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. 

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. 

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?

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. 

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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.