Summer conferences are just around the corner, and the LHC experiments are putting together O(1 fb) samples as we speak (in another post I will report on the progress of data collection at CMS, which has already collected over 650 inverse picobarns of useful data). It seems that this is a good time to make the point of where we stand with Higgs boson searches.
I am speaking, of course, of the Standard Model (C) Higgs boson, the only one which exists (maybe). Fancier concoctions, predicting five, eleven, or exp(pi) new scalars will be reviewed another day when I am under drugs.
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'Project Calliope' will have a nearly circular polar low-earth orbit... but what does that actually mean? Here's a brief mini course in orbital mechanics.
Any orbit requires 6 elements to specify the position and motion fully. Since we live in 3-D space, it's equivalent to 3 spatial dimensions and 3 velocities. You could use (x,y,z) for the position and (vx,vy,vz) for the velocities. You could use spherical coordinates, or Euler angles. All of those give you, at any instant, the full position and motion in 3D of the satellite at a specific instance in time.
In 1956, science-fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote a short story for Fantastic Universe called "Minority Report", about a futuristic world where precognitive mutants can predict crimes before they can happen. The ethical concerns about encroachment of big government and the possibility of a police state are obvious in a time of the USSR and increasing government regulation in the period - how can you be guilty of a crime you did not yet commit? The argument was also whether free will existed. Tom Cruise starred in a movie based on the story in 2002.
I suppose the recent Egypt-centric focus on food consumption had to end eventually. The 'food pyramid' you have seen for decades, craftily negotiated by food lobbyists, is being replaced by...a pie. First Lady Michelle Obama is on a war against obesity and she
will fight over food.
Pres. Obama warned us, "
You do not want to be between Michelle and a tamale" and the new dietary guideline shape is the latest weapon.
Firstly, I guess an apology is in order. Its been a hell of a long time since number 4 went out; I got rather caught up with other things and this series then languished on my list of half-written articles. So, apologies for that!
But before we get cracking with the final 3, I thought I'd pick up on an episode of fakery that just wasn't. This is the tale of
Archaeopteryx, who has weathered the storm and has retained its place as perhaps the greatest example of a transitional fossil that we have.
Most of us seek out like-minded individuals who will reinforce our worldview. As I remind my students, we hold no beliefs we think are incorrect. After all, if we thought we were wrong, we wouldn't believe it. There's a reason that it can be hard for us to agree to disagree or live and let live, too. If I am certain I am right, and you disagree with me, then you must be wrong.
The fact that I am swamped by the too many activities I am involved in these days can be gauged by things like the following: I get to know about important new physics results coming from an experiment I am part of by... private communications from amateurs! Knowledgeable and informed ones, of course -but that's not the point.
The video “
Why Quantum Mechanics is Weird” (25k views) won the 2005 Berkeley Video&Film Festival Best of Festival Award in Education. That is second place, behind a Grand Festival Award which went to a film on polar bears (much cuter than me talking for 27 minutes). In this blog, I will go through the math behind the video which provides a novel, entirely mathematical explanation for why causality is different between classical and quantum mechanics. Calculus done correctly in spacetime may turn out to provide the correct answer, completely philosophy-free, as it must be.
Why does local realism being wrong imply that non-local reality is true? Such is widely opined to be the only sober solution because it conserves good old reality, the scientists’ fort that is to be defended against the onslaught of magic.
However, reality with “spooky actions at a distance” is not non-magical either. Nevertheless, the issue is known as “non-locality in quantum physics”, never as “non-reality in quantum physics”. How about keeping localism and instead accepting that realism is a god of the gaps in retreat? Don’t like it? Well, how about at least not being so sure about it for starters?
