Money and Finance
- Bbc Documentary: Beautiful Equations
Artist and writer Matt Collings takes the plunge into an alien world of equations. He asks top scientists to help him understand five of the most famous equations in science, talks to Stephen Hawking about his equation for black holes and comes face to...
- Gravitational Waves From Big Bang Detected
Link to article: Gravitational Waves from Big Bang Detected Physicists have found a long-predicted twist in light from the big bang that represents the first image of ripples in the universe called gravitational waves, researchers announced today....
- Why Some Physicists Bet Against The Higgs Boson - By Robert Wright
After Stephen Hawking conceded that he'd lost his bet about the Higgs boson, I wondered why he had been on the wrong side of the bet. Why had he doubted the existence of a particle widely assumed to be an essential constituent of physical reality?...
- Hadron Collider Breakthrough As Beams Collide
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider managed to make two proton beams collide at high energy Tuesday, marking a "new territory" in physics, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.The $10 billion research tool has been accelerating...
- Cern Fires Up New Atom Smasher To Near Big Bang
It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe - or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday. -Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated...
Money and Finance
Known and unknown unknowns
The world’s largest machine is about to open for business. It will, however, only scratch the surface of the universe
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WELL, it is about to happen. After more than a decade, SFr10 billion ($10 billion) and a lot of nail-biting, the first protons should spin their way into the Large Hadron Collider on August 8th. These protons will only be tests. But in a couple of months’ time, when the tests are complete, the particle-smashing will begin in earnest. At that moment the LHC, as the giant machine near Geneva is known to its friends, will take the first big step into the unknown reaches of particle physics for a quarter of a century. For, although physicists have been trying to keep themselves busy on marginal projects during this period, the truth is that the last truly fundamental subatomic particles, the W and Z bosons, were found in 1983.
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The next one, unless everyone’s theories are wrong, will be the Higgs boson, a theoretical construct required to give mass to the other particles of which matter is composed. That should come quite quickly. Only if it does not will people start scratching their heads.
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But even physicists do not spend SFr10 billion in the search for a single particle. What they are hoping is that the LHC will take them way beyond the universe described by the equations which predicted the W and Z bosons and predict the Higgs, and into terra that is truly incognita. Like the creatures drawn on the edge of a medieval map, the shapes of the denizens of this land are a mixture of observation and guesswork. The existence of some is confidently predicted, and their portraits will probably prove quite accurate. Others, though, are little more than names attached to things that can, at the moment, barely be perceived.
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Related previous post (with book recommendations at end):
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At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star
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- Bbc Documentary: Beautiful Equations
Artist and writer Matt Collings takes the plunge into an alien world of equations. He asks top scientists to help him understand five of the most famous equations in science, talks to Stephen Hawking about his equation for black holes and comes face to...
- Gravitational Waves From Big Bang Detected
Link to article: Gravitational Waves from Big Bang Detected Physicists have found a long-predicted twist in light from the big bang that represents the first image of ripples in the universe called gravitational waves, researchers announced today....
- Why Some Physicists Bet Against The Higgs Boson - By Robert Wright
After Stephen Hawking conceded that he'd lost his bet about the Higgs boson, I wondered why he had been on the wrong side of the bet. Why had he doubted the existence of a particle widely assumed to be an essential constituent of physical reality?...
- Hadron Collider Breakthrough As Beams Collide
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider managed to make two proton beams collide at high energy Tuesday, marking a "new territory" in physics, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.The $10 billion research tool has been accelerating...
- Cern Fires Up New Atom Smasher To Near Big Bang
It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe - or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday. -Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated...