Book Review: Fool Me Twice

Politicians often make decisions that have an impact on science, but because they usually lack basic scientific literacy, they really don't have an understanding of the scope involved in these decisions. In his new book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, filmmaker and science advocate Shawn Lawrence Otto argues that scientists need to become more engaged in the political realm and politicians need to have a better scientific understanding in order to make more informed decisions.

Among at least one Republican candidates for president, there is some concern about whether this science antagonism is good for their party, let alone the country as a whole. In his book, Otto explains how scientific ignorance on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum are leading to decisions which are based more on ideology than on fact-based evidence. In order to solve the significant challenges our country will face in the years ahead, we must invoke a solid understanding of science.

Otto's argument goes beyond mere pragmatism, though, making the case that the anti-authoritarian nature of scientific thinking is fundamentally and ideologically tied into the character of American democracy.?This book is a critical values check and should be required reading for every American politician ... and citizen.

You can find out more about the book by reading our full review.

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Infants Grasp Gravity with Innate Sense of Physics

Infants already have an intuitive understanding of certain physical laws by 2 months of age. As infants grow and learn they gain vast amounts of information about the laws governing the world around them.

Infants as young as 2 months old already have basic knowledge of "intuitive physics," researchers report in a new study.

Most studies into infant cognition employ eye-tracking technology - psychologists can tease out what an infant is thinking and what she considers to be unexpected by following her gaze in different scenarios. This method, called violation of expectation, involves showing babies photos, videos or events that proceed as expected, followed by others that break everyday rules. If the infant understands the implicit rules, he or she will show little interest in an expected situation, but will stare at images of a surprising event.

But at what point in their development do babies begin to understand how the physical world works?

NEWS: Mom's Diet Can Shape Baby's Brain

"We believe that infants are born with expectations about the objects around them, even though that knowledge is a skill that's never been taught," Kristy vanMarle, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, said in a statement. "As the child develops, this knowledge is refined and eventually leads to the abilities we use as adults."

To come to this conclusion, vanMarle and her colleague, Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Northwestern University, reviewed infant cognition research conducted over the last 30 years. They found that infants already have an intuitive understanding of certain physical laws by 2 months of age, when they start to track moving objects with both eyes consistently and can be tested with eye-tracking technology.

For instance, at this age they understand that unsupported objects will fall (gravity) and hidden objects don't cease to exist. In one test, researchers placed an object inside of a container and moved the container; 2-month-old infants knew that the hidden object moved with the container.

BRIEF: No TV for the Baby, Doctors' Group Urges

This innate "physics" knowledge only grows as the infants experience their surroundings and interact more with the world. By 5 months of age, babies understand that solid objects have different properties than noncohesive substances, such as water, the researchers found.

In a 2009 study, a research team (which included Hespos) habituated 5-month-old infants to either a blue solid or a blue liquid in a glass cup, which appeared to be the same when at rest. They tipped the glasses left and right, and poured the contents into other glasses, allowing the infants to form ideas about how the substances worked. Infants habituated to the liquid (but not the solid) weren't surprised that straws could penetrate it, but were confused when straws couldn't penetrate the blue solid. The opposite happened with infants habituated to the solid.

Hespos and vanMarle also learned that babies have rudimentary math abilities: Six-month-old infants can discriminate between numbers of dots (if one set held twice as many dots as the other), and 10-month-old infants can pick out which of two cups holds more liquid (if one cup held four times as much liquid as the other). Also at 10 months of age, babies will consistently choose larger amounts of food - such as crackers - in cups, though only if there are no more than three items in any cup.

While infants appear to be born with intuitive physics knowledge, the researchers believe that parents can further assist their children in developing expectations about the world through normal interactions, such as talking, playing peek-a-boo or letting them handle various safe objects.

NEWS: Humans Age at the Same Rate as Chimps, Gorillas 

"Natural interaction with the parent and objects in the world gives the child all the input that evolution has prepared the child to seek, accept and use to develop intuitive physics," vanMarle said.

The study was published in the January issue of the journal WIREs Cognitive Science.

Related LiveScience Stories

Copyright 2011 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Black Holes: Facts, Theory & Definition

Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.

Stellar black holes — small but deadly

When a star burns through the last of its fuel, it may find itself collapsing. For smaller stars, up to about three times the sun's mass, the new core will be a neutron star or a white dwarf. But when a larger star collapses, it continues to fall in on itself to create a stellar black hole.

Black holes formed by the collapse of individual stars are (relatively) small, but incredibly dense. Such an object packs three times or more the mass of the sun into a city-sized range. This leads to a crazy amount of gravitational force pulling on objects around it. Black holes consume the dust and gas from the galaxy around them, growing in size.

This artist's conception of Cygnus X-1 shows the black hole drawing material from companion star (right) into a hot, swirling disk.
CREDIT: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA

View full size image

Supermassive black holes — the birth of giants

Small black holes populate the universe, but their cousins, supermassive black holes, dominate. Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times as massive as the sun, but have a radius similar to that of Earth's closest star. Such black holes are thought to lie at the center of pretty much every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Scientists aren't certain how such large black holes spawn. Once they've formed, they can easily gather mass from the dust and gas around them, material that is plentiful in the center of galaxies, allowing them to grow to enormous sizes. [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]

Supermassive may be the result of hundreds or thousands of tiny black holes that merge together. Large gas clouds could also be responsible, collapsing together and rapidly accreting mass. A third option is the collapse of a stellar cluster, a group of stars all falling together. [Images: The Big Bang & Early Universe]

Intermediate black holes – stuck in the middle

Scientists once thought black holes came in only small and large sizes, but recent research has revealed the possibility for the existence of midsize, or intermediate, black holes. Such bodies could form when stars in a cluster collide in a chain reaction. Several of these forming in the same region could eventually fall together in the center of a galaxy and create a supermassive black hole. [What's at the Center of Black Holes?]

Black hole theory — how they tick

Black holes are incredibly massive, but cover only a small region. Because of the relationship between mass and gravity, this means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force. Virtually nothing can escape from them — under classical physics, even light is trapped by a black hole.

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
CREDIT: Alain R. | Wikimedia Commons

View full size image

Such a strong pull creates an observational problem when it comes to black holes — scientists can't "see" them the way they can see stars and other objects in space. Instead, scientists must rely on the radiation that is emitted as dust and gas are drawn into the dense creatures. Supermassive black holes, lying in the center of a galaxy, may find themselves shrouded by the dust and gas thick around them, which can block the tell-tale emissions.

Sometimes as matter is drawn toward a black hole, it ricochets off of the event horizon and is hurled outward, rather than being tugged into the maw. Bright jets of material traveling at near-relativistic speeds are created. Although the black hole itself remains unseen, these powerful jets can be viewed from great distances.

Black holes have three "layers" — the outer and inner event horizon and the singularity.

The event horizon of a black hole is the boundary around the mouth of the black hole where light loses its ability to escape. Once a particle crosses the event horizon, it cannot leave. Gravity is constant across the event horizon.

The inner region of a black hole, where its mass lies, is known as its singularity, the single point in space-time where the mass of the black hole is concentrated.

Under the classical mechanics of physics, nothing can escape from a black hole. However, things shift slightly when quantum mechanics are added to the equation. Under quantum mechanics, for every particle, there is an antiparticle, a particle with the same mass and opposite electric charge. When they meet, particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate one another.

If a particle-antiparticle pair is created just beyond the reach of the event horizon of a black hole, it is possible to have one drawn into the black hole itself while the other is ejected. The result is that the event horizon of the black hole has been reduced and black holes can decay, a process that is rejected under classical mechanics.

Scientists are still working to understand the equations by which black holes function.

Artist's concept of the huge black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87, the most massive known black hole to date. Gas swirls around the black hole in an accretion disk. The bright blue jet shooting from the region of the black hole is created by gas that never made it into the hole itself but was instead funneled into an energetic jet.
CREDIT: Gemini Observatory/AURA illustration by Lynette Cook

View full size image

Interesting facts about black holes

• If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity.

• Black holes do not "suck." Suction is caused by pulling something into a vacuum, which the massive black hole definitely is not. Instead, objects fall into them.

• Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity.

• The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.

• The first object considered to be a black hole is Cygnus X-1. Rockets carrying Geiger counters discovered eight new x-ray sources. In 1971, scientists detected radio emission coming from Cygnus X-1, and a massive hidden companion was found and identified as a black hole.

• Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a 1974 friendly wager between Stephen Hawking and a fellow physicistKip Thorne, with Hawking betting that the source was not a black hole. In 1990, he conceded defeat.

• Miniature black holes may have formed immediately after the Big Bang. Rapidly expanding space may have squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes less massive than the sun.

• If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.

• Astronomers estimate there are anywhere from ten million to a billion stellar black holes, with masses roughly thrice that of the sun, in the Milky Way.

• The interesting relationship between string theory and black holes give rise to more types of massive giants than found under conventional classical mechanics.

Black Holes: Facts, Theory & Definition

Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.

Stellar black holes — small but deadly

When a star burns through the last of its fuel, it may find itself collapsing. For smaller stars, up to about three times the sun's mass, the new core will be a neutron star or a white dwarf. But when a larger star collapses, it continues to fall in on itself to create a stellar black hole.

Black holes formed by the collapse of individual stars are (relatively) small, but incredibly dense. Such an object packs three times or more the mass of the sun into a city-sized range. This leads to a crazy amount of gravitational force pulling on objects around it. Black holes consume the dust and gas from the galaxy around them, growing in size.

This artist's conception of Cygnus X-1 shows the black hole drawing material from companion star (right) into a hot, swirling disk.
CREDIT: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA

View full size image

Supermassive black holes — the birth of giants

Small black holes populate the universe, but their cousins, supermassive black holes, dominate. Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times as massive as the sun, but have a radius similar to that of Earth's closest star. Such black holes are thought to lie at the center of pretty much every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Scientists aren't certain how such large black holes spawn. Once they've formed, they can easily gather mass from the dust and gas around them, material that is plentiful in the center of galaxies, allowing them to grow to enormous sizes. [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]

Supermassive may be the result of hundreds or thousands of tiny black holes that merge together. Large gas clouds could also be responsible, collapsing together and rapidly accreting mass. A third option is the collapse of a stellar cluster, a group of stars all falling together. [Images: The Big Bang & Early Universe]

Intermediate black holes – stuck in the middle

Scientists once thought black holes came in only small and large sizes, but recent research has revealed the possibility for the existence of midsize, or intermediate, black holes. Such bodies could form when stars in a cluster collide in a chain reaction. Several of these forming in the same region could eventually fall together in the center of a galaxy and create a supermassive black hole. [What's at the Center of Black Holes?]

Black hole theory — how they tick

Black holes are incredibly massive, but cover only a small region. Because of the relationship between mass and gravity, this means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force. Virtually nothing can escape from them — under classical physics, even light is trapped by a black hole.

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
CREDIT: Alain R. | Wikimedia Commons

View full size image

Such a strong pull creates an observational problem when it comes to black holes — scientists can't "see" them the way they can see stars and other objects in space. Instead, scientists must rely on the radiation that is emitted as dust and gas are drawn into the dense creatures. Supermassive black holes, lying in the center of a galaxy, may find themselves shrouded by the dust and gas thick around them, which can block the tell-tale emissions.

Sometimes as matter is drawn toward a black hole, it ricochets off of the event horizon and is hurled outward, rather than being tugged into the maw. Bright jets of material traveling at near-relativistic speeds are created. Although the black hole itself remains unseen, these powerful jets can be viewed from great distances.

Black holes have three "layers" — the outer and inner event horizon and the singularity.

The event horizon of a black hole is the boundary around the mouth of the black hole where light loses its ability to escape. Once a particle crosses the event horizon, it cannot leave. Gravity is constant across the event horizon.

The inner region of a black hole, where its mass lies, is known as its singularity, the single point in space-time where the mass of the black hole is concentrated.

Under the classical mechanics of physics, nothing can escape from a black hole. However, things shift slightly when quantum mechanics are added to the equation. Under quantum mechanics, for every particle, there is an antiparticle, a particle with the same mass and opposite electric charge. When they meet, particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate one another.

If a particle-antiparticle pair is created just beyond the reach of the event horizon of a black hole, it is possible to have one drawn into the black hole itself while the other is ejected. The result is that the event horizon of the black hole has been reduced and black holes can decay, a process that is rejected under classical mechanics.

Scientists are still working to understand the equations by which black holes function.

Artist's concept of the huge black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87, the most massive known black hole to date. Gas swirls around the black hole in an accretion disk. The bright blue jet shooting from the region of the black hole is created by gas that never made it into the hole itself but was instead funneled into an energetic jet.
CREDIT: Gemini Observatory/AURA illustration by Lynette Cook

View full size image

Interesting facts about black holes

• If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity.

• Black holes do not "suck." Suction is caused by pulling something into a vacuum, which the massive black hole definitely is not. Instead, objects fall into them.

• Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity.

• The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.

• The first object considered to be a black hole is Cygnus X-1. Rockets carrying Geiger counters discovered eight new x-ray sources. In 1971, scientists detected radio emission coming from Cygnus X-1, and a massive hidden companion was found and identified as a black hole.

• Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a 1974 friendly wager between Stephen Hawking and a fellow physicistKip Thorne, with Hawking betting that the source was not a black hole. In 1990, he conceded defeat.

• Miniature black holes may have formed immediately after the Big Bang. Rapidly expanding space may have squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes less massive than the sun.

• If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.

• Astronomers estimate there are anywhere from ten million to a billion stellar black holes, with masses roughly thrice that of the sun, in the Milky Way.

• The interesting relationship between string theory and black holes give rise to more types of massive giants than found under conventional classical mechanics.

Black Holes: Facts, Theory & Definition

Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.

Stellar black holes — small but deadly

When a star burns through the last of its fuel, it may find itself collapsing. For smaller stars, up to about three times the sun's mass, the new core will be a neutron star or a white dwarf. But when a larger star collapses, it continues to fall in on itself to create a stellar black hole.

Black holes formed by the collapse of individual stars are (relatively) small, but incredibly dense. Such an object packs three times or more the mass of the sun into a city-sized range. This leads to a crazy amount of gravitational force pulling on objects around it. Black holes consume the dust and gas from the galaxy around them, growing in size.

This artist's conception of Cygnus X-1 shows the black hole drawing material from companion star (right) into a hot, swirling disk.
CREDIT: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA

View full size image

Supermassive black holes — the birth of giants

Small black holes populate the universe, but their cousins, supermassive black holes, dominate. Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times as massive as the sun, but have a radius similar to that of Earth's closest star. Such black holes are thought to lie at the center of pretty much every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Scientists aren't certain how such large black holes spawn. Once they've formed, they can easily gather mass from the dust and gas around them, material that is plentiful in the center of galaxies, allowing them to grow to enormous sizes. [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]

Supermassive may be the result of hundreds or thousands of tiny black holes that merge together. Large gas clouds could also be responsible, collapsing together and rapidly accreting mass. A third option is the collapse of a stellar cluster, a group of stars all falling together. [Images: The Big Bang & Early Universe]

Intermediate black holes – stuck in the middle

Scientists once thought black holes came in only small and large sizes, but recent research has revealed the possibility for the existence of midsize, or intermediate, black holes. Such bodies could form when stars in a cluster collide in a chain reaction. Several of these forming in the same region could eventually fall together in the center of a galaxy and create a supermassive black hole. [What's at the Center of Black Holes?]

Black hole theory — how they tick

Black holes are incredibly massive, but cover only a small region. Because of the relationship between mass and gravity, this means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force. Virtually nothing can escape from them — under classical physics, even light is trapped by a black hole.

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
CREDIT: Alain R. | Wikimedia Commons

View full size image

Such a strong pull creates an observational problem when it comes to black holes — scientists can't "see" them the way they can see stars and other objects in space. Instead, scientists must rely on the radiation that is emitted as dust and gas are drawn into the dense creatures. Supermassive black holes, lying in the center of a galaxy, may find themselves shrouded by the dust and gas thick around them, which can block the tell-tale emissions.

Sometimes as matter is drawn toward a black hole, it ricochets off of the event horizon and is hurled outward, rather than being tugged into the maw. Bright jets of material traveling at near-relativistic speeds are created. Although the black hole itself remains unseen, these powerful jets can be viewed from great distances.

Black holes have three "layers" — the outer and inner event horizon and the singularity.

The event horizon of a black hole is the boundary around the mouth of the black hole where light loses its ability to escape. Once a particle crosses the event horizon, it cannot leave. Gravity is constant across the event horizon.

The inner region of a black hole, where its mass lies, is known as its singularity, the single point in space-time where the mass of the black hole is concentrated.

Under the classical mechanics of physics, nothing can escape from a black hole. However, things shift slightly when quantum mechanics are added to the equation. Under quantum mechanics, for every particle, there is an antiparticle, a particle with the same mass and opposite electric charge. When they meet, particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate one another.

If a particle-antiparticle pair is created just beyond the reach of the event horizon of a black hole, it is possible to have one drawn into the black hole itself while the other is ejected. The result is that the event horizon of the black hole has been reduced and black holes can decay, a process that is rejected under classical mechanics.

Scientists are still working to understand the equations by which black holes function.

Artist's concept of the huge black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87, the most massive known black hole to date. Gas swirls around the black hole in an accretion disk. The bright blue jet shooting from the region of the black hole is created by gas that never made it into the hole itself but was instead funneled into an energetic jet.
CREDIT: Gemini Observatory/AURA illustration by Lynette Cook

View full size image

Interesting facts about black holes

• If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity.

• Black holes do not "suck." Suction is caused by pulling something into a vacuum, which the massive black hole definitely is not. Instead, objects fall into them.

• Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity.

• The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.

• The first object considered to be a black hole is Cygnus X-1. Rockets carrying Geiger counters discovered eight new x-ray sources. In 1971, scientists detected radio emission coming from Cygnus X-1, and a massive hidden companion was found and identified as a black hole.

• Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a 1974 friendly wager between Stephen Hawking and a fellow physicistKip Thorne, with Hawking betting that the source was not a black hole. In 1990, he conceded defeat.

• Miniature black holes may have formed immediately after the Big Bang. Rapidly expanding space may have squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes less massive than the sun.

• If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.

• Astronomers estimate there are anywhere from ten million to a billion stellar black holes, with masses roughly thrice that of the sun, in the Milky Way.

• The interesting relationship between string theory and black holes give rise to more types of massive giants than found under conventional classical mechanics.

Black Holes: Facts, Theory & Definition

Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.

Stellar black holes — small but deadly

When a star burns through the last of its fuel, it may find itself collapsing. For smaller stars, up to about three times the sun's mass, the new core will be a neutron star or a white dwarf. But when a larger star collapses, it continues to fall in on itself to create a stellar black hole.

Black holes formed by the collapse of individual stars are (relatively) small, but incredibly dense. Such an object packs three times or more the mass of the sun into a city-sized range. This leads to a crazy amount of gravitational force pulling on objects around it. Black holes consume the dust and gas from the galaxy around them, growing in size.

This artist's conception of Cygnus X-1 shows the black hole drawing material from companion star (right) into a hot, swirling disk.
CREDIT: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA

View full size image

Supermassive black holes — the birth of giants

Small black holes populate the universe, but their cousins, supermassive black holes, dominate. Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times as massive as the sun, but have a radius similar to that of Earth's closest star. Such black holes are thought to lie at the center of pretty much every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Scientists aren't certain how such large black holes spawn. Once they've formed, they can easily gather mass from the dust and gas around them, material that is plentiful in the center of galaxies, allowing them to grow to enormous sizes. [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]

Supermassive may be the result of hundreds or thousands of tiny black holes that merge together. Large gas clouds could also be responsible, collapsing together and rapidly accreting mass. A third option is the collapse of a stellar cluster, a group of stars all falling together. [Images: The Big Bang & Early Universe]

Intermediate black holes – stuck in the middle

Scientists once thought black holes came in only small and large sizes, but recent research has revealed the possibility for the existence of midsize, or intermediate, black holes. Such bodies could form when stars in a cluster collide in a chain reaction. Several of these forming in the same region could eventually fall together in the center of a galaxy and create a supermassive black hole. [What's at the Center of Black Holes?]

Black hole theory — how they tick

Black holes are incredibly massive, but cover only a small region. Because of the relationship between mass and gravity, this means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force. Virtually nothing can escape from them — under classical physics, even light is trapped by a black hole.

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
CREDIT: Alain R. | Wikimedia Commons

View full size image

Such a strong pull creates an observational problem when it comes to black holes — scientists can't "see" them the way they can see stars and other objects in space. Instead, scientists must rely on the radiation that is emitted as dust and gas are drawn into the dense creatures. Supermassive black holes, lying in the center of a galaxy, may find themselves shrouded by the dust and gas thick around them, which can block the tell-tale emissions.

Sometimes as matter is drawn toward a black hole, it ricochets off of the event horizon and is hurled outward, rather than being tugged into the maw. Bright jets of material traveling at near-relativistic speeds are created. Although the black hole itself remains unseen, these powerful jets can be viewed from great distances.

Black holes have three "layers" — the outer and inner event horizon and the singularity.

The event horizon of a black hole is the boundary around the mouth of the black hole where light loses its ability to escape. Once a particle crosses the event horizon, it cannot leave. Gravity is constant across the event horizon.

The inner region of a black hole, where its mass lies, is known as its singularity, the single point in space-time where the mass of the black hole is concentrated.

Under the classical mechanics of physics, nothing can escape from a black hole. However, things shift slightly when quantum mechanics are added to the equation. Under quantum mechanics, for every particle, there is an antiparticle, a particle with the same mass and opposite electric charge. When they meet, particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate one another.

If a particle-antiparticle pair is created just beyond the reach of the event horizon of a black hole, it is possible to have one drawn into the black hole itself while the other is ejected. The result is that the event horizon of the black hole has been reduced and black holes can decay, a process that is rejected under classical mechanics.

Scientists are still working to understand the equations by which black holes function.

Artist's concept of the huge black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87, the most massive known black hole to date. Gas swirls around the black hole in an accretion disk. The bright blue jet shooting from the region of the black hole is created by gas that never made it into the hole itself but was instead funneled into an energetic jet.
CREDIT: Gemini Observatory/AURA illustration by Lynette Cook

View full size image

Interesting facts about black holes

• If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity.

• Black holes do not "suck." Suction is caused by pulling something into a vacuum, which the massive black hole definitely is not. Instead, objects fall into them.

• Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity.

• The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.

• The first object considered to be a black hole is Cygnus X-1. Rockets carrying Geiger counters discovered eight new x-ray sources. In 1971, scientists detected radio emission coming from Cygnus X-1, and a massive hidden companion was found and identified as a black hole.

• Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a 1974 friendly wager between Stephen Hawking and a fellow physicistKip Thorne, with Hawking betting that the source was not a black hole. In 1990, he conceded defeat.

• Miniature black holes may have formed immediately after the Big Bang. Rapidly expanding space may have squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes less massive than the sun.

• If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.

• Astronomers estimate there are anywhere from ten million to a billion stellar black holes, with masses roughly thrice that of the sun, in the Milky Way.

• The interesting relationship between string theory and black holes give rise to more types of massive giants than found under conventional classical mechanics.

Biggest Physics Stories of 2011

Two physics stories in 2012 easily eclipsed all the others, making headlines all over the place. Here are the two stories that caused the entire physics world to sit up and take notice:

Easily the most significant of these stories, if it pans out, would be the discovery of neutrinos that move faster than the speed of light. If further evidence suggests that this is happening, then 2011 will become a defining, benchmark year for physics.

Physicists have a tendency to define physics into three basic epochs:

Pre-Newtonian physics (which really isn't considered physics)Classical (Newtonian) physicsModern physics

The modern physics era is usually defined as beginning in 1905, when Einstein published the papers that basically formed the origin of both relativity and quantum physics.

If neutrinos are moving faster than the speed of light, then 2011 will be yet another dividing line, because physicists will have to completely revise what they've believed they understand about the universe, possibly adopting some form of variable speed of light cosmology, which has until now been just a fringe, abstract hypothetical conjecture.

However, don't throw out your old physics textbooks just yet! Physicists are still extremely skeptical about these neutrino results, and rightly so. The whole situation is caused by results out of only the OPERA experiment at CERN and, though follow-up research has supported the original findings, there's still very little overall evidence for such a bold claim. In addition to more work at OPERA, scientists at other facilities are hoping to test the findings to get confirming evidence. It'll really be in 2012 that these results will stand or fall ... but then it took over a decade from 1905 for Einstein's papers to bear fruit, as well!

One of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider has been to search for the elusive Higgs boson, the particle which rounds out the Standard Model of particle physics by giving the other particles their mass. See, the problem with the Standard Model is that it's too perfect. The symmetries involved match up in such a way that, if it described the universe, there would be no mass of any kind.

Enter the Higgs boson. This particle is a crucial component of the Higgs mechanism, which throws the symmetries involved off just enough to allow for the observed masses to manifest in our universe. In other words, it's the particle that makes "stuff" out of energy.

For a few weeks in November and December, it was sounding like CERN scientists were going to announce that they'd discovered the Higgs boson, but these rumors appeared to be overblown. Instead, they offered only "a hint of a detection." Normally, this annual report of findings doesn't come out until the new year, but CERN decided to release them before the holiday season this year.

These results, which come from the ATLAS and CMS projects, both show some data bumps which scientists think may correspond with regions where the Higgs boson would reside. Right now, the scientists involved are saying there's about a 50% chance that the results are the Higgs.?Next year, the research will ramp up in these areas and we'll have better confirmation (or refutation) of the results.

The ATLAS results indicate a mass of 126 GeV while the CMS results give 124 GeV. (GeV = gigaelectron-volts, which is an energy measurement corresponding to mass. A hydrogen atom is about 1 GeV. These results would give the Higgs boson about the same mass as a cesium atom.) It looks like the results do narrow the range of the Higgs boson's energy level to somewhere between 115 GeV and 130 GeV, giving the CERN scientists a range to explore in the future, even if they don't find further evidence right at the 124-126 range.

If these are the right energies for the Higgs, then the current version of the theory will need to be modified to account for it. There's a possibility that something like supersymmetry (or something new) would need included to make the theoretical Higgs boson match up with the one we ultimately observe.

This isn't to say that other physics stories haven't proven interesting as well. For example, an internet video demonstrating quantum levitation went viral this year, ending up ultimately on The Today Show. Ultimately it caught my attention by sparking a fun segment on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report.

Possibly one of the biggest stories in 2011 hasn't been strongly tied to science, but rather to economics. The economy is still tottering along, trying to right itself, and science research budgets have been slashed along with everything else. Easily the most iconic aspect of humanity's space program, the costly space shuttle was retired in 2011, calling into question man's future in space. Though this means little for science itself (which can easily be carried out with unmanned missions), there's certainly something emotional that gets lost in removing direct human experience from the equation.

But science isn't safe from these cuts either. For much of the year, it looked likely that Congress was going to cut funding to the James Webb Space Telescope, the currently-being-built successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Without it, we'll be very hard pressed to observe the universe in greater detail, which is needed to gain a better understanding of the role played by both dark matter and dark energy in the formation and development of the cosmos. (In 2012, there may also be more Earth-based experiments that shed light on these.)

In November, however, some budget-wrangling saved the James Webb Space Telescope, though it did put a cap on how overbudget the project is allowed to go.

With an election year ramping up, this certainly isn't the last we'll hear of funding cuts to science research projects. As with the stories above, it looks like 2012 will help decide how this one comes out.

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