Owl (and unseen hourglass) by Rick Lohm. Owls are very popular tattoos, but that doesn’t matter. A tattoo doesn’t have to be completely unique for it to mean something to you.
We, the undersigned, are musicians, actors, directors, authors, and producers. We make our livelihoods with the artistic works we create. We are also Internet users.
We are writing to express our serious concerns regarding the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online…
cwnl:
LHC Breaks Supersymmetry’s Beauty
Image Credit: Spiro 4 Stuart Daly/Dutch Uncle Agency
With possible but not yet definite and verifiable news of gaining some understanding to the so called god particle aka the elusive Higgs Boson, what would happen to the other theories that have been submitted? More specifically the other favored theory. In this limited article, NS explores the other side of the story and what could come of it.:
In July, at a particle physics conference in Grenoble, France, Nobel laureate George Smoot seemed to be channelling the spirit of Thomas Huxley. The scrappy 19th-century champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection once spoke of “the great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”. Smoot, a cosmologist who made his name studying the afterglow of the big bang, thinks this is just the drama now playing out in particle physics.
Particle physics has a beautiful theory, known as supersymmetry. More than three decades in the making, its elegant mathematical structure was intended to replace the “standard model”, the eminently serviceable but sometimes creaky and in parts aesthetically unpleasing theoretical construct that is currently our best description of matter’s fundamental workings.
Supersymmetry’s beauty is now meeting some ugly facts emerging from the Large Hadron Collider, the gargantuan particle accelerator situated at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Supersymmetry predicts a whole slew of new particles, and by most reckonings the LHC should have started producing some of them already. But it hasn’t. That throws up some big questions. Is supersymmetry really the right answer? If not, what is?
Supersymmetry - SUSY to its legion of fans - has long been seen as a panacea for the standard model’s ills. Back in the early 1960s, one of the theories that went into making the standard model faced an embarrassment. It could not explain how elementary particles, things such as electrons and the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, get their mass. It predicted none of them had any mass at all.
A workaround, arrived at from several angles in 1964, was to postulate that an all-pervading field exists with which elementary particles interact differently, giving each a unique mass. This was the Higgs field, named after one of its progenitors, Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, UK.
The Higgs mechanism was neat, but created its own problem. Experimental clues indicated that the mass of the “quantum” of the Higgs field, the Higgs boson, was between about 114 and 180 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) – exactly the range in which the LHC is currently feverishly seeking the particle, with as yet only tantalising hints. The theory, though, made it something like a billion billion times bigger. This gigantic discrepancy came to be known as the hierarchy problem.
cwnl:
Lunar Eclipse Over an Indian Peace Pagoda
Our Moon turned red last week. The reason was that during December 10, a total lunar eclipse occurred. The above digitally superimposed image mosaic captured the Moon many times during the eclipse, from before the Moon entered Earth’s shadow until after the Moon exited.
The image sequence was recorded over a Shanti Stupa Peace Pagota near the center of New Delhi, India, where the eclipse of the Moon was nearly, but not completely, total.
The red tint of the eclipsed Moon was created by sunlight first passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, which preferentially scatters blue light (making the sky blue) but passes and refracts red light, before reflecting back off the Moon. Differing amounts of clouds and volcanic dust in the Earth’s atmosphere make each lunar eclipse appear differently. The next total lunar eclipse will occur only in 2014.
Image Credit & Copyright: Chander Devgun (SPACE)
The sandfish lizard (Scincus scincus) spends the majority of its life in desert sand, coming to the surface only to forage. It encounters different densities and types of sand in its habitat, which affect not only how it moves, but how quickly it can move. Researchers used high-speed X-ray imaging and developed empirical granular-drag laws to understand how sandfish lizards “swim” in sand. The work could apply to robots that must crawl, burrow and swim in unconsolidated material like desert sand or rubble at a disaster site. Photo: Daniel Goldman, Georgia Institute of Technology
