Higgs Boson 2: Boson Harder

Here's the story.

And another one. From the horse's mouth, so to speak. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the physicists at CERN... still haven't found the Higgs boson. But they're damn close. 

Here's what the announcement was about. Being a project of gigantic proportions, the Large Hadron Collider has many, many teams of scientists working on each project. Finding the Higgs boson is only one of the many things being researched, though certainly one of the most important. 

Like antimatter studies. Antimatter is awesome. 

Blinded by the Light

Being a scholarly man, I have naturally abhorrent eyesight. My visual acuity is about 20/500, in both eyes. When compared to the perfect eyesight of 20/20… I’m not doing too hot. But I wondered, as I put in my contacts for astigmatism, what that number actually measured. What does it mean? How is my eye so horribly out-of-whack?

Smashing Pumpkins

Happy day-after-Halloween, everyone!

Halloween: The one day where giving candy to other people’s kids is
not only acceptable, but the preferred method of communication.

I guess I don't have to tell you that, as a physicist, I love shooting things into the air. For this reason, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays; it gives me a chance to watch pumpkin chucking. For any of you who are unfamiliar with the process, this is the breakdown:

1. Get a pumpkin.

2. Make a device that throws the pumpkin.

3. Throw the pumpkin using the device.

Hokie Stone

It turns out that the 78^th annual SESAPS meeting was all that I could have hoped for, and more. The most revealing part of the whole thing was just how many types of physicists there are. There were 35 different categories of talks, all with two to eight speakers each, going all day. That’s a lot of physics to cover.

Of course, some of the talks were more interesting (and more accessible) than others. For instance, did you ever wonder how a cat’s tongue laps up water? Neither did I, until I saw a presentation explaining the physics behind it. 

A Letter to Readers - Conferences

Fine Readers of PiPT, 


Sorry for the long delay in blog posts! It always stresses me out when I haven't written something in more than four days, and it's been a good 3 weeks since this site got any love, so you can imagine my state. But I think that it was worth it, because I was hard at work getting ready to attend...

Great Scott!

By now, you've either heard from me that CERN found faster-than-light particles, heard it from the news, or just not heard about it at all (in which case, don't you dare stop reading). This finding has turned the scientific community for a loop, and no one quite knows how to react. The popular news has been reporting it as the end-all-and-be-all of physics discoveries, but that's not true at all. To be sure, the significance of this find is mind-blowing, but I'm willing to bet that reporters took the ambitions and cautions of scientists (wild things, they are) at face value, instead of looking at the facts. 


You and I know better.* 

...or is it?

You know that article I just wrote? Hold on to your hats, kids. These neutrinos may have just broken the speed of light. This... is interesting.


http://news.yahoo.com/particles-recorded-moving-faster-light-cern-164441657.html
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EDIT: Here's an article about the experiment from a much more... scientifically sound source:


http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/09/neutrinos-travel-faster-than-lig.html

It's All Relative. Really.

In the wonderful world of Physics, everything can be categorized with four adjectives: big, small, fast, slow.

Physics is pretty much like Sesame
Street, in that sense.

Seriously, though, these qualifiers are what physicists focus on when evaluating anything. In fact, there’s a branch of physics for each combination, and unbeknownst to you (or perhaps fully beknownst), we’ve already covered a lot of these concepts ourselves:

Slow and Big:	Classical Physics (The Tides, Gravity)
Slow and Small:	Quantum Mechanics (Quantum Dots)
Fast and Big:	General Relativity (Time Travel)
Fast and Small:	Quantum Field Theory (Higgs Boson)

The fascinating thing is that one man almost single-handedly made all of these possible: Albert Einstein. In 1905, Einstein published a set of papers establishing his ideas on Special Relativity, considered by far the most groundbreaking theory in modern physics. They revolutionized the way scientists thought of the Universe, and made further developments in both science and technology possible. This is all great news, and I’m sure you’re jumping out of your chair with joy, but… what did his papers actually say? What makes Special Relativity so special?

Nope. 

Where We're Going...

A lot of you have probably been thinking, “OK, world, this is the future. Where is my flying car?”

"I need something more... stylish."

Well, before you get your proverbial panties in a bunch, think about how that would work. Without involving jets (which are dangerous for a commercial vehicle) and propellers (which would make your car a plane) the only thing left to make your car fly would be the power of magnetism. Everyone’s pushed a magnet across a table before; in theory, a strong enough magnet would be able to push off a metal surface and, with, a motor in it, possibly drive itself around. However, that magnet you pushed does flips, skids, and is just entirely unstable if pushed from the bottom. How could one implement your fantastic new magnet technology in a stable car, one that wouldn’t flip over when you turned it on? The answer: superconducting levitation. Believe it or not, that is a real phrase, and the technology is being implemented as we speak.

The God Particle

The Higgs boson.
...I don't even know.

You may have heard of the “Higgs boson particle” in the news lately. It’s the thing that CERN is working so hard on this year, sending out news reports daily, it seems. In reality, the Higgs boson is one of the only theoretical fundamental particles that hasn’t been observed yet, and even more important, it’s the key to a grand unification of Physics theory.

But... what is it?

Music makes me...

I’m not sure how many people realize how much physics there actually is in music. In fact, the art of music is a branch of physics all on its own, called musical acoustics. The mathematics applied to this artistic field actually present beautiful and intriguing sounds that one would never think of directly, but at the same time has already intuitively known.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you play an instrument, you’re already familiar with the major scale: a series of whole notes that make a pleasing sound. In reality, every note in that scale is repeating sound wave, buffeting the medium around it at a certain frequency. This translates into a musical tone when it hits your eardrum. Yet did you ever consider that, by measuring these frequencies, all of these tones can be connected through the wonderful world of numbers?

YES! MATH!

The History of the Meter

In science, precise measurements are everything. In order to prove even the simplest theorems, you need systems of measurement that can be both accurate for your purposes, and translatable to other scientists to facilitate collaboration. This is what the SI units are for; they’re a universal system of measuring things. The meter, as stubborn as America might be to use it, is actually the perfect ruler for science (we’ll see why later). But I wondered today: what did the world do before the French intervened with their fancy “Système International d'unités”? How did we measure football fields? 

Yeah, I went there.

The Fundamentals, Part 4: The Weak (but still really strong) Force

Our final interaction, and it’s a tough one. The weak force is probably the most subtle of the fundamental interactions; it’s responsible for beta decay, or the breaking down of particles like the neutron and proton through radiation. This kind of decay is the main force that powers our Sun, as well as making heavier elements possible. However, there’s a lot more to the weak interaction than meets the eye...

The Fundamentals, Part 3: The Strong Force

Part three is our first venture into relatively obscure physics. I’d reckon that not many people could accurately describe what either weak or strong forces do. Luckily, you won’t be one of those people. 

Years ago, when quantum science was first being explored, physicists started discovering a couple of very, very small pieces of matter and energy that made up everything, particles like protons, electrons, and neutrons. They called these the ‘elementary particles’ because of their special status as the building blocks of the universe. All of this progress led to more accurate models of the atom, and it was finally deduced that all atoms contained a nucleus in the center with a certain number of protons and neutrons, as well as an electron cloud surrounding this core. 

And for this, there was much rejoicing.

But how did the protons and neutrons stay together?

The Fundamentals, Part 2: Electromagnetism, a.k.a. "The positive side has the bump, right?"

Ah, electromagnetism. This fundamental interaction of matter is so much more important than most would believe. Like gravity, the effects of electromagnetism have always been known by humankind, in one form or another. However, it wasn’t until way, way later that we found out what it truly was, or how integral it is to the existence of... well, everything. It took a man by the name of James Clerk Maxwell to get science on its way. He published his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873, pointing out several interconnected properties between the two phenomena, like: 

Point 1: Electric charges of different sign (positive, negative) attract, and like ones repel. The same goes with magnetic poles: north pulls south, and pushes away other norths. 

Point 2: Running an electric current through a wire creates a magnetic field. Likewise, moving a magnet through a loop of wire creates an electric current. 

What he had described was the newly understood phenomena called... electromagnetism. 

The Fundamentals, Part 1: Gravity

With all the talk happening on PiPT about fictitious motion, antimatter transformations, and overly-complicated analyses of the tides, it’s about time that we went back and explored the bare necessities of the Universe, those few things it absolutely needs to be what it is today. These absolutes are called the fundamental interactions of nature: 

• Gravity
• Electromagnetism
• Strong Force
• Weak Force

They're the four things that keep everything in one piece; without them, nothing, not even atoms, would exist. 

---------

1. Gravity

Good ol' gravity. It's the force that most of us are probably most familiar with, though it's the weakest of the four by far. Its effects have been known for about as long as humans have been on this Earth, yet it took a long time for someone to truly see it as its own entity. Aristotle was one of the first; he described gravity as the movement of objects to their 'natural place'. Earth went the lowest, water floated on that, air floated on that. Pretty straightforward. 

News: Quantum Dots

For anyone who's interested, here's an article expanding on my post about Quantum Dots, and how they can be used in solar cells:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-tiny-tech-big-results-quantum.html

I Can't Believe They're Not Forces!

If you’ve ever taken a Physics course, you may have learned about Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion. In case it’s been a while:

1. An object in motion stays in motion
2. The force of an object is equal to the mass multiplied by the acceleration (F=ma)
3. For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.

These are the rules upon which Classical Physics was founded. They are taught in grade school like they are the end-all and be-all of motion in our Universe, and one can certainly do amazing things with them. However, think about this interesting mind experiment: you slide a puck on a frictional rotating table.

That’s it. That’s the mind experiment. You can picture that, right? Because Newton’s Laws can’t.

...pause for dramatic effect...

'The Tides', or 'Things that are so much more complicated than they seem'

So, it's the middle of the summer. That time of year when TV stations play Christmas in July specials and the Earth decides it wants to try and set fire to anyone who walks outside by bombarding them with UV radiation. And what better way to celebrate this fact than going to the beach? 


The beach, as it turns out, is full of physics. In fact, the beach wouldn’t even be there without physics. It’s the motion of the tides that eroded the rocks that originally created the border between sea and land, turning everything into sand. And of course, what makes the tides come in and out? The gravitational pull of the moon. 

As romantic as it sounds, the pull of the moon on the sea is actually fascinating. At high tide, water is pulled towards the moon ever-so-slightly. This subsequently creates a low tide on the sides of the Earth, the places that the water is being drawn from. Yet, the opposite side of the Earth also has high tide, since the effect of the moon goes straight through the Earth! 

This MS Paint drawing just blew my mind. 

The Universe ain't what it used to be.

Do you remember that post I wrote on antimatter about a week ago? Near the conclusion, I speculated that there could be whole antimatter galaxies that science has yet to discover, and thus blew your mind with physics. Well, someone decided to take it a step further. The physicist Dragan Hajdukovic recently published a paper describing an alternate Big Bang theory, one that I found fascinating. In his theory, the universe eventually stops expanding, shrinks down, and then switches all of its matter into antimatter. 

....what.

That’s right: we would live in an antimatter universe. Let’s Tarantino this theory and see how Dragan came to this shocking conclusion.

Graphene = Physics Magic

It seems to get better and better every day. Every other news report that comes out describes it as something that outlasts, outshines, and outruns every other material out there. But first.... what is it? 

Graphene is a 2-dimensional sheet of carbon molecules, packed close together in a hexagon pattern reminiscent of chicken-wire (something a surprising number of nanotech specialists are familiar with). It’s a fairly recent development in physics, not because scientists didn’t know single sheets existed, but because they didn’t know they could be isolated from the bigger 3D graphite. Theoretically, 2D crystals should not exist; the thinner a film of atoms gets, the lower its melting point (remember that temperature is simply the vibration of atoms. The faster the vibration, the more unstable our chicken wire can get). By the time you get to 2D, there should be an indefinite melting point. Hence, no graphene. 

But obviously, science messed up.

Antimatter: everything you'll never be

If any of you are familiar with Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, or if you've been around any physics anything in the past few years, then you might know a little bit about something called antimatter. You get one thing, grab its natural opposite, smash them together, and things explode. But really, what is antimatter? How does that even happen? Well, I'm glad you asked.

As common in almost all of the most interesting physics concepts, the science was predicted before it was discovered. It was no different with antimatter. In 1928, Paul Dirac published a paper outlining the connections between Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which worked on a large scale, and Erwin Schrodinger’s equation of quantum physics, which worked on a small scale. Now, understand: Dirac was freakin’ brilliant. His mathematics was spot-on, and his explanation connecting these two branches of physics made perfect sense if one analyzed his equations. 

Perfect Sense.

News: Google Global Science Fair

I realize that the purpose of my blog is to explain science in a friendly way, but sometimes science is better told by others. This is the case at the Google Global Science Fair. These kids are just incredible; check out the finalists, as well as their amazing works, at the project's website:

The Google Global Science Fair 2011

Also, in addition to the ridiculous opportunities these students were provided for their amazing work, they got giant Lego trophies. That's something.

Flux Capacitors are so overrated

The concept of time has fascinated mankind for a long… time. Our lives are focused on its flow: when to grow food, when to sleep, when to mate, when to bundle up. We reminisce and anticipate. The flow of time is not only part of our lives, it is our lives, and our deaths, and everything in between. This all-encompassing feel to time is what makes it remarkable. Yet, until the turn of the century (excluding big thinkers like H.G. Wells) time was realistically seen as an immovable force that could never be manipulated or changed. It was Albert Einstein himself who put an end to that notion when he published his Theories of Relativity.

Now, though this blog does not have the time to go into his thought process in detail*, Einstein’s basic message was that the three dimensions of space, as well as the singular dimension of time, were not separate entities, but rather woven into one another, creating what we now call: ‘space-time’. 

Stay with me, now. 

Little Glowy Things

See these?

Shiny.

These are called quantum dots. They are incredibly tiny semiconductors, the applications of which are nearly endless. And you’ve probably never heard of them. 

Hair of the Dog

Everyone has that friend who goes out every night of the weekend (starting on Thursday) and seemingly spends at least half of their paycheck attempting to get as drunk as possible. This is not necessarily a bad thing; socially, clubbing is a great way to bond with friends: if not out of enjoyment, then out of collective fear of that one guy in the corner who keeps giving you those looks. You know the one.

Yet when I see someone partying hard, I don’t think about how they feel then, but fast-forward to the next morning when the hangover sets in. Do they even know what their bodies have been through? The struggles their motor skills went through to get them back to their apartment? How they’ve just given themselves the equivalent of a drawn-out concussion? My guess is, probably not.

Fun with Rusting

Why don’t ships rust? 

It sounds like a simple enough question: ships do rust, just not quickly enough to notice. Yet, if one thinks about it, it becomes more of a curiosity. Even iron that’s just been exposed to the air starts to rust; what do boats go through? They never come out of the water, the paint doesn’t stay on forever, and any speed they gain just serves to quicken the reaction. By all accounts, some of the most magnificent ships on the sea should be having a much harder time riding the surf in two or three years. How do these giant boats stay afloat while facing the constant threat of corrosion?

It all has to do with electrolytes.

Yeah, those things.

Mutants!

The recently-released X-Men: First Class (which, for the record, was an excellent film) depicted genetically unique ‘mutants’ with skills so amazing that some of their members saw themselves as a new and improved species. It’s wonderful to think that a lucky few might one day be able to create magnetic fields with a wave of our hand, or hypnotize with a stare, but sadly these things are not even physically impossible, but evolutionarily impractical. Even if nature dictated that it was time for one man to shoot high-powered lasers from his eyes, what evolutionary purpose would this serve?

Thinking a little about that, we’re led to an even bigger question: in what way could humans keep evolving? It sounds like an incredibly pompous question, especially coming from a person that could be outrun, outswam, outflew, and outlived by many other members of the animal kingdom. Yet there is some logic behind it. Humans are unique from any other animal through the way that they utilize the environment around them; more often than not, instead of adapting to it, we make it adapt to us. 

In Soviet Russia...

Have a heart...

For most of my life, I’ve had minor heart palpitations. They’ve never been very serious, at their worst making me mildly uncomfortable for a few seconds, but they've always thrown me a little off my guard. An irregular heartbeat is an uncomfortable thing to experience; that pumping rhythm is there one’s entire life, and the body doesn’t react well when the tempo switches up. 

But what if there was no tempo? Enter science. NPR recently covered a story about an artificial heart that doesn’t act like a heart at all… at least in the traditional sense. In the past, artificial hearts like the Jarvik 7 were designed to mimic the natural processes of the originals – mainly, the electrically-stimulated 'pumping' action – and act as a total replacement for the damaged organs. In most cases, though, damage wasn’t severe enough to cause a total shutdown, and so a total heart replacement would actually do more harm than good.

...in some cases.

Physics is fascinating, I swear.

Physics is fascinating. I’m a physicist, so I’m a bit biased, but I always experience a sense of wonder when experiencing the world around me through such terms. 

Now, this love of science is not universal. Some have big issues with the whole idea; they usually have some valid points: 

1. I’m not a science person. It’s really never interested me in the least.

2. Math.

3. Why do I want to know how to calculate a ball’s flight path? No, honestly, why?

4. I tried to get into it in high school, but my teacher/class/notebook wasn’t good enough. 

Fig. 1: Fun.

Well, I have come up with some rebuttals. You see, in all of its supposed complication and intricacy, Physics is nothing more than the science of change. And, as many of us have experienced first-hand, change happens all the time; anyone who notices this is already a type of scientist. Just like the world around us, change itself is ever-changing, you could say. 

Or not. I probably wouldn’t, it’s a strange turn of phrase. But you understand. 

The goal of this blog is to share with you, dear reader, my sense of wonder and, more importantly, the reason why I’m a scientist. Most teachers fail to put the science in context, which is 100% of the fun. I’ll even admit, the fact that a ball goes up and down is not exciting in itself; anyone who took basic physics in high school will tell you that. Yet it was the idea that prompted Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and hundreds of other great minds to think long and hard about what makes the world go ‘round (in several cases, literally) and transform our universe from one of chance to one of intricate order, from one of blind faith to one of incredible utility. 

This transformation is never emphasized in introductory classes, even though it was the thing that got me and several other people I know hooked on physics, and more broadly science, in the first place. Moreover, observing how other things change, like the body, the stock market, or human emotions, make one just as scientific as a physicist, and those who excel at this study are just as capable as the great minds described above. 

Some would say that comparing a great writer/economist/artist and a great physicist is like comparing apples/bananas/kiwis and oranges, and in a way I suppose they’re right. But while the skill set might be different, the basic concepts that physicists use are the exact same concepts used in every other facet of academia. Anyone who doesn’t like physics, but is able to devote themselves to knowledge in some other way, is unknowingly a kind of physicist themselves. My hope is that by sharing my experiences in science with you, you’ll find a little beauty in it yourself. 

Except for the math part. There’s no getting past that one (See Fig. 1)


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