Particle Physics
drorzel | May 12, 2010Via Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter, I ran across a Discovery News story touting a recent arxiv preprint claiming to see variation in the fine-structure constant. It's a basically OK story, but garbles a few details, so I thought it would be worth giving it the ResearchBlogging treatment, in the now-traditional Q&A format.
What did they do? The paper looks at some spectral lines in radio emission from a moderately distant galaxy with the poetic name "PKS1413+135." These lines are produced by OH molecules in interstellar gas clouds, and the frequencies they see suggest that there may have…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Dennis Overbye is a terrific writer, but I have to say, I hate the way that he falls into the lazy shorthand of using "physics" to mean "theoretical particle physics" in this article about a recent conference built around debates about the state of particle physics. He's got lots of great quotes from Lisa Randall and Lawrence Krauss and others about how things are really bleak on the theory side, and these are barely tempered by enthusiasm from experimentalists.
So, yeah, theoretical particle physics may well appear to be in crisis. But, look, theoretical particle physics is always in crisis…
illconsidered | September 10, 2008Just wanted to be one of the voices acknowledging day one of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. I know very little about it, but being a blogger I don't let that get in the way of talking about it!
You can read about it on Wikipedia, The Source of All That is Knowable.
Two interesting factoids I learned from a Science Friday podcast:
1. it shoots 100's of billions of protons at a time, thousands of times per second and accelerates them to 99.999999% o the speed of light! Sounds pretty fast.
2. it will not create something that swallows the earth or destroys the whole universe because the kind of…
cevans | December 19, 2007
The search for a Theory of Everything, which is kind of the unofficial M.O. of the scientific establishment, has always been closely guarded. The elements of profound uncertainty involved with such a quest have always primly clipped, safe from the grubby hands of untrained speculation. Relatively sane, brilliant physicists who err too far in the direction of the fabulous are practically shunned, or at least relegated to different class; those who posit that any variant of string theory might bridge the gap are nominally demoted from "physicists" to "string theorists," a nomenclature that…