Physics

The idea for this blog was dead simple. In my second blog at Science 2.0, " Quaternions for a Third Grader ", I showed of my clay and pipe cleaner model of quaternion multiplication. A few months ago, David Halliday and I started talking about ...

Article - Doug Sweetser - Mar 23 2012 - 7:13am

The Higgs Mass In Atomic Mass Units

Whenever I try to explain something about particle physics to a layman, I run into the problem of mass/energy units. A Giga-electronVolt is not something you may expect people to be familiar with, and on the other hand it is not appealing to explain direct ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 20 2012 - 9:51am

How Fast Do You Fall Through Earth And The Perfect Physics Instructor Suicide

I just saw the most annoying video about an interesting physics question. Apart from the over the top stereotypical German (supposed to be funny or is he for real?) and arrogant “ look how clever we physicists are ” attitude, the most annoying is that the ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Mar 22 2012 - 10:59pm

The Say Of The Week- Higgs Properties

After fixing the Higgs boson mass to the best fit value mh = 125 GeV, the SM does not have any free parameter left to vary. Therefore all the anomalies in the present data must be statistical fluctuations and disappear with more statistics. This interpret ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 13 2012 - 5:54pm

Van Der Waals Force Or Gecko Feet Grasping Into Parallel Worlds

That relativity theory or quantum mechanics are only important at huge velocities or incredibly small distances and so on is a common misconception. In fact, the yellow color of gold and the stickiness of fridge magnets are relativistic effects. One thing ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Mar 27 2012 - 12:24am

Quaternions, THE Numbers of the Universe

The title of this blog is the title of a talk I will be giving real soon, this Thursday, March 29, as part of "Ignite Boston 9" at MIT's Media Lab. No, you cannot go unless you are one of the 400 people who signed up, but video should be ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - Apr 15 2012 - 8:44am

DZERO Confirms New Chi_b(3P) State

While most High-Energy Physicists nowadays are kept busy with the idle search for non-existent new physics beyond the standard model in the form of improbable Supersymmetric particles, phantom leptoquarks, fairy Z' resonances, putative colorons, inven ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 28 2012 - 9:44am

Einstein Proved Right- Again

How do you know a scientist was right a lot? When an entire cottage industry exists to try and prove him wrong. Einstein's view of the Universe has gotten some new respect; the most accurate measurement ever made of the distance to the time when the e ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 30 2012 - 1:00pm

Superluminal Neutrinos: Opera Spokesperson Resigns

Antonio Ereditato (left), spokesperson of the Opera collaboration, announced today he stepped down. He is no longer leading the Opera experiment. The Opera experiment last September made headlines around the world with their announcement that neutrinos ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 30 2012 - 5:47am

No Resignation Over Faster Than Light Neutrinos In Bonobo World

In the parallel world where bonobos* developed into those that took over the earth with the help of technology, they never insisted on an absolute nature of time in the first place. Einstein came along and discovered that since we use light as the most ba ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Apr 1 2012 - 4:52am