Large Hadron Collider

56 posts

US experiments find hint of a break in the laws of physics

7 min read
Scicomm anomalous magnetic dipole moment dark energy dark matter Fermilab Muon g-2 g-2 anomaly Higgs boson Large Hadron Collider LHCb muon dipole moment Muon g-2 neutrino masses New Physics particle physics physics beyond the standard model Standard Model Standard Model of particle physics supersymmetry

At 9 pm India time on April 7, physicists at an American research facility delivered a shot in the arm to efforts to find flaws in a powerful theory that explains how the building blocks of the univer…

The awesome limits of superconductors

8 min read
Scicomm Abrikosov vortex lattice Abrikosov vortices BCS theory Bose-Einstein condensate CERN Cooper pairs copper electrical conductivity electrical resistivity electrons flux-flow resistance Joule heating Large Hadron Collider Lisa Randall magnesium diboride magnetic flux Meissner effect niobium Pauli's exclusion principle Praveen Chaddah protons silver superconductors superfluid helium titanium type I superconductors type II superconductors vortex pinning

On June 24, a press release from CERN said that scientists and engineers working on upgrading the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had "built and operated … the most powerful electrical transmission l…

Where is the coolest lab in the universe?

5 min read
Scicomm blue hypergiant Boomerang Nebula Bose-Einstein condensate cosmic microwave background energy density Eta Carinae gas outflow heat International Space Station kinetic energy Large Hadron Collider Nature News red giant temperature thermal equilibrium thermodynamics vacuum Vladivostok white dwarf Wolfgang Ketterle

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performs an impressive feat every time it accelerates billions of protons to nearly the speed of light – and not in terms of the energy alone. For example, you release…

Peter Higgs, self-promoter

2 min read
Culture Science C.R. Hagen Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Englert Francois Englert Gerald Guralnik Gerardus t Hooft Greenpeace Higgs Higgs boson Higgs mechanism Large Hadron Collider particle physics Peter Higgs Philip Warren Anderson Robert Brout Sheldon Cooper The Big Bang Theory Tom Kibble Wolf Prize

I was randomly rewatching The Big Bang Theory on Netflix today when I spotted this gem: Okay, maybe less a gem and more a shiny stone, but still. The screenshot, taken from the third episode of the s…

The not-so-obvious obvious

4 min read
Scicomm Science Brian Wansink Cornell University data torturing Higgs boson Ig Nobel Prizes incremental research Large Hadron Collider Marc Abrahams modelling ozone p-hacking Ronald H Coase scientific research statistical significance University of Exeter

If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you'll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known fact in study-…

The symmetry incarnations

10 min read
Scicomm anastomosis asymptote Banach-Tarski paradox Big Bang Theory cellular automata degrees of freedom electro-weak symmetry breaking fractals Gilbreath's conjecture hypercube Large Hadron Collider Mandelbrot sets Mulliken symbols Nambu-Goldstone bosons prime numbers surface tension symmetry thermodynamics V.S. Ramachandran

This post was originally published on October 6, 2012. I recently rediscovered it and decided to republish it with a few updates. Geometric symmetry in nature is often a sign of unperturbedness, as i…

All the science in 'The Cloverfield Paradox'

4 min read
Science black holes compactification high dimensions Interstellar Kaluza-Klein theory Large Hadron Collider particle accelerators Quantum mechanics special theory of relativity Spectral string theory The Cloverfield Paradox wave function wavefunction

I watched The Cloverfield Paradox last night, the horror film that Paramount pictures had dumped with Netflix and which was then released by Netflix on February 4. It's a dumb production: unlike H…