cern

I think I have found a solution for Zynga.

The company needs to get together with the United Nations peacekeeping forces around the world and create a board game in which people get killed, but not really.

How is it that I have had this quite brilliant notion?

Well, I have been stimulated by the news that Rovio, they who have enriched so many lives with Angry Birds, have got together with CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, landlord for the Large Hadron Collider) to create new and amusing experiences to exercise young minds.

These will be under a … Read more

Scientists who announced two months ago observations of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," have had their research published in the peer-reviewed Physics Letters B, along with an astounding list of thousands of authors.

More than 5,000 researchers around the world are said to have contributed to the landmark studies by the CMS and ATLAS teams working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). They said on July 4 the new boson they had observed was consistent with the Higgs, believed to be responsible for imparting all elementary particles in the universe with mass.

Two articles by the teams are each about 30 pages long. The combined author list takes up 19 pages of single-spaced text and appears to have roughly 6,000 names. Wouldn't that be fun to cite as a footnote in full? … Read more

I never knew that Tim Berners-Lee was a cross-dresser.

I don't mean to bring it up to expose him. I bring it up merely to celebrate the fact.

For in 8 days' time, the first photo ever uploaded to the Web will be 20 years old. And why would a picture of a wonderful all-girl singing group be the first ever out there on the WWW?

Well, partly, a report suggests, because of Berners-Lee's cross-dressing.

I lean heavily for this information on the wonderful tale told by Motherboard. (I've also emailed Berners-Lee, but haven't heard back.)… Read more

There is much excitement over the discovery of the Higgs boson particle.

Physicists everywhere are, as I understand it, overjoyed that all of their theories have been proved to be correct. Which certainly puts them far ahead of any economists.

However, for one man this discovery has come with a cost.

For Stephen Hawking admitted to the BBC that he'd just lost $100 over Higgs boson's arrival.

Hawking is clearly impressed with this breakthrough.

"It should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize," he told the BBC.

There is, though, a certain melancholy for Hawking, too.

"… Read more

This is a guest commentary. See Mark Wise's bio below.

The Higgs boson is an integral part of our understanding of nature. It is a particle that is an excitation of what is called the Higgs field. The Higgs field permeates all of space and when some of the fundamental particles travel through it they acquire mass. The amount of mass they acquire depends on how strongly they interact with the Higgs field. Some like the electron acquire a small mass while others acquire a much larger mass.

One peculiar aspect of this is that this Higgs field that … Read more

Scientists at the CERN nuclear research facility have almost certainly found the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," they have announced.

This morning the leaders of the experiments running through the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) said that their two teams had independently observed a particle consistent with the Higgs, which has until now been theoretical rather than a sure thing. The Higgs boson is thought to be responsible for mass in the otherwise-already-proven standard model of physics.

"We have observed a new boson," Joe Incandela, leader of the CMS experiment said at a press conference … Read more

An apparently leaked video dated for dissemination tomorrow depicts a CERN representative involved with one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider saying that "we've observed a new particle," which he goes on to label "one of the biggest discoveries in our field in the last 30 to 40 years."

"It's something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks, for example," the spokesman, Jo … Read more

Fireworks. Hot dogs. Beach blankets. Particle physics.

July 4 this year won't be just about Americans celebrating Independence Day and unofficially kicking off the the summer vacation season. It could also bring news of some significance from physicists in Europe who've been in hot pursuit of a mysterious subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson -- and a better glimpse at the nature of the universe.

The big-brain folks at CERN on Wednesday will be holding a seminar at which they plan to provide an update on the Higgs search, divulging the preliminary results of their 2012 data … Read more

Neutrinos can't travel faster than the speed of light after all.

CERN has confirmed that an initial reading, which recorded neutrinos -- nearly mass-less subatomic particles -- sent from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratory as moving faster than light, was based off of a "faulty element" with the experiment's fiber-optic timing system.

The results, presented today at the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan, closes the chapter on a highly surprising finding last year that challenged the conventional wisdom of physics. The results quickly faced public scrutiny.

"Although this result … Read more