Zeeya merali biography of william
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Physics articles within Nature
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Books & Arts |
Martin Rees applauds a biography of the physicist who kickstarted the Pugwash Conferences for arms control.
News & Views |
With the laser just over half a century old, another dream of the pioneers of this light source has been fulfilled. An atomic X-ray ljusstråle with unprecedentedly high photon energy has been demonstrated. See Letter p.488
Letter |
No limit to the speed of information propagation exists in non-relativistic quantum field theory, but finite-velocity transport of correlations is now found in a system of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, aiding fundamental understanding of closed quantum systems far from equilibrium.
- Marc Cheneau
- , Peter Barmettler
- & Stefan Kuhr
Letter |
Experimental simulations of galaxy-forming conditions using lasers show that the Biermann battery generates seed magnetic fields, which turbulence can amplify to affect galaxy ev
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In Search of Time’s ursprung
Rearrange the following words to tell a coherent life story: A man dies, later he gets married, and finally he is born. Thanks to our built-in temporal sense, it’s pretty straightforward: Tomb always follows womb, it’s never the other way around.
Yet at a fundamental level, time’s origin remains a mystery. “It’s one of the deepest questions at the forefront of science, but when we ask, ‘What is time? Where does it come from?’ it’s not even clear the words man any sense,” says Nima Arkani Hamed, a physicist at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, N.J. “We can barely articulate what a world without time, or physics without time, means.”
Confusing as the absence of time would be, there is mounting evidence that at the most basic level of reality, time is an illusion. Stranger still, laboratory tests with laser lights and advances in our understanding of string theory—the proposed framework positing that particles are composed of small t
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Creator, Mathematics and the Physical Universe
This is a Q & A blog post by our Visiting Scholar in Philosophy, William Lane Craig.
Hello Dr. Craig,
Firstly, Thank you for the incredible contributions you’ve made in advancing the intellectual respectability of Christianity.
Lately, I’ve been pondering the argument from the applicability of mathematics. After watching and reading much of your work on the subject, I think I’ve finally come to be at peace with it after previously not having been so. I’ve been able to overcome the usual objection that the function of mathematics is necessary, but one question still gnaws at me.
It seems to me that the argument necessarily implies that whether or not mathematics is applied to the universe is a contingent matter; indeed, this is what is so surprising. If so, then what would a universe to which mathematics has not been applied be like? That is, one in which, say, the laws of physics are not so elegantly expressible in terms of mathe