ROUTINE SOYUZ LAUNCH
Spectacular in its no-fuss
simplicity. Plus onboard shots!
youtu.be/fW2EhH1xRrYIMAXSHUTTLE LAUNCH
Atlantis’ was filmed in 2009 for an
IMAX doco. It’s like being there.
youtu.be/uuYoYl5kyTOP5 54
Greatest rocket launches
on YouTubeEveryone knows E=mc2 but what about m=E/
c2? That’s the equation for the amount of
energy required to create mass - or matter -
from, well, energy itself.
It’s an important part of conirming
Einstein’s theories and the work done by
other physicists after him, and scientists at
the Imperial College London are trying to
actually do it.
The idea is simple enough. Proposed in
1934 and called the Breit-Wheeler process,
conirmed back in 1934 had a lot to do with
the unavailability of extremely powerful
lasers. Now though, the Gemini laser at
STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s
Central Laser facility might be up to the job.
If the experiment is a success and the Breit-
Wheeler process conirmed, it will add one
more piece, perhaps the inal piece, to the
puzzle of quantum electrodynamics and give
us new insight into such things as gamma ray
bursters, and even the Big Bang itself.it hypothesises that it should be possible to
smash two photons together hard enough
to create an electron and a positron (an
anti-electron). Electrons don’t have a LOT
of mass, sure, and if the electron and the
positron touch each other they’ll convert
back into energy via an matter-antimatter
annihilation, but that’s not the point. The
point is to demonstrate that energy can be
converted into matter.
That the Breit-Wheeler process wasn’tTurning Laser Light Into Real Matter
12 POPULAR SCIENCE
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