed at bright objects beaming down enough distorted light to measure, but for a space-surveillance system or a versatile astronomical tool it's not enough. For this, a laser guidestar is used, like an artificial star movable in the sky, available wherever needed. By bouncing a laser beam off air molecules and measuring the turbulence with the reflected light, the scopes can look anywhere.
And now, Starfire's latest guidestar, from the laser team led by Craig Denman, is a new and improved guidestar generated by a yellow-photon laser that excites sodium atoms fifty-six miles high in the mesosphere. It can reflect off a diffuse band of meteorite debris, and from that higher altitude return a better beam, at a truer angle, for even bigger telescopes.
Nice to see that in these magazines you can find more than half naked girls, cars, health and fashion articles... ;)
Photons going backward in time
Going for a blast into the real pastApparently, they're going to shoot an ultraviolet laser into a crystal, and out will come two lower-energy photons that are entangled. For the first phase of the experiment, to be started early next year, they're going to shoot an ultraviolet laser into a crystal, and out will come two lower-energy photons that are entangled, searching for evidence of signaling between the entangled photons, and hoping to test for retrocausality (evidence of a signal sent between photons backward in time).
The second test will involve sending one of the photons down 10 miles of fiber optic cable, delaying it by 50 microseconds, then testing a quantum-mechanical aspect of the delayed photon. Due to quantum entanglement, the non-delayed photon would need to reflect the measurement made 50 microseconds later on the delayed photon. In order for this to happen, some kind of signal would need to be sent 50 microseconds back in time from the delayed photon to the non-delayed photon.
PS: funny to see that the link to the article refers to "292378_timeguy15.html"
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