physics

Neutrino Transformation Could Help Explain Mystery of Matter

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Cool story in Wired today … Two research teams have found new evidence of transformations in elusive elementary particles called neutrinos. The findings may finally help explain why the universe didn’t vanish shortly after its birth. “These results are just the beginning of the story for neutrinos,” said physicist Robert Plunkett of Fermilab in Chicago. … Read more

Signs of dark matter from Minnesota mine

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Ron Cowen reports in ScienceNews that there are Possible evidence for WIMPs reported, supporting claims of Italy-based experiment

An experiment in Minnesota is the first to bolster a long-contested claim that detectors a continent away have found evidence of particles called WIMPs.

WIMPs are theorized particles considered to be leading candidates for dark matter, invisible material believed to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe.  In the Minnesota experiment, called COGENT, a hockey puck–sized chunk of germanium deep in a former iron mine attempts to record rare collisions with WIMPS.

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How to fix a particle accelerator.

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Around the house you only need two items for carrying out necessary repairs. These are, a can of WD-40, and a roll of duct tape. Confused? OK, its like this …

  • If it moves, and it shouldn’t, you deploy the duct tape
  • It it doesn’t move, and it should, you deploy the WD-40

So that’s all you really need :-)

Ah, but does this model scale up? What if you are not at home, but instead are at work at say … Fermilab, and just happen to encounter an issue with the Tevatron particle accelerator, what then? Remember now, this is a complex multi-billion dollar machine that is about four miles in circumference and involves about a thousand superconducting magnets, which accelerate protons and antiprotons to super-sized energies. Also, these are not common magnets, they are cooled with liquid helium so that they consume only one-third of the power they would normally require. If you hit an issue, do you shut down for a week, and call in a team of specialists at considerable cost to pull it apart for repair, or do you instead get out your roll of duct tape and patch it up so that you can carry on with no outage?

And the answer is …

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Comments on “No God needed for Big bang”

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As I’m sure you are aware by now, the world famous scientist, Prof. Stephen Hawking, has a new book coming out in which he explains that we don’t need God to explain the Big Bang. Our current understanding of modern physics is now sufficient and leaves no room left for the “God did it” hypothesis. … Read more