[Draft – more citations to come] Lately I’ve encountered many articles about research on the Higgs boson. Retrospectives, ongoing discoveries, and expectations for the upgraded LHC and its third run. The stuff of careers for 1000’s of scientists. This research is a fascinating effort akin to “particle archeology.” Inferring – detecting evidence for – the… Continue reading Higgs 10 years on – expectations for a path beyond
[Draft] [“Beyond the Standard Model” series] Background on the “crisis” This Quanta Magazine article (below) has an eye-catching title, but its gist relates to the hierarchy problem, which I discussed in a prior post. That 2017 post (and additionaL commentary) used quotes by physicists – Sean Carroll, Leon Lederman, Fermilab’s Don Lincoln (video) – and… Continue reading Reductionism in quantum physics – a naturalness mire?
This Space.com article “Hotspot for Cosmic Rays: Touring the Telescope Array Project in Utah” published on May 27, 2017, reminded me that while CERN’s LHC is the current champ of colliders on Earth, other particles which have been raining down on us for billions of years are colliding with Earth’s atmosphere at even higher energies —… Continue reading Up in the sky — faster than a speeding LHC proton
UPDATE JULY 4, 2022 • CERN > “The Higgs boson, ten years after its discovery” (July 4, 2022) The landmark discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider exactly ten years ago, and the progress made since then to determine its properties, have allowed physicists to make tremendous steps forward in our understanding… Continue reading Not so deific particle – Higgs boson
Physics was a requirement for the first two years when I was an undergrad. That introduced me to The Feynman Lectures on Physics, three heavy red volumes (© 1963, 1964, 1965). The preface in each volume had a picture of Feynman playing the bongo drums. And then the early morning physics labs. Two of the… Continue reading Reality is fields
We’re all familiar with the saying, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” So, I have a similar problem with modern cosmology: which came first, fields or particles? After the Big Bang … Well, the answer is sort of neither. There was a long evolutionary path from earlier organisms to creatures that laid eggs… Continue reading BB: Chicken or egg redux
