higgs
esiegel | July 3, 2012"Give me a coin. <Takes Coin.> All right. Uh... heads, I win, tails, you lose. Right? <Flips coin.> Tails, you lose." -Ralph Kramden
All things being equal, you're well aware that if you flipped a completely fair coin, you'd have a 50% chance of it landing on heads, and a 50% chance of landing on tails (ignoring the side, of course).
Image credit: C. Nolan, A. Eckhart and Warner Bros. Pictures, retrieved from http://explow.com/Two-Face.
So let's imagine that you flip the coin ten times, and you get seven heads and three tails. Are you worried? You shouldn't be; in order to tell…
esiegel | April 3, 2012"...the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."
-Leon Lederman, author of The God Particle
The Higgs Boson: you know the deal. It's the last undiscovered particle in our current picture of all the fundamental particles in the Universe.
Image credit: Fermilab, retrieved from eurekalert.org.
If we can find it, we'll either have a big clue as to what the next step to take in physics will be, or we'll be forced to admit that physics works too well, and many of the great…
kmcwalsh | December 13, 2011This guest post was written by Brookhaven Lab physicist Kostas Nikolopoulos.
Today's public seminar at CERN, where the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented the preliminary results of their searches for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson with the full dataset collected during 2011, is a landmark for high-energy physics!
The Higgs boson is a still-hypothetical particle postulated in the mid-1960s to complete what is considered the SM of particle interactions. Its role within the SM is to provide other particles with mass. Specifically, the mass of elementary particles is the result of their…
esiegel | May 5, 2008Hector writes in and asks about someone from Sheffield in the UK who says that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create Dark Matter:
The massive ATLAS detector will measure the debris from collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which recreates the conditions found in the early universe during the Big Bang when Dark Matter was first created. If the LHC does indeed create such particles then it will be the first time that the amount of Dark Matter in the universe has increased since the Big Bang - the LHC will effectively be a Dark Matter 'factory'.
Well, Hector basically…