Apr 17 2013
In the previous post, we had arrived at the seeming impasse concerning the detection of the Higgs particle in that the particles that we can detect (because they live long enough to reach the detectors) are either those that the Higgs does not directly decay into (photons) or have very small probabilities of doing so …
Apr 16 2013
A Ukrainian engineer Oleg Berg has found a way to change the key of a song from major to minor and vice versa, thus transforming its effect on the listener by completely altering the mood. Here is an example that uses one of the Beatles classics Hey Jude switched from the original major to a …
Apr 15 2013
In the search for the Higgs particle, we had to overcome two problems: producing it and detecting it. Both those things are difficult and I will first look at the detection part. The Higgs particle is unstable, in that left to itself it lasts for a very short time. We know this since its mass …
Apr 12 2013
In the previous post in this series, we saw how the Higgs mechanism gave rise to the masses of the weak interaction force particles W+, W-, and Z. We also saw how the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking that was part of that mechanism resulted in the Higgs field having a non-zero average value even …
Apr 10 2013
You have to hand it to Richard Feynman. He had a way of not only making difficult physics concepts understandable, he could also make everyday phenomena interesting by posing and then answering questions that do not even occur to most of us or, if they do, to which we are likely to give a facile …
Apr 10 2013
We have finally reached the stage where we can explain the Higgs mechanism. In part 3 of this series, I said that the complete set of elementary particles consisted of six quarks, six leptons, six ‘gauge bosons’ (particles that are the agents of the four fundamental forces), and the Higgs particle. In part 7, I …
Apr 09 2013
President Obama has initiated a new program to map the human brain. He has initially allocated $100 million for it but that will clearly not be enough for such a mammoth project and will have to be considered a down payment that must be added to later. I think that this is a worthy project, …
Apr 09 2013
Last Friday, I participated on the panel that discussed Science and Religion. The room was full (I estimate well over 100 people) showing how much interest there was in this topic amongst students, staff and faculty. It lasted about 75 minutes but many people stayed on afterwards to discuss in small groups. I spent about …
Apr 08 2013
In order to understand the Higgs mechanism, we need to first understand how it came to be that the Higgs field, unlike all the other fields corresponding to the other 18 elementary particles, came to have a non-zero average value in the vacuum. As I said in the previous post in this series, this is …
Apr 05 2013
I have said before that the emerging modern consensus is that there are no particles or waves in the classical sense of those terms, although those concepts are still useful to us in visualizing physical processes. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)
:)
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