This week's science news was filled with big discoveries from the world of the small, led by a physicist's creation of a mini-universe, which was designed so we can watch time emerge from within an isolated quantum system.
The experiment was performed using a Bose-Einstein condensate — a strange state of matter that consists of thousands of atoms blended into a single quantum object at near absolute zero (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). The system showed time speeding up, slowing down and even stopping, depending on what the system was doing.
Those weren't the only highbrow high jinks using a Bose-Einstein condensate we reported on this week. We also covered NASA's upgrade to its mini-fridge-sized laboratory on the International Space Station that will use the bizarre state...
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