"Higgs boson walks into a church, and the priest says, 'I'm sorry we don't allow Higgs bosons to come to churches.' And [the Higgs] says, 'But without me, you can't have mass.'"
Mother of Higgs boson found in superconductors
A weird theoretical cousin of the Higgs boson, one that inspired the decades-long hunt for the elusive particle, has been properly observed for the first time. The discovery bookends one of the most exciting eras in modern physics.
The Higgs field, which gives rise to its namesake boson, is credited with giving other particles mass by slowing their movement through the vacuum of space. First proposed in the 1960s, the particle finally appeared at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012, and some of the theorists behind it received the 2013 Nobel prize in physics.
But the idea was actually borrowed from the behaviour of photons in superconductors, metals that, when cooled to very low temperatures, allow electrons to move without resistance. Near zero degrees kelvin, vibrations are set up in the superconducting material that slow down pairs of photons travelling through, making light act as though it has a mass.
SPACEThe Higgs Boson May Disintegrate into Dark Matter
6 comments:
The world of quantum physics, like the world of republican logic, is a very strange place..
"..superconducting material that slow down pairs of photons travelling through, making light act as though it has a mass."
--Good. Let's shine it on dark
matter and start on that mystery.
It's remarkable how far we've come in discovering the fundamentals of the universe.
All the more astonishing that, at the same time as such work is being done, millions still literally believe in a six-day creation, a woman being made from a rib, a talking snake, and a ship carrying all the world's animals during a global flood.
the most important thing about boson is to have a good marinade
http://grillinfools.com/blog/2011/02/05/bison-tenderloin-marinated-in-roasted-garlic-and-cracked-peppercorns/
Excuse me, Shaw. Does Boston stop at this train?"
A neutrino walks into a bar.
Bartender: "Are you new around here?"
Neutrino: "Just passing through.
Personally, I'm not especially fond of elections. They're always so negative.
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