It is time to wrap up what turned out to be a much longer series of posts on the Higgs than I anticipated when I started it, probably with a lot more information than readers wanted to know! (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) …
Category Archive: Science
Apr 30 2013
What our ancestors may have looked like
The so-called ‘Cambrian explosion’ that occurred 500-600 million years ago saw the appearance in the fossil record of an extraordinarily wide diversity of life forms. Whether there was a sudden flurry of evolutionary advances at the time or whether that time marked the beginning of animal bodies that were fossilizable and so gave the illusion …
Apr 30 2013
Stumping the stumpers
Recently someone told me that a friend of his was a science teacher in the American south who was teaching his students about anatomy and said that apart from a few small differences, the form of male and female skeletons were identical. He was nonplussed when a student said that that was not quite correct …
Apr 29 2013
Brinicles as the source of life?
One of the big unsolved problems inn science is how ‘life’, or more precisely, the first self-replicating molecular, came into being. Popular theories suggest, among other things, that life originated in deep underground thermal vents.
Apr 29 2013
The Higgs Story-Part 19: Nobel dilemmas
As soon as the discovery of the Higgs was announced in July 2012, there was immediate talk of who would get the seemingly inevitable Nobel prize for it, with some anticipating that it would be awarded even as soon as the same year. This did not happen and I personally did not expect it. For …
Apr 26 2013
The Higgs Story-Part 18: What else is the Higgs good for?
So now that the Higgs has supposedly been discovered and an important prediction of the Standard Model confirmed, what’s next? Is it of any use or is it just going to sit on the particle physics shelf as a trophy to the success of big science? This is hard to answer now and may become …
Apr 24 2013
The Higgs Story-Part 17: Other design challenges of the LHC
Magnetism is weird but in a fun way. Who as a child has not played with magnets and wondered how they worked? And for many a scientist it was what first attracted them to their field. Magnets are our first introduction to the idea of invisible forces that seem to permeate all space and can …
Apr 23 2013
Last poker hand in Casino Royale
I was intrigued following my review of Skyfall when commenter Enkidum said that the implausibilties in this film pale “in comparison to the final poker hand in Casino Royale, which has never occurred in history and likely never would, even if people kept playing poker until the heat death of the universe.”
Apr 22 2013
The Higgs Story-Part 16: Design challenges of the LHC
The most obvious design challenge to detect the Higgs particle is that the colliding particles needed to have energies that are sufficient to produce the Higgs. Not knowing the mass of the particle complicated things but having a good idea that the upper limit of mass should be around 1 TeV helped. (For previous posts …
Apr 19 2013
The Higgs Story-Part 15: Producing the Higgs
It is time to turn to the issue of how to produce the Higgs particle. Particles that are too short-lived to be found in nature have to be produced in the laboratory. What one does is to use Einstein’s famous relation E=mc2. If one has energy large enough, one can in principle produce any particle …
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