At the heart of the matter: What is the single most important fact in science? It is a question of almost risible naivety and surely one that no serious scientist would attempt to answer. Yet in the early 1960s the American Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman put forward what he believed to be the answer. If the world was facing immediate obliteration, so that there was only time to scribble down one scientific fact for future generations, then according to Feynman that sentence should be: “All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” [Guardian]
Scientists claim to ’see dark matter’: Scientists may have caught a glimpse of the long sought “dark matter” that makes up 90 per cent of the mass of the universe. The discovery takes scientists a step further to determining the nature of dark matter, which has been an elusive puzzle since it was first discovered more than 70 years ago. [Telegraph]
May 1st, 2008 at 9:52 am
This article is filed under Blog, Physics.
Before the Big Bang - the Big Bounce: Scientists have obtained their first glimpse of what happened before the Big Bang of creation, revealing there was a “Big Bounce”. The new work suggests that time existed before the Big Bang, when a more ancient universe collapsed to give birth to the one we live in today. Ours is the latest universe in a series that expanded, then collapsed, before another - slightly different cosmos - was born anew, though many details are obscure and, the theory concludes, will always remain that way. [Telegraph]
Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole: Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic. To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident. Nevertheless, some experts say too much hype and not enough candor on the part of scientists about the promises and perils of what they do could boomerang into a public relations disaster for science, opening the door for charlatans and demagogues. [NYT]
April 16th, 2008 at 9:30 am
This article is filed under Blog, Physics.
Prof Peter Higgs interview: Smashing atoms at CERN and the hunt for the ‘God’ particle: The machine will slam subatomic particles called protons together to recreate conditions not seen since an eyeblink after the Big Bang of creation and explore new realms of nature, including finding the Higgs particle that plays a starring role in current theory, holding it together, and helping to endow matter with mass. Named after Prof Peter Higgs, most physicists call the particle the Higgs boson. One Nobel laureate gave it the grandiose title of the “God particle”, after his publishers refused to let him call his book “The Goddam Particle”: everyone agrees that it is, without doubt, the slipperiest particle of physics. [Telegraph]
Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More: They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe. Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure. [NYT]
April 7th, 2008 at 10:08 am
This article is filed under Blog, Physics.
3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang: In the standard interpretation of the Big Bang, which took shape in the 1960s, the formative event was not an explosion that occurred at some point in space and time—it was an explosion of space and time. In this view, time did not exist beforehand. Even for many researchers in the field, this was a bitter pill to swallow. It is hard to imagine time just starting: How does a universe decide when it is time to pop into existence? [Discover]
The Big Bang: what will we find?: The expert opinion on what the atom-smashing machine may tell us. There is lot of feverish speculation about what will happen when the Large Hadron Collider starts humankind’s biggest effort ever to shed light on the fundamentals of the universe. Will the Geneva-based effort reveal why most sub-atomic particles have mass (probably signalled by the appearance of something called the Higgs particle)? Will the vast experiment reveal why nature prefers matter over anti-matter? [Telegraph]
March 25th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
This article is filed under Blog, Physics.
Atom-Smasher Gears Up to Find ‘God Particle’: If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, which is so tantalizing that it has been called “the God Particle.” [Discovery]
What is the matter with the universe?: The problem is that, by the standard picture of creation, we should not exist at all because equal quantities of matter and “antimatter” were created in the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. [Telegraph]
March 24th, 2008 at 11:57 am
This article is filed under Blog, Physics.
A 100-ton wheel, the last piece of an ambitious experiment that scientists hope will help unlock the secrets of the universe, was successfully lowered into an underground cavern on Friday. It is the final major element in the ATLAS particle detector, the largest of four detectors being hooked up to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, which the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) hopes to start up around the middle of 2008. [MSNBC]
Could the next Einstein be a surfer dude? Six iconoclasts who could revolutionize physics—again. [Discover]
You could think of it as the biggest, most powerful microscope in the history of science. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), now being completed underneath a circle of countryside and villages a short drive from Geneva, will peer into the physics of the shortest distances (down to a nano-nanometer) and the highest energies ever probed. [Scientific American]
February 29th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
This article is filed under Blog, Physics.
Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black. But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions — the pinnacle of stealthy technology. [Washington Post]
In the past few months some tantalising, and mind-boggling, ideas have emerged: that there should be two dimensions of time, not one; that time could grind to a halt in a few billion years; or, most radical of all, that time does not even exist [Telegraph].
In cutting their funding of the physical sciences, and devaluing science education, the US and UK governments are committing ‘scientific vandalism’ [Spiked].
February 20th, 2008 at 9:57 am
This article is filed under Anthropology, Blog, Physics.
