big bang
Category archives for big bang
So just what is out there beyond the Standard Model?
Posted by Ethan on November 16, 2012 
“Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.” -Craig Ferguson Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate — albeit not incredibly precisely — which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go.…
The Halloween Horror of the Dark Universe!
Posted by Ethan on October 31, 2012 
“A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux … is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.” -William J. Broad Despite the wondrous, luminous sights of the night sky, we’ve…
What Happened Before The Big Bang?
Posted by Ethan on October 15, 2012 
“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe — as a cosmologist — isn’t quite about the Big Bang in and of itself. The Big Bang is a remarkable…
Why I am a liar straight from the pit of hell
Posted by Ethan on October 5, 2012 
“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!” -George Gamow Earlier today, a video (from last month) was released where one of the members of the US House of Representative — a member who sits…
If it comes back to you, it’s yours!
Posted by Ethan on September 10, 2012 
“Not even light can escape such hollowing, this huge mass in a small space. Even the Milky Way with its open arms is said to have a black hole at its heart.” -Susan B.A. Somers-Willett Our Milky Way is home to us all. With its hundreds of billions of stars, massive spiral arms, dust lanes,…
Where do Supermassive Black Holes Come From?
Posted by Ethan on July 30, 2012 
“Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order.” -Robert Coover Our Milky Way,…
How Big is the Entire Universe?
Posted by Ethan on July 18, 2012 
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” -Stephen Hawking The Universe is a vast, seemingly unending marvel of existence. Over the past century, we’ve learned that the Universe stretches out beyond the billions of stars in our Milky Way, out across billions of light years, containing close to…
Now that we’ve got the Higgs, what’s next?
Posted by Ethan on July 6, 2012 
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” -Stephen Hawking After a long search spanning more than my entire lifetime (so far), the Higgs boson has finally been…
Explaining the Higgs: on TV last night!
Posted by Ethan on July 5, 2012 
“We knew that we had indeed done something that was very different and very exciting, but we still didn’t expect it to have something to do with physical reality.” -Gerald Guralnik, co-developer of the Higgs mechanism Might as well make this entire week “Higgs week” here on Starts With A Bang, given how important yesterday’s…
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Posted by Ethan on March 27, 2012 “Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we’ll call ‘existence.’ Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating–peeling apart. … Now you have something, you have two…
