Archivo etiqueta «Física»

Por David Kaiser, profesor de Física e Historia de la Ciencia en el Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Su último libro es How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. Traducción: Esteban Flamini (Project Syndicate, 05/01/12):

Hace cincuenta años, los físicos de partículas se encontraron con un desafío inesperado. Sus mejores modelos matemáticos daban cuenta de algunas de las fuerzas naturales que explican la estructura y el comportamiento de la materia en un nivel básico (por ejemplo, el electromagnetismo y la fuerza nuclear débil, responsable de la desintegración radioactiva). Pero esos modelos funcionaban con la condición de … Seguir leyendo

By Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia and the author of The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 15/12/11):

When rumors started crisscrossing the Internet last week that the elusive Higgs particle had been detected by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, I experienced my first physics-generated chill in a decade. It happened again Tuesday morning with the official announcement suggesting that the more than 40-year search for the Higgs may finally be nearing its end.

The researchers have cautioned that the data have … Seguir leyendo

By Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics and professor of the public engagement in science, at the University of Surrey (THE GUARDIAN, 23/11/11):

Threats to eat one’s boxer shorts on live television if one is proved wrong should not be made lightly by scientists, however confident they might be in their pronouncements. Not because of the health risks, the potential for public humiliation, or because it somehow trivialises the scientific process, but because it leads the public to think that science is about vested interest or a closed-minded reluctance to embrace new discoveries.

Nevertheless, my recent light-hearted remark concerning a … Seguir leyendo

By Michael D. Lemonick, a senior writer for the nonprofit journalism organization Climate Central and a contributor to Time, where he was a senior writer for 21 years (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 11/10/12):

If you want to get your mind around the research that won three astronomers the Nobel Prize in physics last week, it helps to think of the universe as a lump of dough — raisin-bread dough, to be precise — mixed, kneaded and ready to rise. Hold that thought.

Now consider Albert Einstein — not the wild-haired, elderly, absent-minded professor he became in his later years … Seguir leyendo

Por Jorge Wagensberg, director científico de la Fundació La Caixa (EL PERIÓDICO, 08/10/11):

El mundo científico se ha conmocionado con la noticia de que una partícula subatómica, un neutrino, ha superado la velocidad de la luz, es decir: ha corrido más que su propia sombra. Curiosamente, en su momento resultó muy difícil aceptar que la velocidad de la luz era una constante de la realidad de este mundo, una barrera infranqueable para cualquier móvil que transporte información. La velocidad de la luz como límite no es una consecuencia de la teoría de la relatividad, es una de sus dos … Seguir leyendo

Por Miguel Boyer Salvador, exministro de Economía y Hacienda y miembro del Comité Delors. Es licenciado en física (EL PAÍS, 06/10/11):

De los miles de experimentos que han realizado los físicos desde Galileo, solo algunos dieron un giro radicalmente trascendental para la gigantesca construcción de su ciencia. Varios de ellos han tenido a la luz como protagonista y han dado sorpresas y resultados casi paradójicos. Young, en el primer tercio del siglo XIX, probó, con experimentos de interferencias, que la luz tenía un carácter ondulatorio, contra la opinión de Newton. A principios del siglo XX, el llamado efecto fotoeléctrico fue … Seguir leyendo

By Lawrence M. Krauss, director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University and the author of the forthcoming book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 04/10/11):

Findings that showed faster-than-light travel were released to the public too soon.

What do you do as a scientist when you know a research result that is almost certainly wrong is about to become a media sensation? That is the quandary I found myself in last month as I awaited the announcement from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, about particles called neutrinos … Seguir leyendo

Por David Deutsch, profesor visitante de física en el Centro de Computación Cuántica del Laboratorio Clarendon de la Universidad de Oxford, y autor de The Fabric of Reality (La estructura de la realidad) y The Beginning of Infinity (El principio del infinito). Traducido al español por Leopoldo Gurman (Project Syndicate, 02/09/11):

Hace poco se descubrió que la expansión del universo se está acelerando, en vez de disminuir, como se pensaba antes. La luz proveniente de distantes estrellas en explosión reveló que una fuerza desconocida (apodada «energía oscura») sobrepasa con creces a la gravedad en términos cosmológicos

Inesperada para los … Seguir leyendo

Por Elsa Prada, investigadora en grafeno en el Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales del CSIC de Madrid (EL PAÍS, 06/08/10):

Hace poco más de cinco siglos, Colón buscó una ruta alternativa para llegar a las deseadas Indias. Con grandes esfuerzos (y falta de confianza de sus contemporáneos), marchó en la dirección contraria a la del resto de navegantes. En el camino, sin esperarlo, hizo un descubrimiento que cambiaría el futuro de la humanidad. La historia nace a menudo de iniciativas que desafían el camino establecido, de personas que se aventuran en la otra dirección.

Esta actitud es la … Seguir leyendo

By Brian Greene, a professor of math and physics at Columbia and the author, most recently, of Icarus at the Edge of Time (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 12/09/08):

Three hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system.

The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and … Seguir leyendo

By George Walden (THE TIMES, 11/09/08):

In 1987, as Minister for Higher Education and Science, I was despatched by Margaret Thatcher to CERN in Geneva on a delicate mission. It was the era of “the cuts” and I was the bearer of unwelcome news. For us the biggest black holes were in the budget, and particle physicists would have to overhaul their expenditure like everyone else.

It was not that Mrs Thatcher had a grudge against pure science – she was scientifically trained, but as a chemist, and particle physics seemed to her the spoilt child of the scientific family. … Seguir leyendo

By Ariane Sherine, a TV comedy writer (THE GUARDIAN, 10/09/08):

Yesterday, my flatmate came into my room and asked, “Are we going to die tomorrow?” Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics, has apparently chosen today to try to recreate the big bang, using an atom-smashing machine called a Large Hadron Collider – and a chemistry professor named Otto Rössler, among other scientists, thinks it “quite plausible” that the experiment will create black holes that will “survive and grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside”.

Knowing almost nothing about particle physics, I consoled my flatmate: “I’m sure … Seguir leyendo

By Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics and of the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. He is this year’s recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday prize for science communication (THE GUARDIAN, 01/12/07):

Yet another of my pens has just disappeared from where I swear I just left it and is probably already with my smug doppelganger in a parallel universe. We all have our favourite take on the existence of parallel worlds; it’s a subject that has been fodder for science-fiction writers for quite a while now. The question is whether the idea has a … Seguir leyendo