esiegel | November 8, 2010"I suppose I'll open a bottle of something if they find it." -Peter Higgs
Alright, all you quarks and leptons in the house. I'm looking at you in particular, up quark, down quark, and the electron. The up and down quarks combine to make up the proton and neutron, while the electron combines with nuclei to make up atoms.
We learned a little bit about how the Higgs will complete the standard model. And one of the things we mentioned is that the Higgs mechanism gives rest masses to all of the particles in the standard model.
This includes all the quarks (including the constituents of the…
esiegel | November 7, 2010"She said believe in yourself and believe in your dreams. I took away those words and will keep them in my memory for a lifetime." -Dominique Dawes
Every weekend, I try to come to you with a story that is a break from the regular physics and astronomy stuff I write about. This weekend, I was listening to a sweet song by Alison Krauss,
I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby,
and looking at a picture of the Elephant Nebula. Why is it called the Elephant Nebula? Well... it kind of looks like... well...
Yeah. It's an elephant. Maybe a snuffleupagus, but probably an elephant. And one of the first…
esiegel | November 5, 2010"I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work." -Maria Mitchell, Astronomer
If you were around back in 1997, perhaps you remembered seeing Comet Hartley 2 back then, as it brightened and came close to Earth, as captured by NASA.
Unlike the other comets you know of, like Halley's Comet, Hartley 2 returns close to Earth every 6.5 years, while most comets take nearly a century!
Comet Hartley 2 doesn't look like it originates from the Kuiper Belt. Rather, it looks…
esiegel | November 4, 2010"We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!" -Gollum, from the Hobbit
Don't get me wrong. The Higgs is an absolutely wonderful mechanism, and I've very optimistic that the last particle of the standard model -- the Higgs Boson -- will be found over the next few years, either at the Large Hadron Collider or, if experimenters get very lucky, at Fermilab!
As far as particle physics goes, the Higgs would be unlike any other fundamental particle we know of. While all the other particles have a spin, or an intrinsic angular momentum, the Higgs is predicted to be spin-0, or spinless.
While all…
esiegel | November 2, 2010"Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise." -Ayn Rand
We're all aware that one of the ways that human life on Earth could end, conceivably, is the same way that the dinosaurs went down.
And asteroid tracking and deflection technology is fast becoming one of the hot issues of the day. It appears so often in the news that you'd think we are at a high risk, any day, of being hit by a catastrophic asteroid.
But -- and my opinion here definitely runs against the mainstream -- I think this hysteria is…
esiegel | October 31, 2010"Dusty Rhodes, do you think you're what our forefathers were thinking about when they thought up the American Dream? Ooooh, yeah, I don't think so."
-Macho Man Randy Savage
Those of you who've known me for any length of time know that Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and know that I put a whole lot of effort into my costumes. Here's a scary song for you to take you through this year's costume,
Caleb Meyer,by Gillian Welch. But I am not Gillian Welch for Halloween this year.
One of the most ridiculous -- yet entertaining -- characters from my childhood was this guy: the Macho Man…
esiegel | October 29, 2010"People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend." -Jim Morrison
Yes, Jim Morrison, some people are quite strange, too.
People Are StrangeBut that's not what I'm talking about. You see, one of the "doomsday" scenarios people are talking about over at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- in addition to black holes -- are out-of-control strangelets.
Let's talk about what these things are, what people are afraid of, and whether there really is anything worth fearing.…
esiegel | October 27, 2010"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together." -Alan Watts
We've talked, recently, about the scale of the Universe, and trust me, it's huge.
Filled with hundreds of billions of giant, Milky Way-sized galaxies,
each of which contains nearly a trillion stars,
the whole thing is really, really big. And, after nearly 14 billion years of expansion since the big bang, the…
esiegel | October 23, 2010
"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." -Stephen Jay Gould
It's been almost three years since I started science writing, and almost two years since I moved over here, to ScienceBlogs. And together, you and I have been through over five hundred posts, nearly ten thousand comments, and more than two million pageviews. No one can take that away from us, just like Billie Holiday sings:
They…
esiegel | October 21, 2010"I don't think we came from monkeys. I think that's ridiculous. I haven't seen a half-monkey, half-person yet." -Glenn Beck
I don't often write about biology here, but as many of you know, I often write about the history of the Universe, and that includes the Sun, the planets of the Solar System, and the Earth in particular.
Just this week, I came across the last in a series of one of the greatest nature shows I've ever seen: David Attenborough's Life series. In particular, this was Life in Cold Blood, which focused on reptiles and amphibians.
One of the complaints I regularly get over…
esiegel | October 20, 2010"The laws in this city are clearly racist. All laws are racist. The law of gravity is racist." -Marion Barry
The law of gravity, contrary to what Marion Barry says, is -- perhaps -- the most indiscriminate of all the laws of nature.
What do I mean? Well, you get a large collection of matter and energy together, like in a galaxy, and what does it do? It pulls -- with the entirety of the irresistible force of gravity -- on everything. Give the most massive collections of matter enough time, and they'll pull in everything around them for tens of millions of light years.
And when you do, you'll…
esiegel | October 19, 2010"It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time." -Winston Churchill
And yet, when you look out, you can't help but wonder how far away these points of light in the sky are.
Some things are easy. Our Solar System, for instance. Just by knowing Newton's Laws of gravity and observing the positions of the planets over time, we can determine the distances to any of the planets, our Moon, or our Sun to incredible (better than 99.999%) accuracy.
But what about the stars? They're much, much farther away than anything in our Solar System, and…
esiegel | October 17, 2010"The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing... there are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words." -Doris Humphrey
I don't know what the weather is like for the rest of you, but here, it's deceptively cold. What do I mean?
You know that feeling, when you look outside, and the world looks bright, sunny, and full of color? And then you open the door or window, or step outside, and the world feels like this:
Cold! And all you want to do is run back inside, hide…
esiegel | October 15, 2010"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us." -T. H. Huxley
There's an amazing interactive application on the Scale of the Universe that was just pointed out to me (thanks, Brian L.), and I had to share! So go play with it (again, link here), and let's talk about it.
You are here, of course. A human being is somewhere between 1 and 10 meters, to be rough. Being able to zoom from scales as small as the Planck Scale (~10-35 meters) all the way up to the…
esiegel | October 14, 2010Calvin: Why does the sky turn red as the sun sets?
Calvin's Dad: That's all the oxygen in the atmosphere catching fire.
Calvin: Where does the sun go when it sets?
Calvin's Dad: The sun sets in the west. In Arizona actually, near Flagstaff. That's why the rocks there are so red.
Calvin: Don't the people get burned up?
Calvin's Dad: No, the sun goes out as it sets. That's why it's dark at night.
Calvin: Doesn't the sun crush the whole state as it lands?
Calvin's Dad: Ha ha, of course not. Hold a quarter up. See, the sun's just about the same size.
Calvin: I thought I read that the sun was…
esiegel | October 11, 2010"I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." -Isaac Newton
"Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out in the ocean." -Christopher Reeve
Today is Columbus Day here in the United States. And unlike pretty much everyone else I know, I've been looking forward to Columbus Day for weeks, now.
Why's that?
After all, it's not like I get off from work, or that I think Columbus was some idealized version of a human…
esiegel | October 9, 2010"If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it."
-John Lennon
John Lennon, assassinated thirty years ago, would have been 70 today. Sometimes, a simple song can say it better than any prose can.
JuliaThis was written for his mother, Julia, who died in an accident when John was a teenager. Happy birthday -- to John Lennon and to everyone who remembers his music -- from me and the rest of scienceblogs!
esiegel | October 8, 2010"You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in." -Arlo Guthrie
You know the story. Every galaxy we look out at, with hardly any exceptions, appears to be moving away from us. Not only that, but the farther away a galaxy appears to be, the faster it appears to move away from us!
What do we observe that leads us to believe this? Well, thanks to Edwin Hubble, who looked at the spectra of distant galaxies, we discovered that, compared to Earth, where we make atoms emit and absorb light at very specific wavelengths (or frequencies):
for distant galaxies, these emission/absorption lines…
esiegel | October 7, 2010"Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere." -Thomas Carlyle
When you take a look up at the sky, the two most prominent objects are the Sun and the Moon.
And every day, like clockwork, they rise in the East and set in the West.
Why's that?
Because the Earth rotates on its North-South axis! Not only does it rotate, but it rotates from West to East, and that's why we see everything rise in the East and set in the West over the course of a day or night.
Image Credit: Phil Hart.
It gets…
esiegel | October 5, 2010"Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a piece of glass." -John Updike
It was so much fun talking about neutrinos that I thought I'd take the time to tell you what all the fuss is about.
Let's go back -- way back -- to the late 1920s. Not only did we know that everything on Earth was made out of atoms, we knew that atoms were made out of atomic nuclei, which were positively charged, massive, and tiny, and…