coupling

“Supposedly she’d died, but here she was again–somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.” -Denis Johnson Over the past 100 years, our picture of the Universe has changed dramatically, on both the largest scales and the smallest. Image credit: Richard Payne. On the large-scales, we've gone from a Newtonian Universe of unknown age populated only by the stars in our own Milky Way to a Universe governed by General Relativity, containing hundreds of billions of galaxies. Image credit: Rhys Taylor, Cardiff University. The age of this…
"This is evidently a discovery of a new particle. If anybody claims otherwise you can tell them they have lost connection with reality." -Tommaso Dorigo You've probably heard the news by now: the Higgs boson -- the last undiscovered fundamental particle of nature -- has been found. The fundamental types of particles in the Universe, now complete. Indeed the news reports just keep rolling in; this is easily the discovery of the century for physics, so far. I'm not here to recap the scientific discovery itself; I wrote what to expect yesterday, and that prediction was pretty much exactly what…