numbers-and-particles
The Higgs Boson Might Not Be as Weird as We Hoped
Wait, what? New Higgs boson results? Did you think it was over? Oh hell no. "A post today":http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/11/14/higgs-results-at-kyoto/ from physicist Matt Strassler discussing the newest Higgs findings puts it well, "Knowledge...
One GIF To Explain the Multiverse of the Microscopic
Even if cosmic multiverse theories turn out to be bunk -- probably not -- it's worth considering that we live in at least a few multiverses already. You might say that the narrow band of visible light that allows the set of things we can see with our...
How Five Times Three Equals a Hacking Revolution
The thing used to protect most of your digital secrets -- credit card numbers, email accounts, bank account information, whatever -- is a peculiar sort of lock and key, a variety of encryption called public key cryptography. In this secrecy scheme, the...
New Research: We Live in a Cosmic Cave Full of Dark Matter
Experimental results released last month from Italy's deep underground XENON100 detector revealed, sadly, "no dark matter":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/7/18/space-is-only-noise-in-the-underground-dark-matter-detector, at least in its most commonly...
The Science Behind Unhackable Quantum Communication
For many years, we've been able to communicate via electronic messages really, really securely. Thank asymmetric key cryptography for this, a scheme for encoding messages that is nigh unbreakable. The widely-used and depended-upon secrecy scheme rests...
Music Is Louder and More Boring Than Ever, Says Math
How hard did that headline blow your mind? Imagine: music really is crappier now; you're not just turning more snobby. It's louder, not just because you're playing it louder because technology is making it much easier and cheaper to give yourself...
A Brief History of Atom Smashers
Smashing two things together in order to uncover their hidden properties is something hardly limited to the pleasure-inducing, dirty acts you’re now thinking about. Particle physicists all over the world have been constantly working on and improving...
The Higgs Boson Interpreted as Cuban Dance Music
Data and statistical analysis is a hard thing to explain to a public not accustomed to it and more used to pop culture imaginings of scientists just finding shit in sudden _eureka!_ moments. Based on a cross-section of interactions over the years...
Motherboard TV: A Death on the Frontier
The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world's largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the...
Space is Only Noise in the Underground Dark Matter Detector
For all of the pop culture, mainstream buzzing devoted to the Higgs boson, it seems almost bizarre that at least some amount of comparable attention isn't devoted to dark matter and dark energy. Is that the price tag that comes with high energy...
For Chrissakes, Stop Calling It 'God Particle'
Detecting and cross-checking (and cross-checking again) the existence of the Higgs boson is a big undertaking and an important one, so its attention from the press is understandable - laudable, even. But the problem with covering the Higgs boson search...
It Did Hurt: An Interview with Fermilab Physicist Rob Roser on Searching for Higgs in America
Physicist Rob Roser is head of the Scientific Computing Division and formerly a spokesman for the CDF experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator, in Batavia, Illinois, an hour outside of Chicago. The Tevatron was switched off last September, leaving...