Included in the pile of mail waiting for me when I returned to my office last week was the February issue of the APS News, which had an article on the top 11 physics headlines of 2011. Here they are, with my unsolicited comments thrown in. Many I think are interesting, a few not so much. But 2011 seems to have been a pretty good year for physics overall.
1. Closing in on habitable planets: We heard something about this in our colloquium this week. It is certainly an exciting area! We (by which I mean they) have now detected close to a thousand extra-solar planets, with thousands more candidates in the works. As a devoted Star Trek fan, I am certain that there must me lots of earth-like planets out there, and I can’t wait to visit them.
2. The Japanese tsunami and Fukushima: Surely everyone has asked the same question I asked: why in the world would anyone build a nuclear power plant so close to the coast in a country where earthquakes happen all the time? The Fukushima tragedy will have long-ranging effects on the nuclear industry, some of which are discussed in the Oct-Dec 2011 issue of Physics in Canada, but I can’t help but think that all of this could have been avoided if people had taken the risks seriously when they built the thing. Of course, one is also forced to wonder what risks were ignored in building other nuclear plants. Nuclear power should have been the way of the future, but I think the industry may have shot itself in the foot. By they way, the fluid dynamics of the tsunami is interesting: apparently the wave was the superposition of two separate tsunamis that merged into one mega-big one.
3. Quantum computing: This particular headline is about group that built a chip that can actually do 4-qubit calculations. This does sound like a significant step towards actually doing something useful, but I am afraid I can’t get excited about quantum computing. As an intellectual endeavour, sure, I can see why people find it interesting. But as a practical way to actually compute something, I think we have a long, long way to go.
4. Higgs boson: Has it been seen? Or not? Apparently there have been a few possible sightings that have turned out to be statistical bumps that went away when more data was analyzed. The December report of something at 125 GeV sounded a bit more robust, but we still don’t know for sure.
5. Heaviest antimatter: Some folks at Brookhaven made a few anti-helium nuclei. This was hard to do, and is quite an accomplishment. The article doesn’t say what they actually did with the nuclei, though.
6. Living laser: This one sounds a bit like the work of the kind of mad scientists you see in bad sci-fi movies. Some folks modified a human kidney cell so that it produces a fluorescent protein (one that occurs naturally in jellyfish), then put it between two mirrors and shone some blue light on it. The protein acted as an optical gain medium, and the cell emitted green laser light. Cool.
7. Seeing a wave function: This one was interesting. Some researchers at NRC in Ottawa have devised a way to probe the state of photons with out actually causing their wave function to collapse. This allows a direct measurement of the wave function, without perturbing the system a la Heisenberg. This demonstrates two things: first, some people are very clever, and second, there are many things about quantum mechanics that I don’t understand.
8. Faster than light neutrinos: I’ve posted about this before. It appears that the measurements that produced this headline were wrong due to a problem with the system used for measuring time. Lesson: when you get a result that violates all known physics, check it carefully before you tell anyone about it. This applies as much to students writing up third-year lab reports as it does to professional scientists at CERN.
9. Tevatron shutdown: The Tevatron at Fermilab used to be the highest energy particle accelerator, but that honor now belongs to the LHC. The Tevatron was shutdown last year after 28 years of operation. Even the most useful of tools eventually reaches the end of its useful life. Fermilab will now focus on higher-intensity accelerators rather than higher-energy.
10. Nobel prizes: We’ve heard a lot about these: the physics prize was for the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, which is pretty interesting, and the chemistry prize was for the discovery of quasicrystals, crystals with five-fold symmetry that broke all the established rules of solid state physics.
11. Biggest black hole: We’ve about this, too: a black hole with a mass of 21 billion solar masses in a galaxy far, far away. When I was a student, there were debates about whether black holes existed at all, now they are everywhere.