Particles accelerate without a push
Some physical principles have been considered immutable since the time of Isaac Newton: Light always travels in straight lines. No physical object can change its speed unless some outside force acts on it. Not so fast, says a new generation of physicists: While the underlying physical laws haven’t changed, new ways of “tricking” those laws to permit seemingly impossible actions have begun to appear. For example, work that began in 2007 proved that under special conditions, light could be made to move along a curved trajectory — a finding that is already beginning to find some practical applications. Now, in a new variation on the methods used to bend light, physicists at MIT and Israel’s Technion have found that subatomic particles can be induced to speed up all by themselves, almost to the speed of light, without the application of any external forces. The same underlying principle could also be used to...