particle physics

Chris Knight's avatar

Work with me here.  It’s way too late at night, I can’t sleep and this is the kind of thing I think about at this hour.

Here’s the problem: “Does a shadow have mass, and how much does it weigh if it does?”

Remember how in Peter Pan, when Pete loses his shadow and has to sew it back on when he finally catches it?  That’s how this started (though why I was thinking of Peter Pan so randomly is beyond me).  So if Pan loses his shadow, and it gets away from him and he has to catch it and attach it back to himself, then…

Logically, the shadow must have mass.  Because Pan couldn’t take hold of it if it didn’t have mass.  Except it’s impossible for a shadow to have mass, right?  Right?!

Okay, let’s look at this from the angle of physics.  What is a ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

My mind is reeling from thinking about the applications possible with this…

A sharp-thinking dude named Ramesh Raskar and his team of techies have come up with a way to take photos… at 1,000,000,000,000 frames per second. That’s fast enough to watch an individual packet of photons from a laser moving through a soda bottle and being able to observe how the light particles scatter throughout.

And if you watch the video, you can also see how this technology might find its way into everything from medical imaging to search and rescue.

One thing that comes to mind is that in another decade or so, with enough refinement something like this could be put into a smartphone. The result? Your very own ESPER straight out of Blade Runner.

And then there is the notion of aiming this camera at a house, from across the street or from an ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Those clever boffins (as our British brethren love to call such technical folk) at CERN in Switzerland have really made a mess of things this time: they’ve recorded neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light.

If their determinations hold up, then a whole lotta physics is gonna have to be overhauled. Einstein held that the speed of light in a vacuum was an immutable, impassable barrier, and for most of the past century a lot of our understanding and technology has been based on that. And now… Einstein’s model of relativity stands to be revisited, revised, and possibly amended considerably.

But as with all such announcements, a measure of temperance and consideration is warranted. Jon Butterworth has posted an excellent essay on The Guardian’s website about the ramifications of CERN’s findings, including how it’s possible that neutrinos might not have broken the speed of light.

But if CERN’s ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Someday in our foreseeable future, our children will be learning about chemistry with a periodic table that looks something like this…

…no thanks to researchers conducting experiments with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

According to this article at The Register (which reads disturbingly too much like a quantum physics essay written by Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange) the “topflight international reverse-alchemy boffins say they have managed to transmute gold into an entirely new form of ‘negatively strange’ antihypernucleic antimatter, ultra-bizarre stuff which cannot possibly occur naturally – except perhaps inside the cores of collapsed stars.”

In layman’s terms it’s a new form of matter whose strangeness is less than zero but probably not too boring.

I’m currently hopped-up on allergy medicine, and I still have no idea what the hell all of that means....

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Chris Knight's avatar

See if you can wrap your noggin around this one: the Large Hadron Collider – that super-powered high-energy thingamabob at CERN in Switzerland that previously had been predicted would destroy the world – is now theorized to be the first observed occurrence of the “grandfather paradox” of time travel!

According to two physicists, the LHC’s mission to produce the hypothesized and long-sought Higgs boson is damned to failure by its own future. The reason? Because the Higgs boson “might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”. And according to Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, this “predestination” from the Higgs particle goes far beyond screwing ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This one is way too wacky to pass up commenting on…

The Large Hadron Collider is a few hours away from getting turned on for the first time. This is a humongous particle accelerator (also happens to be the biggest machine yet built) that scientists are hoping will help answer some questions about the fundamental nature of physics.

All well and good. Except some people are afraid that the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) is going destroy the planet. The biggest fear is that it’s going to spawn a black hole that’ll suck down the entire Earth. At least one lawsuit has been filed on those grounds, seeking to impose an injunction against the LHC’s activation.

And then there is the tale going around that the LHC has an even more nefarious purpose. That it is going to be used to open up a portal to an unknown ...

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