Tag: physics

Physics Demonstrates That Increasing Greenhouse Gases Cannot Cause Dangerous Warming, Extreme Weather or Any Harm

At the outset it is important to understand that carbon dioxide has two relevant properties, as a creator of food and oxygen, and as a greenhouse gas (GHG).

As to food and oxygen, carbon dioxide is essential to nearly all life on earth by creating food and oxygen by photosynthesis.  Further, it creates more food as its level in the atmosphere increases.  For example, doubling carbon dioxide from today’s approximately 420 ppm to 840 ppm would increase the amount of food available to people worldwide by roughly 40%, and doing so would have a negligible effect on temperature.

As to carbon dioxide as a GHG, the United States and countries worldwide are vigorously pursuing rules and subsidies under the Net Zero Theory that carbon dioxide  and other GHG emissions must be reduced to Net Zero and the use of fossil fuels must be eliminated by 2050 to avoid catastrophic global warming and more extreme weather.  A key premise stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is  the “evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change,” where “main driver means responsible for more than 50% of the change.”[1]

The Biden Administration adopted over 100 rules and Congress has provided enormous subsidies promoting alternatives to fossil fuel premised on the Net Zero Theory. The EPA Endangerment Finding, for example, asserts “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated to endanger the public health and to endanger the public welfare of current and future generations.”[2]

On April 9, 2025 President Trump issued a “Memorandum on Directing Repeal of Unlawful Rules” and Fact Sheet stating “agencies shall immediately take steps to effectuate the repeal of any [unlawful] regulation” under Supreme Court precedents, inter alia, where “the scientific and policy premises undergirding it had been shown to be wrong,” or “where the costs imposed are not justified by the public benefits.”[3]  We understand the Supreme Court has also ruled in the leading case State Farm[4] that an agency regulation is arbitrary, capricious and thus invalid where, inter alia:

  • “the agency has … entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem”
  • “the agency has relied on factors which Congress has not intended it to consider.”

We are career physicists with a special expertise in radiation physics, which describes how CO2  and GHGs affect heat flow in Earth’s atmosphere.  In our scientific opinion, contrary to most media reporting and many people’s understanding, the “scientific premises undergirding” the Net Zero Theory, all the Biden Net Zero Theory rules and congressional subsidies are scientifically false and “wrong,” and  violate these two State Farm mandates.

First, Scientific Evidence Ignored.  All the agency rules, publications and studies we have seen supporting the Endangerment Finding and other Biden Net Zero Theory rules ignored, as if it does not exist, the  robust and reliable scientific evidence that:

  • carbon dioxide, GHGs and fossil fuels will not cause catastrophic global warming and more extreme weather, detailed in Part III.
  • there will be disastrous consequences for the poor, people worldwide, future generations, Americans, America, and other countries if CO2, other GHGs are reduced to Net Zero and fossil fuels eliminated that will endanger public health and welfare, detailed in Part IV.

Second, Unscientific Evidence at the Foundation. Unscientific evidence is all we have seen underlying the Endangerment Finding and all the other Biden Net Zero rules, detailed in Part V.

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Physicists confirm the incredible existence of “time mirrors”

For decades, theoretical physicists tossed around the idea that time reflection, also known as “time mirrors,” might one day be demonstrated in a real-world experiment.

This idea seemed too big and wild, yet it kept popping up in serious discussions of quantum mechanics where equations hinted at surprising behavior.

A team led by Hady Moussa from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City has now confirmed that these mysterious events actually exist.

They pulled off a successful test by changing the properties of a device in a quick, uniform way so that signals reversed direction in time.

Understanding time mirrors

This sort of time flip has been described as looking into a mirror and spotting your back instead of your face. It sounds like science fiction, but it has a basis in real physics.

Researchers had predicted for more than 50 years that sudden shifts in a wave’s environment could trigger such reversals.

Time reflections differ from everyday mirror views in one crucial way. Instead of light or sound bouncing back in space, the wave is forced to reverse its flow in time.

That shift causes the frequency of the wave to change, sparking a chain reaction of interesting phenomena in the system.

In normal reflections, you see an immediate image or hear an echo. A time reflection, on the other hand, makes part of the signal run backward.

There is no need for any speculation about time travel, though, since these effects involve a swift flip in the medium’s physical traits.

Time mirrors and metamaterials

To achieve this, the group used an engineered metamaterial designed to control electromagnetic wave behavior in unusual ways. Metamaterials allow scientists to manipulate waves far beyond ordinary mirrors or lenses.

By carefully adjusting electronic components on a strip of metal, they introduced a sudden jump that reversed the direction of incoming signals. They filled the strip with electronic switches hooked to capacitor banks.

That arrangement supplied the necessary burst of energy to force the wave to flip direction in time, an effect that used to be considered nearly impossible with accessible power.

The outcome was a time-reversed copy of the original wave, appearing just as predicted but never before seen with clarity.

Adjusting the system’s impedance at the right instant was key. Impedance is a measure of how much a structure resists electric current, and doubling it turned out to be the trick for flipping the wave in time.

By pulling this off in a lab setting, they proved that the energy hurdle can be overcome when conditions are precisely controlled.

Past attempts had failed because uniform shifts across the entire device were tough to generate, but the new approach surmounted that barrier.

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Medieval alchemy dream comes true: How physicists made gold from lead

In a breakthrough that would make medieval alchemists envious, scientists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold, producing 89,000 atoms per second.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a giant particle accelerator that smashes atoms together at super-high speeds. Scientists there have found a way to knock three tiny particles called protons out of lead atoms, turning them into gold atoms.

The team behind this discovery, called the ALICE collaboration, used a unique way to create gold. Instead of crashing lead atoms head-on, they looked at what happens when the atoms just barely miss each other. Researchers explained that when this happens, powerful electromagnetic fields around the atoms can cause them to change into different elements.

“It’s impressive that our detectors can handle both major collisions that create thousands of particles and these smaller events that make just a few particles at a time,” Marco Van Leeuwen, who leads the ALICE project, said in a press release.

During one period of experiments from 2015 to 2018, the scientists created about 86 billion gold atoms. That sounds like a lot, but when you add up all that gold, scientists said it only weighs about 29 picograms, which is less than a trillionth of a gram. You’d need trillions of times more to make even a tiny piece of jewelry.

The machine can create about 89,000 gold atoms every second, but each atom only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart. Recent upgrades to the machine have almost doubled the amount of gold it can make, but it’s still far from practical use.

According to Uliana Dmitrieva, a scientist for the ALICE collaboration, this is the first time scientists have been able to detect and study gold production at the LHC in this way.

“Thanks to the unique capabilities of the ALICE ZDCs, the present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally,” Dmitrieva said in the release.

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Curious Grad Student Accidentally Discovers Shape-Changing Liquid That Bends the Laws of Thermodynamics

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have discovered a surprising “shape-changing” liquid that seems to bend the laws of thermodynamics.

The strange compound—made of oil, water, and magnetic nickel particles—was first assembled by a graduate student who was merely curious to see what might happen. To his surprise, when the liquid was shaken, the magnetic particles quickly reformed into a shape resembling a Greek urn.

Emulsion and Thermodynamics

“Imagine your favorite Italian salad dressing,” says Thomas Russell, Silvio O. Conte Distinguished Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst and one of the paper’s senior authors. “It’s made up of oil, water and spices, and before you pour it onto your salad, you shake it up so that all the ingredients mix.”

While water and oil normally separate, they can combine through a process called emulsion, where small bits of a third material enter the mix, reducing surface tension between the two normally incompatible substances. The emulsion process works as described by the laws of thermodynamics.

Playing Around in the Lab

A wide range of technologies and applications make use of emulsification. While experimenting with emulsions in the lab, UMass Amherst graduate student Anthony Raykh mixed magnetized nickel with oil and water just to see what might happen.

“Because you can engineer all sorts of interesting materials with useful properties when a fluid contains magnetic particles,” says Raykh. “And, in a complete surprise, the mixture formed this beautiful, pristine urn-shape.”

Despite repeated, vigorous shaking, the mixture consistently returned to a shape resembling an urn. Even altering the size of the magnetic particles did not change the effect.

“I thought ‘what is this thing?’ So, I walked up and down the halls of the Polymer Science and Engineering Department, knocking on my professors’ doors, asking them if they knew what was going on,” Raykh continued.

None of the UMass Amherst researchers could immediately explain the phenomenon. Two of Raykh’s professors, David Hoagland and Thomas Russell, took an interest and joined the investigation.

Investigating a Perplexing Liquid

As the small team began conducting experiments, they expanded their collaboration to include researchers from Tufts and Syracuse universities for help with simulations. The growing team of experts across the Northeast ultimately concluded that strong magnetism was behind the liquid’s unusual behavior.

“When you look very closely at the individual nanoparticles of magnetized nickel that form the boundary between the water and oil,” says Hoagland, “you can get extremely detailed information on how different forms assemble. In this case, the particles are magnetized strongly enough that their assembly interferes with the process of emulsification, which the laws of thermodynamics describe.”

The liquid’s magnetic action reverses the normal emulsion process. Instead of decreasing the tension between oil and water, as normally occurs when introducing a third particle, the magnets increase the surface tension. As a result, the boundary separating the oil and water forms a curve.

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‘Impossible’ Device Physicists Said Wouldn’t Work Just Generated Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation

Scientists from Princeton University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have invented a device that seemingly generates electricity from the Earth’s rotation.

Although generally accepted theories show that generating electricity from a uniform field like Earth’s magnetic field is impossible, the team believes they have found a “loophole” that allows their device to generate tiny but measurable amounts of electricity.

If independent reviews can confirm the team’s work, they say the next steps to building a practical energy-generating device would involve miniaturization and scaling efforts, as proposed in a new paper detailing their current efforts.

Device That Generates Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation Joins Alternative Energy Revolution

The research joins a list of promising new approaches to generating electricity, ranging from “extreme enzymes” or other living organisms to “smart” windows and triboelectric-driven “rain panels” that generate electricity from raindrops.

Other efforts include generating electricity from radio waves, sweat, advanced metamaterials, and ocean waves, including an effort to produce energy from waves at the grid scale. One particularly novel concept uses the classic “drinking bird” toy to generate power with each dip of its beak.

In an email to The Debrief, Princeton University Professor Christopher Chyba noted that his previous work with study co-author and co-inventor, JPL’s Dr. Kevin Hand, was designed to explore the possible electromagnetic heating of astrophysical objects. That theoretical work, Chyba explained, was not intended to have any practical application.

“Curiosity-driven basic research is often what later leads to practical applications,” the professor said. “A lot of basic research initially seems disconnected from our daily lives—but it’s a key component underlying American science and technology.”

However, Chyba explained that as those theoretical studies progressed, the work “led us to begin asking questions that we then realized could be investigated in the laboratory.”

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Einstein’s General Relativity with a Twist: Teleparallelism

It might not be obvious to those of us only grappling with more mundane concerns, but for cosmologists bent on unlocking the universe’s deepest secrets, there’s no shortage of problems keeping them up at night. “Dark matter” is the shorthand explanation for stars and galaxies moving much more quickly than the gravity of their luminous matter should allow. Let’s not forget “dark energy,” too—the preferred solution to the mystery of the universe expanding faster than anyone expected and doing so at an accelerated rate. Meanwhile a hypothesized “evolving” form of dark energy might resolve something called the Hubble tension—the term used for a major disagreement among researchers about the present-day cosmic expansion rate.

Cosmologists have been losing sleep over such quandaries for generations, wondering what missing ingredients they need to add to their models to fix what seem to be glaring gaps in their understanding. But what if the answer to some—maybe even all—of these problems isn’t a radical new theory but rather an old one, devised almost a century ago by none other than Albert Einstein himself? It’s called teleparallel gravity, and according to a loose collection of theorists who study it, this theory deserves a closer look by the wider scientific community.

Dark matter, dark energy, the Hubble tension: underpinning these theories is Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which treats space and time as a unified “spacetime” and considers gravity as spacetime’s curvature. Perhaps, then, the answer is to modify, change or update relativity itself to gain a new understanding of gravity rather than hypothesizing mysterious dark substances and forces. But across the decades, theorists pursuing this general approach have delivered mixed results at best.

The best example may be Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), an effort to banish dark matter that, according to some research, still has to allow for the existence of some dark matter. A more recent addition, dubbed “timescape” cosmology, seeks to account for dark energy by asserting that gigantic, matter-sparse “voids” in the cosmos are much larger than most other measurements say they can be. None of these possible solutions come without their own problems.

So if these new ideas aren’t working out, why not return to the old master? In 1928, about a decade after completing his greatest scientific achievement, general relativity, Einstein began work on an alternative form of this cherished idea. His dream was to find a single set of equations that could describe both gravity and electromagnetism. His idol James Clerk Maxwell achieved such a feat in the early 1860s, using a single set of equations to describe electricity, magnetism and radiation, and Einstein hoped to follow in Maxwell’s footsteps.

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NASA VETERAN’S PROPELLANTLESS PROPULSION DRIVE THAT PHYSICS SAYS SHOULDN’T WORK JUST PRODUCED ENOUGH THRUST TO OVERCOME EARTH’S GRAVITY

Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.

A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.

“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”

“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”

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Research group detects a quantum entanglement wave for the first time using real-space measurements

Triplons are tricky little things. Experimentally, they’re exceedingly difficult to observe. And even then, researchers usually conduct the tests on macroscopic materials, in which measurements are expressed as an average across the whole sample.

That’s where designer quantum materials offer a unique advantage, says Academy Research Fellow Robert Drost, the first author of a paper published in Physical Review Letters. These designer quantum materials let researchers create phenomena not found in natural compounds, ultimately enabling the realization of exotic quantum excitations.

“These materials are very complex. They give you very exciting physics, but the most exotic ones are also challenging to find and study. So, we are trying a different approach here by building an artificial material using individual components,” says Professor Peter Liljeroth, head of the Atomic Scale physics research group at Aalto University.

Quantum materials are governed by the interactions between electrons at the microscopic level. These electronic correlations lead to unusual phenomena like high-temperature superconductivity or complex magnetic states, and quantum correlations give rise to new electronic states.

In the case of two electrons, there are two entangled states known as singlet and triplet states. Supplying energy to the electron system can excite it from the singlet to the triplet state. In some cases, this excitation can propagate through a material in an entanglement wave known as a triplon. These excitations are not present in conventional magnetic materials, and measuring them has remained an open challenge in quantum materials.

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Scientist Suggests Feasibility of Faster-Than-Light Travel within the Boundaries of Einstein’s Physics

The idea of faster-than-light (FTL) travel has captivated human imagination for decades, fueled by science fiction’s portrayal of interstellar journeys that traverse the vast cosmos in the blink of an eye. While the concept has long been considered implausible due to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, recent claims by a daring scientist suggest that FTL travel might not be as far-fetched as previously thought. This potential breakthrough could revolutionize our understanding of the universe and reshape the boundaries of human exploration.

Einstein’s Relativity and the Cosmic Speed Limit

Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity are pillars of modern physics, setting forth the framework for understanding the fundamental behavior of space, time, and gravity. One of the most renowned consequences of these theories is the assertion that the speed of light is the ultimate cosmic speed limit – nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. This assertion has not only been supported by countless experiments but has also been instrumental in shaping our understanding of the universe.

The Challenge of Faster-Than-Light Travel

The idea of FTL travel, while popular in science fiction, has been met with skepticism by the scientific community. The energy required to propel an object to or beyond the speed of light using conventional methods seems insurmountable, and the associated implications, including time dilation and causality violations, challenge the very fabric of reality as we know it.

However, recent developments in theoretical physics have sparked new discussions about the feasibility of FTL travel within the framework of Einstein’s theories. Dr. Amelia Rodriguez, a theoretical physicist at the forefront of this debate, claims that there might be loopholes in Einstein’s equations that could potentially allow for FTL travel without violating the laws of physics.

Warp Drives and Alcubierre’s Theory

Dr. Rodriguez’s work draws inspiration from Miguel Alcubierre’s “warp drive” concept proposed in the 1990s. Alcubierre’s theory involves the creation of a “warp bubble” around a spacecraft, effectively contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. This manipulation of spacetime would allow the spacecraft to “ride” on the wave created by the bubble, potentially enabling speeds faster than light without the spacecraft itself exceeding the speed of light within its local frame of reference.

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Physicists Have Broken The Speed of Light With Pulses Inside Hot Plasma

Sailing through the smooth waters of vacuum, a photon of light moves at around 300 thousand kilometers (186 thousand miles) a second. This sets a firm limit on how quickly a whisper of information can travel anywhere in the Universe.

While this law isn’t likely to ever be broken, there are features of light which don’t play by the same rules. Manipulating them won’t hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology.

Physicists have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of light pulses for a while, speeding them up and even slowing them to a virtual stand-still using various materials like cold atomic gases, refractive crystals, and optical fibers.

This time, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Rochester in New York have managed it inside hot swarms of charged particles, fine-tuning the speed of light waves within plasma to anywhere from around one-tenth of light’s usual vacuum speed to more than 30 percent faster.

This is both more – and less – impressive than it sounds.

To break the hearts of those hoping it’ll fly us to Proxima Centauri and back in time for tea, this superluminal travel is well within the laws of physics. Sorry.

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