Friday, March 30, 2007
In November, on schedule, protons will begin circulating in the
27km ring of the Large Hadron Collider. After 15 years and
$3.8B, the LHC is nearing completion at CERN in the tunnel used
for LEP. The largest and most complex scientific instrument ever
built, the LHC involves the collaboration of more than 2,000
physicists from 34 countries. The primary objective is to find
the Higgs boson, the particle that catalyzed the creation of mass
from energy to form the universe. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman
called it "the God particle." It is the only particle predicted
by the Standard Model of particle physics that hasn't been found,
but physicists are confident that the Higgs will be found by the
LHC. There will likely be much more. Supersymmetry (susy)
predicts a boson superpartner for each fermion. According to a
story in New Scientist, there were hints of both the Higgs and
susy in results from the Tevatron. In any case, we are on the
threshold of spectacular advances in understanding the creation
of the universe. Better a God particle than a God
Why is "The Secret" suddenly the number-one best seller? When I
first heard that "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne is at the top of
the NY Times bestseller list I didn't believe it. Besides, I
look at the best seller list in the Sunday Times every week, and
I hadn't seen anything called "The Secret" in either Fiction or
Nonfiction. But there is a category called, "Advice," that the
NYT only posts on the web. You can think of it as books for
people who watch daytime television. The great champion of The
Secret is Oprah Winfrey. The Secret is a new-age theory about
how to get rich, or layed, by just wanting it badly enough. It
works for Oprah. The Secret quotes "world renowned quantum
physicist" Dr. John Hagelin, who explains it this way, "Quantum
mechanics confirms it. Quantum cosmology confirms it. The
universe emerges from thought and all of this matter around us is
just precipitated thought." Well, so much for the Higgs. There
is a tendency to attribute anything weird to quantum mechanics.
A chemist at the University of Illinois, Lauterbur shared the
2003 Nobel prize with British physicist Sir Peter Mansfield. A
call had just issued for increased use of MRI imaging in women
with a high risk of developing breast cancer.
In 1991 at the University of Iowa, a physics PhD graduate who was
not chosen for an academic prize, killed five people at a physics
department meeting. Physics departments everywhere initiated
policies aimed at recognizing the severe pressure graduate
students are under. A film based on the incident has now won the
Alfred P. Sloan prize for best feature dealing with science.
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