particles

“Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection; no more” -Lord Alfred Tennyson Ahh, the Standard Model of elementary particles and their interactions. It's right up there with General Relativity -- our theory of gravitation in the Universe -- as the most successful physical theory of all-time. Image credit: DoE, NSF, LBNL, and CPEP, via http://www.cpepphysics.org/. While General Relativity describes the relationship between matter-and-energy and spacetime, the Standard Model describes all the known particles in the Universe and how they interact with one another. 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…
SteelyKid, like most toddlers, knows a few songs, and likes to sing them over and over. Her repertoire is limited to "ABCDEFG" (the alphabet song, but that's how she requests it), "Twinkle, Twinkle," "Some man" ("This Old Man," which I only figured out this weekend), and "Round and Round" ("The Wheels on the Bus"). I get a little bored with the repetition, and so tend to make up my own verses, which get sideways looks from her, followed by telling Kate "Daddy's silly!" I've been posting a lot of these on Twitter over the past several days (@orzelc), but for posterity, a few physics-related…
There are a couple of things I should probably not talk about. One of them is photons. But no matter what you think about photons you will probably agree that this is not a very good description of electromagnetic radiation. (from comos4kids.com) Structure of Energy:All EM energy waves travel at the speed of light when in a vacuum. No matter what their frequency or wavelength, they always move at the same speed. Some properties of waves, such as diffraction and interference, are also seen in EM radiation. Scientists have figured out that there are tiny particles in these waves. The…