CP-violation
esiegel | November 29, 2013“If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.” -J. Richard Gott III
It may not occur to you that it's a special thing that the Earth and everything found on it is made of matter; it seems intuitive that it couldn't be any other way. And yet, the very laws of nature themselves haven't yet told us why or how the Universe is this way! For this week's Ask Ethan (and leave your own questions or suggestions here), our regular reader Michael Fisher wants us to get at the heart of this, asking:
Is it true that in the early universe matter &…
esiegel | May 29, 2013"The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal." -Aleister Crowley
But the Universe itself experiences continual growth, constant change, and new experiences all the time, and it does so spontaneously.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
And yet, the better we understand our Universe -- what the laws are that govern it, what particles inhabit it, and what it looked/behaved like farther and farther…
esiegel | 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. In other words, unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for having found the Higgs Boson and nothing else, meaning that there's no window into what lies beyond the Standard Model via traditional experimental particle physics.
Image credit:…
esiegel | March 4, 2008I love The Straight Dope. For 35 years, people have written in and asked some of the most difficult-to-answer questions on any topic you can think of; the staffers, writing under the pseudonym Cecil Adams, do their best to get to the bottom of their questions. Well, they also have a message board, and I saw one of the most difficult questions I've ever seen there:
Where does all the matter in the universe come from?
I'm no[t an] astrophysicist but I understand a little about the Big Bang Theory and also that there's lots of stuff we don't know or probably ever will know about it.
But the…