“What is spacetime made out of?” asks physicist Aron Wall at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics . During the past several years, physicists have begun thinking about spacetime in a radically different way, not as just an empty backdrop for the unfolding story of the universe, but rather treating spacetime as the flow of quantum information from one point to another.
There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 – a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles. Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern think they may have seen another particle, detected as a peak at a certain energy in the data, although the finding is yet to be confirmed.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the day’s news headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the day’s news headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before in the local universe,” said Stephen Smartt, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast and a lead scientist for the Hawaii-based ATLAS survey, which first observed the object that has rocked astronomy since its discovery in June. “It popped up out of nowhere,” says Smartt.
“The tension seems to have grown into a full-blown incompatibility between our views of the early and late time universe,” said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University. “At this point, clearly it’s not simply some gross error in any one measurement. It’s as though you predicted how tall a child would become from a growth chart and then found the adult he or she became greatly exceeded the prediction. We are very perplexed.”
