“Physicists from the CDF and DZero collaborations found excesses in their data that might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV”, said Fermilab in a press release. “This new result also excludes the possibility of the Higgs having a mass in the range from 147 to 179 GeV.”
CERN confirmed the results giving data of ATLAS and CMS. In compairison to the annoucement made in december the new CERN results contained the complete 2011 data including “nearly all possible decay channels” of Higgs, officials said.
Unclear is yet the mass range in which a possible Higgs could hide. CERN gives two different mass ranges at 124 and between 125 and 126 GeV while ATLAS results show a peak at 125.
image: CERN
The probability that the deviation of 2.8 sigma comes from “nothing but background is now 0.26 %.”
Guess, these are thrilling times. Read more here, here and here
haha, I like that. Especially the “consider Germany” part.
They just decided to drastically limit the solar subsidies in Germany, allegedly because the subsidies prevented the German solar industry from making technical progresses.
This nearly 4-minute time-lapse video takes you to northern Canada under a night sky filled with dancing aurora.
In this all-sky view made by a fish eye lens the landscape is lit by the moon, crossing the sky near the horizon in the subarctic latitude of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.
Pauline Gaugnon gives one of the most detailed and yet understandable reports on Higgs (the boson, the field, the mechanism). Nice to read!
“To summarize: The Higgs field provides the mass and the Higgs boson is just an excited state of this field. All particles that interact with the Higgs field acquire mass since they travel less rapidly but still have the same energy. The Higgs mechanism expresses all that mathematically. Sleep tight”
"So let’s investigate how we can get faster than light neutrinos in special relativity, before we no longer have the luxury of an exciting result to play with."
After news popping up about the loose cables that probably, presumably influenced the neutrino experiment at CERN people, me included, tended to blame the scientists for making a mistake. Aidan Randle-Conde asked to consider that uncertainty, lacking knowledge and confusing results have always been the trigger for great discoverys. So let’s take advantage of this exciting times when we don’t know yet for sure if neutrinos are really slower than light.
Short excursion from particle physics: Today I had the chance to attend a guided tour to world’s first “plus energy house” in Freiburg, Germany. It was built in 1994 by the German architect Rolf Disch and uses solar panels, a vacuum heating and loads of other crazy ways to create six times (!) more energy than its inhabitans (the architect and his wife) need. To exploit the maximum of sun power the whole construction is built on a rotating wodden column that enables the house to turn towards the sun. Costs: 1.2 million Euros.
There’s an interesting discussion going caused by a tv appearance by Brian Cox (remember him?). Cox claims in his typical showmaster style that rubbing an diamond changes the universe - in total. [see Cox’ whole TV lecture here]
The background - as Cox sees it - is the connection between the Pauli exclusion principle and the energy levels of all electrons in the universe. The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli discovered in 1925 that no two electrons can have the same energy level no two fermions can occupy the same quantum state at the same time. By rubbing a diamond (that consists of electrons and protons (=fermions) forming carbon atoms) the electrons in the diamond are shifted to a higher energy level - therefore every other electron in the whole universe must be shifting too to avoid identical energy levels.
Cox sums it up to one catchy phrase:
”Everything is connected to everything else” [1:37]
Wait a minute. Jon Butterworth tries to explain critics on Cox’ demonstration and the everything-is-connected-theory. Frankly, my humble physics knowledge doesn’t suffice to reconstruct Butterworth’s explanation in detail. But if everything was connected to everything, we’d be able to transfer information to the last corner of space. In the same moment we unleash it.
If we created a way to decode the changes of energy levels in electrons, we’d be able to transfer information faster than the speed of light. And that is not possible (* without loose cables). I can’t see why the Pauli principle should not apply to Einstein’s speed of light barrier. Therefore I’d say - again, I’m neither a physicist nor an expert of quantum mechanics - Cox must be wrong.
In particular, imagine there is some physicist located in the Andromeda galaxy, doing experiments on the energy levels of electrons. This is a really good experimenter, with lots of electrons available and the ability to measure energies to arbitrarily good precision. When we rub the diamond here on Earth, is there any change at all in what that experimenter would measure?
Of course the answer is “none whatsoever.” Not just in practice, but in principle. The Hamiltonian of the universe will change when we heat up the diamond, which changes the instantaneous time-independent solutions to the Sch[r]oedinger equation throughout space, so in principle the energy levels of all the electrons in the universe do change. But that change is completely invisible to the far-off experimenter; there will be a change, but it won’t happen until the change in the electromagnetic field itself has had time to propagate out to Andromeda, which is at the speed of light. Another way of saying it is that “energy levels” are static, unchanging states, and what really happens is that we poke the electron into a non-static state that gradually evolves. (If it were any other way, we could send signals faster than light using this technique.)
I really enjoy watching Brian Cox, but here I guess he went too far. Sean Carrol mentioned that there IS actually a possibilty that you could measure a change in electrons very far away.
Physicist would say we changed the Hamiltonian, the expression for the energy of the system. […]
But… and I think here you see very clearly the difference between physics (and science in general) and entertainment. Caroll:
[…] there are serious problems in accepting this as an interpretation of what he actually said. For one thing, it has nothing to do with the exclusion principle; bosons (who can happily pile on top of each other in the same quantum state) would be affected just as much as fermions. More importantly, it fails as a job of translation, by giving people a completely incorrect idea of what is going on.
Rubbing a diamond in a TV studio in England does NOT measurably change the configuration of an electron in a different galaxy. It’s a smart and seductive thought that makes the audience listen to your lecture with big eyes. But it’s not science.
"I’m billions of years old, yes. Been hanging around since a few seconds after the big bang, you know. I’ve been in a star, seen a supernova from the inside…"
Happy birthday Stephen Hawking! For a man with ALS disorder you have brought some unforgettable concepts and truths to the world of science and inspired those with disabilities to not see it as that, but as an advantage. You’re what I consider a genuine inspiration. In respect to the birthday of the man known best for his intelligence in our era, WiredScience has featured this wonderful set of audio consisting of some of Professor Hawking’s notable quotes:
It would be hard to find a geek who doesn’t recognize the world-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who turns 70 today, or his equally famous voice.
Despite being stricken with the neurogenerative disease ALS at age 21, Hawking has continued to do groundbreaking work in quantum gravity, cosmology, and black hole research as well as written iconic popular science books such as A Brief History of Time.
Being forced to use a speech synthesizer — as Hawking has since 1986 due to complications from his disease — would have left hindered most peoples’ ability to communicate. But somehow the computerized voice, and the length of time it takes him to type in his thoughts, lends even more weight to Hawking’s words. Below, we have collected audio of some of his best quotes on topics such as physics, space travel, and the meaning of life, all spoken in his iconic digital voice.
If you’d like to hear more about Hawking, tune in to the live webcast of the University of Cambridge’s special symposium beginning at in honor of his birthday featuring physicists such as Hawking’s close friend Kip Thorne and Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter at 8 a.m. EST.
“Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker. Although the universe doesn’t have an end, it had a beginning in the Big Bang. One might ask what is before that but the answer is that there is nowhere before the Big Bang just as there is nowhere south of the South Pole.” — Stephen Hawking —Video Q&A with Time magazine in 2010
![Happy Birthday, old boy.
Audio: Stephen Hawking’s Best Quotes
Happy birthday Stephen Hawking! For a man with ALS disorder you have brought some unforgettable concepts and truths to the world of science and inspired those with disabilities to not see it as that, but as an advantage. You’re what I consider a genuine inspiration. In respect to the birthday of the man known best for his intelligence in our era, WiredScience has featured this wonderful set of audio consisting of some of Professor Hawking’s notable quotes:
It would be hard to find a geek who doesn’t recognize the world-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who turns 70 today, or his equally famous voice.
Despite being stricken with the neurogenerative disease ALS at age 21, Hawking has continued to do groundbreaking work in quantum gravity, cosmology, and black hole research as well as written iconic popular science books such as A Brief History of Time.
Being forced to use a speech synthesizer — as Hawking has since 1986 due to complications from his disease — would have left hindered most peoples’ ability to communicate. But somehow the computerized voice, and the length of time it takes him to type in his thoughts, lends even more weight to Hawking’s words. Below, we have collected audio of some of his best quotes on topics such as physics, space travel, and the meaning of life, all spoken in his iconic digital voice.
If you’d like to hear more about Hawking, tune in to the live webcast of the University of Cambridge’s special symposium beginning at in honor of his birthday featuring physicists such as Hawking’s close friend Kip Thorne and Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter at 8 a.m. EST.
“Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker. Although the universe doesn’t have an end, it had a beginning in the Big Bang. One might ask what is before that but the answer is that there is nowhere before the Big Bang just as there is nowhere south of the South Pole.” — Stephen Hawking —Video Q&A with Time magazine in 2010
Click the source for the audible quotes..
via [cwnl]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxhy6joYE81qbn5m1o1_500.jpg)
