Inside the mind of a physicist, and more. . .
December 15, 2008 | 11:39 am
The Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the Large Hadron Collider's enormous detectors. It will be utilized in the search for new particles, including the Higgs boson. (Photo: CERN)
A great new science news site has cropped up: Northwestern University in Illinois recently posted its Science in Society articles on line.
The site has stories by students and faculty at Northwestern and Medill as well as by contributing authors. The stories cover a wide variety of scientific fields with Physics and Astronomy as one of the nine core sections.
Stories on the site aim to connect every day people with research efforts and explain how that research affects them. The introduction to the site explains, “We explore not only the science, but the legal, ethical, and even economic implications of research as well.”
Two notable features on the site come from scientists working with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
André de Gouvêa, Ian Low, and Tim Tait write a wonderly easy-to-understand summary of particle physics and how it is studied at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland titled “Big Ideas, Small Particles”.
A brain MRI. MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is one of the many technologies made possible as a result of physics research.
Just for fun, the trio has thrown in a slide show demonstrating how the LHC won’t create a black hole that swallows the Earth and a slide show on the history of technology in the field.
In “From a Physicist’s Mind”, Heidi Schellman writes an equally down-to-Earth story summarizing how the superconducting magnets work at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator. She also explains how the need for cutting-edge tools for experiments has jump started technological advances leading to better products and services used in everyday life, including MRI machines, superconducting wire and the World Wide Web.
Tona Kunz
Posted in Uncategorized |
1 Comment »
December 17th, 2008 at 8:48 am
The search still remains one of what is matter really. When it comes to symmetry of W and Z bosons it takes ten or more times the energy to produce them in symmetry breaking exercises. Does anyone consider that the nature of matter may in itself be a conductor of energy in time as opposed to spacetime curvature? It would mean that matter becomes a connected wormhole at a node incorporating a twist or angular change in dimension. It would be significant if such an incident could replicate the concept that anti particles of sufficient energy might change the past with lost energy in positive particle formation providing a surge of energy and radiation forward and in effect changing the future.