Rounding out the top five on this year's list were George Harrison from the Beatles, who died in 2001, with $22 million, and German-born physicist Albert Einstein with $18 million.
Einstein has become a key trademark in child education due to the Disney-owned Baby Einstein brand of videos and toys.
According to Ni, the course covers, among other topics, energy and convservation, the theory of relativity, earthquakes and quantum physics. Quantum physics is the study of how tiny things like electrons work.
Ni said students of the physics course can expect to learn how physics applies to current and past events, such as how the World Trade Center fell when airplanes were flown into it. Ni said the airplanes' gas, which has an abundance of energy, was ignited by oxygen air. The fire caused the buildings to buckle as if someone hit them from above with a hammer.
This week of advanced science talks at the lab culminated in a lecture by Gross who offered a note of apology about the string theory of reality, to which he has been a major contributor
"It hasn't led to any big observational payoffs," he said.
A member of LANL's Theoretical Division, astrophysicist Salman Habib said after the talk that string theory remains difficult to assess.
"It's a funny field to look at from the outside because it has yet to connect with the outside world," he said. "Mathematically, it's very pretty and theorists like to do fundamental mathematical computations, but they have not led to any big observational payoffs so far.
The annual budget for NSF's entire physics program, of which theoretical physics is only a small part, is approximately $249 million; this represents 0.009 percent of the federal budget. Our government devotes more than 1 billion dollars per week in deficit spending to perpetuate the war in Iraq.
[b]The amount that the federal government spends on curiosity-driven scientific research does not impede our nation from making progress in the day-to-day effort at improving the human condition. Our nation's misplaced priorities are much larger in scale and much harder to scapegoat[/b]. While learning about the origins of the universe or the evolution of man may not lead to more shelters for the homeless, collectively burying our heads in the sand is unlikely to have the desired effect either.
Now imagine this scene: I haven't showered in over 36 hours, temperatures are hitting near 110 degrees, I'm as filthy as I can ever remember being because of the blowing dust, a goat herder and his family tending their goats pass by our vehicle — once in the morning and once during the evening, going in the other direction, each time waving a white flag to make sure they aren't accidentally shot — and I've got physics going in one of my ears. Back on the base, I would take a cot outside at night and use my night-vision goggles to look at stars and constellations while listening to Professor Muller….
“Our work investigates the exciting possibility that the cold spot is due to the presence of a cosmic texture; some current particle physics theories predict textures to be produced as the universe evolves, but they had never been observed. Somewhat to our surprise, we found that the cold spot, and in fact the cosmic microwave background radiation over the whole sky, is indeed consistent with such a texture model. Although the current data are not yet compelling, we suggest future observations that should be able to test our hypothesis definitively. If the cold spot is indeed proven to be a texture it will completely change our view of how the universe evolved following the Big Bang.”
They have sent atoms crashing into one another in a particle accelerator to create bloated versions of the elements aluminium and magnesium. The new, artificial forms of these metals have many more neutrons in their atomic nuclei than do the everyday versions.
The metamaterial is made by depositing alternating layers of two semiconductors -- indium gallium arsenide and aluminium indium arsenide -- onto a substrate using molecular beam epitaxy. Each layer of the metamaterial is about 80 nm thick, which is much smaller than the wavelength of the infrared light.
The goal is simple, to launch pumpkins with a medieval style catapult as far as possible, but there's a surprising amount of physics that goes into it. Illini Bluffs High School students aren't just launching pumpkins as far as humanly possible with this catapult they're also learning about science. Physics teacher, Aaron Stremmel, launched the lesson plan after he chucked pumpkins as a student.
Physics student, Kara Wolfe says, "I get to come out here and see it in action, I don't fall asleep, lets just say that, I don't fall asleep."
That's easy enough to say and, judging by the number of people who lined up to see What the Bleep Do We Know and What the Bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole, it's the kind of speculation that many of us are all too eager to embrace. (Happily, Warren doesn't mention either of these films, dismissed by most scientists as pseudoscientific drivel.)
But who says that the ebb and flow of neurons requires 21st-century physics? Relativity becomes important when objects move near the speed of light, or when large gravitational fields are involved; quantum theory says a great deal about the subatomic realm, but very little about the macroscopic world. (And Warren should be careful about citing string theory; as tantalizing as it is mathematically, it has yet to make a testable prediction about physics, let alone consciousness.)
Q: Why do you call Kabbalah a science and not a religion?
A: It's called a science because that is what it is. The wisdom of Kabbalah started about 5,000 years ago in ancient Babylon. At that time, the whole of humanity was connected and they were together as one nation. Egoism began to grow within people; they became more alienated, which then prompted the whole famous story of the Tower of Babylon and all of that.
Now the cure for that was a method that was discovered by a certain individual whom we know today as Abraham. He discovered a method to reconnect people despite the growing egoism.
The method he discovered was a scientific method. In other words, it uses scientific research tools to investigate our own internal mechanism, and that is what we know today as the wisdom of Kabbalah. (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) date much later than the wisdom of Kabbalah and are actually unrelated.
In addition, Kabbalah is a study. It's like any science . . . There are no objects -- no red strings, holy water, any kind of fortune-telling, mysticism, charms -- none of that belong to authentic Kabbalah, not even meditation. It's just pure study of reality and it enhances your perception of reality to enhance your control over your own life and life in general.
Q: But there is spirituality?
A: Yes, spirituality is that aspect of reality which is not perceived by our ordinary five senses. The wisdom of Kabbalah simply enhances your perception of reality. It gives you additional tools which you wouldn't acquire otherwise.
Just like physics gives you certain tools, Kabbalah gives you other tools. You need all kinds of sciences to achieve a complete picture of reality. Kabbalah takes you, so to speak, behind the scenes.
Picture it as embroidery. You see a beautiful picture in front of you, of scenery or a flower, something like that. If you turn the embroidery around you see a whole mess of threads. You have to know how the threads are connected to know how to make it into a beautiful flower at the front of the picture. That's what Kabbalah teaches you, how to connect the threads from behind the scenes.
Over the last decade or so, physicists have found convincing evidence that neutrinos can transform – or oscillate – from one “flavour” (electron, muon or tau) into another as they travel through space, a phenomenon that means neutrinos have mass. The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment is designed to measure Θ13, the only one of nine “mixing angles” that has not been accurately determined.
The nature and process of science is a foundational topic in a course entitled “Physical Science for Elementary Educators” which I team-teach with a colleague in chemistry at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. I have developed and used in class a guided discussion activity intended to help the students think about the issues surrounding the status of ID as science and whether it should be included in state public school science standards.
Most students recognized that ID is not properly defined as science and should not be taught in science classrooms. However, there was a definite portion of the class (about 25%) that would certainly support such inclusion. Interestingly, this group seemed to see no contradiction between stating that ID is not science, but at the same time stating that it should be taught in science classrooms. This is a discouraging finding, since it indicates that arguments against ID being science, even if successful, may not effectively counteract all pressure to nevertheless include ID in science classrooms. Perhaps a more stark confrontation with such inconsistency would force a change in viewpoint, but this was not the point of the exercise, and may not be successful in any case, given the deep-seated nature of convictions that likely underlie such statements.
In the past year the number of pupils from Nunnery Wood going on to study biology at Worcester Sixth Form College has soared by almost 400 per cent; physics has risen in popularity by 160 per cent; and chemistry is up 42 per cent.
American Standard has been making urinals for 160 years, and its design and engineering group does "a tremendous amount of work" to ensure optimal splash patterns, says design director Gray Uhl.
Uhl's staff employ "mathematical formulas, fundamental geometry, and run both computer models and physical tests" to ensure minimal splashback, he says.
A parabolic back wall is optimal, and most American codes require a urinal to protrude 14 inches from the back wall to the front of a urinal.
...it doesn’t matter, for example, how different polices are between parties, the distribution of votes will remain unchanged. “The elections considered span a period of 30 years, in which deep cultural, economic and social transformations have occurred,” say the researchers in their paper. “There is no hint of that in the data pattern.”
In attempt to explain this universal distribution, Fortunato and Castellano supposed that a candidate gains popularity, and hence votes, by a word-of-mouth effect. They considered each candidate at the top of a tree-like structure, persuading a small number of close friends of to vote for them with a certain probability, who in turn would promote the candidate to more people, and so on. The number of contacts that each person would have to spread the word would have a distribution of its own, which the researchers assumed would follow a “power law” of a generic parameter, α.
Fortunato and Castellano simulated this structure for different values of the persuading probability, the minimum number of contacts a person could have and α. They discovered that their simulation could exactly replicate the curve underlying the election data sets. This, they claim, proves that different candidates in proportional elections gain votes by word of mouth.
In regards to mysticism, both The Uncertainty Principle and quantum mechanics in general do not validate a belief in the ability for a person to extend their will into the universe through the use of a ‘spiritual’ force of any kind.
Not just a milestone in condensed-matter physics or physics in general, something most physicists would agree upon, but "one of the high-water marks of human thought" is how Goldbart characterized the so-called BCS Theory recently.
Advertisement
"I really feel that," he said.
"This is a theory that had an enormous impact on physics in all areas, I would say," added Goldbart's colleague in the UI Physics Department, Professor Gordon Baym.
