Let Me Count the Waves

A Medieval Crossword Puzzle

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 11:44:26 -0700

wtfarthistory: Pun intended! (Get it, “cross”-word puzzle?). Oliverus, De laudibus sanctae Crucis...

cwnl: LHC Breaks Supersymmetry’s Beauty Image Credit: Spiro...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:58:55 -0800

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.

Article: The truth hurts: LHC breaks supersymmetry’s beauty

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/11/28/best-art-design-books-2011/

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:52:16 -0800

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/11/28/best-art-design-books-2011/

electrikmuse: The Art of Complex Problem Solving A cool...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:02:45 -0800

electrikmuse: The Art of Complex Problem Solving A cool interactive visual diagram created by Marshall Clemens.

hyperallergic: Manuel Fernández, “Two Hundred and Sixteen...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:16:29 -0800

hyperallergic:

Manuel Fernández, “Two Hundred and Sixteen Colors” — a participative Internet-based work. [Click through to see and participate.]

The La-La Theory

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:09:33 -0700

Met a very interesting Tumblr today named Katie Haegle, who I share similar interests and...

Come on Long Beach designers ~ CitID is an ambitious project...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:00:00 -0700

Come on Long Beach designers ~ CitID is an ambitious project aiming to gain global consciousness by giving a (type)face to every city worldwide; big or small, rich or poor, famous or infamous, well-known or unheard-of.

This weekend. I’ll be there…cheering from the...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:03:58 -0700

This weekend. I’ll be there…cheering from the sidelines, that is (too out of shape) :/

Photo

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:59:53 -0700

Beautiful photographic studies by Luke Hayes via Visuelle.

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:03:36 -0700

Beautiful photographic studies by Luke Hayes via Visuelle.

failblog.org

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:49:00 -0700

failblog.org

Yep, sounds just like Long Beach

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:47:36 -0700

Yep, sounds just like Long Beach

Progressive House at its finest -- Chilling Moments, Shmuel Flash (Bedrock, of course)

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:56:00 -0700

Progressive House at its finest -- Chilling Moments, Shmuel Flash (Bedrock, of course): From Sasha...

arielwaldman: Pretty amazing infographic by Omid Kashan of time...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 01:37:47 -0700

arielwaldman:

Pretty amazing infographic by Omid Kashan of time since the Big Bang

chromatichouse: 14-billion-years-later: Speed of light may...

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:32:00 -0700

chromatichouse:

14-billion-years-later:

Speed of light may have been broken

Okay guys, this one is hot off the press. I’ve only found two sources for this (here and here) that have been posted in the last hour. I have to say that I immediately doubt the validity of this, but I feel I should bring it to your attention anyway.

Reports from our good friends at CERN say that they’ve observed particles traveling at faster than light speeds. For those of you who know a bit about relativity, this ain’t all that cool. The speed of light is basically meant to be the fastest speed there is, and if this wasn’t the case then we may have a major breakdown of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The scientists at CERN have concluded this based off results in which a beam of neutrinos fired from a particle accelerator in Geneva traveled 434 miles 60 nanoseconds faster than it should have. This may not sound like much, but the error was calculated at 10 nanoseconds and the scientists themselves seem fairly adamant in their results.

HOLY FUCK

Photo

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:47:00 -0700

aural bliss --- "Bellows" from Loscil's album "Plume"

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:10:41 -0700

aural bliss --- "Bellows" from Loscil's album "Plume"

White Holes A white hole, in general relativity, is a...

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 03:05:03 -0700

White Holes

A white hole, in general relativity, is a hypothetical region of spacetime which cannot be entered from the outside, but from which matter and light may escape. In this sense it is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered from the outside, but from which nothing, including light, may escape. (However, it is theoretically possible for a traveler to enter a rotating black hole, avoid the singularity, and travel into a rotating white hole which allows the traveler to escape into another universe.)

Like black holes, white holes have properties like mass, charge, and angular momentum. They attract matter like any other mass, but objects falling towards a white hole would never actually reach the white hole’s event horizon.

See also; Event Horizons

laughingsquid: World Trade Center Twin Towers Tribute by...

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:21:30 -0700

laughingsquid: World Trade Center Twin Towers Tribute by Quoteskine

scienceisbeauty: Click the picture to check out in a 360º view...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:45:24 -0700

scienceisbeauty: Click the picture to check out in a 360º view how easy must be to command the Space Shuttle Discovery… Source: 360VR Images