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Articles by K. Blau Steven
Your most impactful publication can come at any time
The most cited of a scientist’s papers is equally likely to be the first, the last, or one selected at random. Steven K. Blau comments An international research team led by Albert-László Barabási (Northeastern University) has just published a wide-ranging study of how the impact of a scientist’s oeuvre varies over the course of a career.
Thermodynamics constrains interpretations of quantum mechanics
John Stewart Bell’s famous theorem is a statement about the nature of any theory whose predictions are compatible with those of quantum mechanics: If the theory is governed by hidden variables, unknown parameters that determine the results of measurements, it must also admit action at a distance.
A fast radio burst’s extragalactic home
Discovered in 2007, fast radio bursts (FRBs) emit luminous pulses of radio light that last mere milliseconds. To date, astronomers have reported about 20 FRBs but don’t know what causes them. One, identified in 2014 by Laura Spitler and colleagues, stands apart because it has been observed to burst repeatedly (see Physics Today, April 2016, page 22). The source was first detected on 2 November 2012, hence its designation FRB121102.
Electrons in graphene follow viscous fluid laws
A new imaging technique captures the characteristic hydrodynamic flow profile. Rachel Berkowitz In a conducting material, electrical resistance arises from electrons scattering off either impurities in the atomic lattice or lattice vibrations called phonons. Electron-impurity and electron–phonon scattering can be measured easily because the momentum of the scattered electrons changes. But electrons in a solid also scatter off one another.
Shedding light (and dark) on quantum probabilities
For more than a century, Thomas Young’s seminal double-slit experiment was seen as a convincing demonstration that light is a wave phenomenon. The modern interpretation provided by quantum mechanics is radically different: Light comprises discrete entities called photons, and the photon wavefunction at a given location on a detector screen receives contributions from all paths that pass from the photon source through the slits (call them A and B) and on to the screen.
Seven Earth-sized planets around a tiny star
An international team has discovered that the ultracold dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 is orbited by seven planets comparable to Earth in size. For all but the outermost planet, the researchers were also able to obtain density estimates and concluded that the data “broadly suggest rocky compositions.” Most intriguingly, all the planets could potentially house liquid water on at least limited regions of their surfaces. Following are the essential facts about the discovery.
A gravitational-lensing measurement of the Hubble constant
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, Suyu et al. In 1929 Edwin Hubble confirmed that galaxies are receding from us with a speed proportional to their distance: v = H0d. As late as the mid 1990s, the value of the proportionality constant H0, the Hubble constant, was known only to be somewhere between 50 and 90 km/s per megaparsec (see the article by Mario Livio and Adam Riess, Physics Today, October 2013, page 41).
Q&A: A. Zee on explaining physics to any audience
Books on group theory, the branch of mathematics dealing with the properties of sets, have long struggled to find a balance between mathematical theory and physical insight, says theoretical physicist Piet Van Isacker in the January issue of Physics Today. Luckily for physicists, there is now a book that provides both: A.
A large galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter
Scattered among the galaxies of the Coma cluster are dozens of objects that are as large as the Milky Way but shine only 1/100 as bright. The stability of those ultradiffuse galaxies (UDGs) in the tidally disruptive Coma environment suggests that they may be held together by an unusually large component of dark matter. Now a research team led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University has measured the mass of one UDG, Dragonfly 44, and found a value similar to that of our Milky Way.
The new case of missing antineutrinos
Once a vexing mystery, the apparent vanishing of neutrinos on their way from a source to a detector arises because neutrinos come in three flavors—electron, muon, and tau. If the detector is not sensitive to all three flavors, oscillations among the neutrino’s three mass eigenstates can mimic a neutrino deficit.
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