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 minor key. [Read more…]
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 is much greater than that of other elementary particles and so it should decay into them. As such, in order to detect it, one has to first set up the conditions to produce it and then find ways to detect it either before it decays or, if that is not possible, to find ways to infer that it had existed for a short time. The production and detection of unstable particles like the Higgs stretched the limits of what we can do with current technology (and budgets) and provides a window into the world of particle physics. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
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 in the vacuum, unlike every other field. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
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 or wrong answer. [Read more…]
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 said that there were patterns among the 18 non-Higgs particles, apart from some anomalies. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
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, since the brain defines so much of who were are. [Read more…]
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 90 minutes afterwards talking with some people and it was a lot of fun. What follows is a summary of the discussion and Q/A that focuses mostly on the topics that interested me. [Read more…]
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 the key fact about the Higgs field that leads to it giving mass to the other particles. So how did that come about? [Read more…]
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.) [Read more…]
Although I will not be talking about the graviton much in this series, it is worthwhile to make a slight detour from the main story line to discuss the role of the gravity force. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)
I should point out that unlike with the other force fields, we have not as yet been able to find a way to ‘quantize’ the gravitational field, i.e., find a way to make its particle properties manifest, the way we have been able to do with the theories of the strong, electromagnetic, and weak forces. But despite this, we have been able to make great progress in understanding it. As this article points out, because we have the option of visualizing the behavior of fields using either a particle model or a wave model, we can choose which is the most convenient in any given context, and that has enabled us to overcome the lack of a quantized theory of gravity. [Read more…]