Like many scientists who study dark matter, Mack says the only thing we really know about it is that there’s five times as much of it as known matter. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander muses about the interplay of jazz, physics, and math. And cosmologist Katie Mack unpacks the latest thinking about the mysteries of dark matter, as part of the Perimeter Institute Public Lecture series. “A lot of physicists are very unhappy with the possibility of non-locality,” says Adlam. That’s because, for the effect to be instantaneous, the information must be conveyed from place to place at faster than the speed of light. In a similar vein, in a 1991 study physicist Richard Gott set out a mathematical description of a wild scenario in which two “cosmic strings” moved past each other in opposite directions. According to his calculations, this would create closed time-like curves looping around the strings.
How to Get a Ph.D. in Physics
Rudolf Grimm obtained his diploma degree in 1986 at the University of Hannover, Germany, and his doctoral degree in 1989 at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. During his postdoctoral stay (1989–1990) at the Institute of Spectroscopy in Troitsk near Moscow, Russia, he started his scientific work on optical dipole forces on atoms in intense laser fields. In 1990, he moved back to Germany to the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg to work on laser cooling of stored ion beams and on novel schemes to cool and trap neutral atoms. In 2000, he became full professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In 2003, he also became one of the research directors of the newly founded Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work focuses on ultracold atomic and molecular quantum gases. Among his achievements are the worldwide first Bose-Einstein condensates of cesium and strontium atoms, and a molecular condensate of lithium dimers.
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All these effects and theories proves the dual nature of matter. Written in Latin, the first law is typically translated as “a body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in motion, at constant speed and in a straight line, unless acted on by an external force.” The only remaining loophole is that the theories this is based on are incomplete. Relativity and quantum mechanics work very well for certain aspects of the Universe, but they also aren’t compatible. This suggests we need a deeper theory that unifies the two, but despite decades of effort we don’t have one.
In this regime, the system is governed by universal physics and the existence of Efimov states can be expected. Or rather, the evolution of consciousness is a deep mystery under the reductionist paradigm, according to which the behavior is determined at the micro level, making it irrelevant whether or not consciousness pops up at higher levels. But suppose instead that the emergence of biological consciousness brings into existence radically new forms of behavior, over and above what physics alone could produce. Perhaps organisms that have conscious awareness of the world around them, and thereby freely respond based on that awareness, behave very differently than mere mechanisms. With these assumptions in place, we can make sense of natural selection’s preference for conscious organisms. Although consciousness can’t be directly observed, if you’re dealing with another human being, you can ask them what they’re feeling, or look for external indications of consciousness.
Francesca Ferlaino received her Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Florence and the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy in Italy in 2004. After two years of post-doctoral research in Florence, she joined the Ultracold Atoms and Quantum Gases group at the University of Innsbruck in Austria as a visiting scientist. From 2007 to 2009, she was a Lise-Meitner fellow of the Austrian Science Fund in Innsbruck, working mainly on Efimov physics and few-body physics with ultracold atoms. In 2009, she won the prestigious START Award from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research and the FWF, allowing her to establish a new research group at the Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck. Gas, a wide magnetic-field region exists where overlapping Feshbach resonances lead to a situation where all three scattering lengths are very large.
An error in any of these can cause your answer to be off, so pay close attention to your math as you work and, if you have time, double-check your answer at the end to make sure your math “adds up.” Don’t leave all of your studying to the last minute, since procrastination is one of the biggest hindrances in understanding physics. Do not concentrate on the numbers until the very end of any problem. Understanding the topic means that you understand the equations behind it, the derivations behind them, and especially being able to manipulate them symbolically. Improving your algebra and calculus techniques is a must. Practice problems by solving them symbolically first, then plug in values. Trying to understand the unknown is still a central problem in human life.
