Fluid dinamics mimic quantum mechanics

Researchers succeeded to produce the fluidic analogue of a classic quantum experiment in which electrons are confined to a circular "corral" by a ring of ions. In their experiment they filled a circular tray with silicone oil and made it vibrate at a rate just below that required to produce surface waves. When they dropped a single droplet on the surface it began to bounce up and down producing waves that hit the wall, interfered with each other and kept moving the droplet around. At first glance the movement of the droplet seemed chaotic but as time passed and data gathered, it turned out that it was following a decent probability distribution. This pattern is very similar to the movement of an electron placed in a ring of ions.

Although this experiment may seem to most of us as yet another analogy in nature, the situation is much more serious than that! Quantum phenomena are usually unique to our microcosm and are hard to mimic on a macroscopic scale. This experiment is one of the few that helps our limited imagination to have a tiny grasp on the world of subatomic particles and get a clearer picture of quantum mechanics, a discipline that, according to the famous physicist Richard Feynman, "nobody understands".

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle gets on firmer ground

The extent to which the properties of a quantum system can be measured is described by physicist Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. To those new to the world of quantum physics, this principle is based on the very simple assumption that one can only observe a system or a phenomenon after having interfered with it by transmitting energy to the system. Subatomic particles, like electrons, are so sensitive that if you want to measure their position or energy by radiating the system (the atom) with electromagnetic waves (the same thing as lighting up a torch in a dark room to be able to look around and see what is in there), you will eventually knock out the electron from its "original" position and observe it somewhere else or with a different momentum (~energy).

The main implication of this theory is that we can only have a picture of the world we live in to a limited extent. We cannot say what happens beyond that limit, what was the exact energy and position of that electron before we observed it, how the atomic nucleus and subatomic particles really look like, and even cannot be sure that these things we call particles had existed at all before we engaged in their direct observation. Bizarre. Not only for us, but also for the physicists of the era when Heisenberg came up with this idea about the limitations of our observations. Since then the scientific society has been eager to prove that Heisenberg was wrong - without any success. Today's hot news on the issue is that the precise predictions of the principle still hold without any doubt. Read more about the current debate and the new findings here.

(For contemplators lost in Wikipedia's articles on modern physics, I would recommend the brilliant book of John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat)

Four-quark particle found - May be entirely new form of matter

Physicists work eagerly to find all particles predicted by the Standard Model. However, our universe can sometimes trick us and spit out some entirely new forms of matter. That is what could have happened recently at the Belle experiment in Japan and the Beijing Spectrometer Experiment (BESIII) in China where a subatomic particle with four-quarks was found for the first time.

One may think that our understanding of the universe will become complete as we manage to find the missing pieces of the Standard Model. But what if we keep finding such exotic particles instead of the predicted ones? Should we rephrase our theories at some point in the future the same way as our brilliant scientists did at the dawn of the 20th century?

Read more here.