Can a black hole be used as a particle detector?

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology think it may be possible.

One of the reasons for this idea is the sheer cost and time required for the financing and building of particle accelerators. The Large Hadron Collider for instance took approx 30 years to build "at a cost of around £3.7billion".

From the Daily Mail:

The team believe that axions can circle a black hole, in a similar way to how electrons circle the nucleus of an atom, except that this time, it is gravity rather than electromagnetic force that binds the two together.
Delving briefly into the world of quantum physics, every particle is described as a wave.
The wavelength corresponds to the particle's energy. Heavy particles have small wavelengths, but the low-energy axions can have wavelengths of many kilometers.
The results of Grumiller and Mocanu show that axions can circle a black hole, similar to electrons circling the nucleus of an atom.

Source -> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2161581/Cant-afford-particle-detector-Use-black-hole-say-scientists-believe-harness-destructive-giants-science.html

Earlier related links: http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2011/07/god-particle-close-to-being-discovered.html & http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2012/01/this-guy-might-not-be-100-right.html

Faster than light Neutrinos? Bologna.

Get it? Bologna? Because it was measured in Italy? Isn't it awesome when I have to explain a joke for it to be funny?

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Recently Neutrinos running through the Opera detector at CERN were measured (on the Italian side of their accelerator) by arriving 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected if traveling at light speed. Turns out, it was just a loose cable, no really. Read below. Stupid brilliant Physicists!

From the Science Insider:
Physicists had detected neutrinos traveling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.
According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis. 

Image source -> Wired.com

 Sources: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/neutrinos-faulty-cable/
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/02/faster_than_light_neutrinos_ex.php
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/breaking-news-error-undoes-faster.html
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/bummer-faster-light-neutrinos-werent-and-it-was-cable-guys-fault?cmpid=tw
http://gizmodo.com/5887398/a-loose-cable-caused-the-faster+than+light-particles-test

More on Neutrinos! -> http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2011/12/vampires-of-physics-not-twlight-kind.html

Earlier (related) links -> http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2011/07/god-particle-close-to-being-discovered.html & http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2012/01/this-guy-might-not-be-100-right.html & http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2011/12/mit-builds-camera-fast-enough-to.html & http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2012/01/biggest-solar-radiation-storm-in-years.html & http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2012/02/really-old-ice_16.html & http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2012/02/they-reached-ice.html

This guy might not be 100% right

I'm no means an Einstein hater (do they have those?), just saying E = mc² might have some evidence against it. Having said ALL that, in Albie's own words, it was just a THEORY*.

Really short version:
During an experiment at CERN, super excited Neutrinos arrived in Italy approx 60 nanoseconds sooner than they should've. Implying that they were traveling faster than the theoretical maximum speed of matter, the speed of light, 299,792,458 m / s (~671 million mph).

LHC

From the Digital Journal article:
Physicists at CERN have rerun tests conducted in September which suggested that neutrinos travel faster than light. The latest results are consistent with those of the first received with skepticism after faults were found in the experiment design.
Digital Journal reported that Dr. Bergio Bertolucci and his team of researchers in Gran Sasso announced in September "that neutrinos sent through the ground in the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus) experiment were measured as apparently traveling faster than speed of light. In the experiment, neutrinos sent from the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) laboratory in Geneva, to Gran Sasso laboratory 732 kilometers away, appeared to have made the trip faster than the speed of light, showing up in Italy a fraction of a second earlier than expected."


Source -> http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/314640

Earlier related link:
http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2011/07/god-particle-close-to-being-discovered.html

*and we all know if his brain had access to CERN's current equipment, I'd have a flying Delorean

The Vampires of Physics, not the tw*light kind

Everything you'd every want to know about Neutrinos in 1:25

THIS is the lab they're talking about at 0:44


Clickable link -> http://youtu.be/lAAmAbJvvJg

See? Learning Physics doesn't HAVE to be long and boring...

Source -> http://gizmodo.com/5869387/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-neutrinosin-less-than-two-minutes

Earlier link about Neutrinos -> http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/search/label/IceCube%20Neutrino%20lab%20NSF

MIT builds a camera fast enough to capture the motion of Light

In keeping with this webpage being random as hell, now a science post!

From MIT's website:
MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom. Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers, calls it the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” he says.

Particles of light — photons — enter the camera through the slit and are converted into electrons, which pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects the electrons corresponding to late-arriving photons more than it does those corresponding to early arriving ones. 


The image produced by the camera is two-dimensional, but only one of the dimensions — the one corresponding to the direction of the slit — is spatial. The other dimension, corresponding to the degree of deflection, is time. The image thus represents the time of arrival of photons passing through a one-dimensional slice of space.

"B*tches LOVE high speed cameras!"

Source -> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html via http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/13/dnp-mit-builds-camera-that-can-capture-at-the-speed-of-light-vi/ via https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html?_r=2&ref=technology

Another physics post -> http://www.dannyfinnegan.com/2011/07/god-particle-close-to-being-discovered.html