Tag Archives: Large Hadron Collider
US experiments find hint of a break in the laws of physics
At 9 pm India time on April 7, physicists at an American research facility delivered a shot in the arm to efforts to find flaws in a powerful theory that explains how the building blocks of the universe work. Physicists … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged anomalous magnetic dipole moment, dark energy, dark matter, Fermilab Muon g-2, g-2 anomaly, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, LHCb, muon dipole moment, Muon g-2, neutrino masses, New Physics, particle physics, physics beyond the standard model, Standard Model, Standard Model of particle physics, supersymmetry
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The awesome limits of superconductors
On June 24, a press release from CERN said that scientists and engineers working on upgrading the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had “built and operated … the most powerful electrical transmission line … to date”. The transmission line consisted of … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged Abrikosov vortex lattice, Abrikosov vortices, BCS theory, Bose-Einstein condensate, CERN, Cooper pairs, copper, electrical conductivity, electrical resistivity, electrons, flux-flow resistance, Joule heating, Large Hadron Collider, Lisa Randall, magnesium diboride, magnetic flux, Meissner effect, niobium, Pauli's exclusion principle, Praveen Chaddah, protons, silver, superconductors, superfluid helium, titanium, type I superconductors, type II superconductors, vortex pinning
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My heart of physics
Every July 4, I have occasion to remember two things: the discovery of the Higgs boson, and my first published byline for an article about the discovery of the Higgs boson. I have no trouble believing it’s been eight years … Continue reading
Posted in Life notes, Scicomm
Tagged ATLAS detector, Atomki, axions, CEPC, CERN, CMS detector, hedonism, Higgs boson, Higgs factory, Large Hadron Collider, particle physics, Quantum mechanics, Sabine Hossenfelder, thermodynamics, XENON excess
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Where is the coolest lab in the universe?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performs an impressive feat every time it accelerates billions of protons to nearly the speed of light – and not in terms of the energy alone. For example, you release more energy when you clap … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged blue hypergiant, Boomerang Nebula, Bose-Einstein condensate, cosmic microwave background, energy density, Eta Carinae, gas outflow, heat, International Space Station, kinetic energy, Large Hadron Collider, Nature News, red giant, temperature, thermal equilibrium, thermodynamics, vacuum, Vladivostok, white dwarf, Wolfgang Ketterle
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Peter Higgs, self-promoter
I was randomly rewatching The Big Bang Theory on Netflix today when I spotted this gem: Okay, maybe less a gem and more a shiny stone, but still. The screenshot, taken from the third episode of the sixth season, shows … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Science
Tagged C.R. Hagen, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Englert, Francois Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Gerardus t Hooft, Greenpeace, Higgs, Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Large Hadron Collider, particle physics, Peter Higgs, Philip Warren Anderson, Robert Brout, Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory, Tom Kibble, Wolf Prize
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The not-so-obvious obvious
If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you’ll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known fact in study-speak. I don’t … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged Brian Wansink, Cornell University, data torturing, Higgs boson, Ig Nobel Prizes, incremental research, Large Hadron Collider, Marc Abrahams, modelling, ozone, p-hacking, Ronald H Coase, scientific research, statistical significance, University of Exeter
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Science v. tech, à la Cixin Liu
A fascinating observation by Cixin Liu in an interview in Public Books, to John Plotz and translated by Pu Wang (numbers added): … technology precedes science. (1) Way before the rise of modern science, there were so many technologies, so … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Science
Tagged Bernhard Riemann, Cixin Liu, glass ceiling, Large Hadron Collider, mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry, particle physics, Riemannian geometry, technology, Three Body Problem
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The symmetry incarnations
This post was originally published on October 6, 2012. I recently rediscovered it and decided to republish it with a few updates. Geometric symmetry in nature is often a sign of unperturbedness, as if nothing has interfered with a natural … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged anastomosis, asymptote, Banach-Tarski paradox, Big Bang Theory, cellular automata, degrees of freedom, electro-weak symmetry breaking, fractals, Gilbreath's conjecture, hypercube, Large Hadron Collider, Mandelbrot sets, Mulliken symbols, Nambu-Goldstone bosons, prime numbers, surface tension, symmetry, thermodynamics, V.S. Ramachandran
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Exploring what it means to be big
Reading a Nature report titled ‘Step aside CERN: There’s a cheaper way to break open physics‘ (January 10, 2018) brought to mind something G. Rajasekaran, former head of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, told me once: that the future … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged capitalism, classical physics, cyclotrons, Large Hadron Collider, laser wakefield acceleration, tabletop accelerators
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All the science in ‘The Cloverfield Paradox’
I watched The Cloverfield Paradox last night, the horror film that Paramount pictures had dumped with Netflix and which was then released by Netflix on February 4. It’s a dumb production: unlike H.R. Giger’s existential, visceral horrors that I so … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged black holes, compactification, high dimensions, Interstellar, Kaluza-Klein theory, Large Hadron Collider, particle accelerators, Quantum mechanics, special theory of relativity, Spectral, string theory, The Cloverfield Paradox, wave function, wavefunction
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