Science
catdynamics | July 31, 2012$3 million each for 9 theorists from Yuri Milner Foundation Fundamental Physics Prize
IAS big winner.
Milner Prize: Guth (MIT), Linde (Stanford); Arkani-Hamed, Maldacena, Seiberg and Witten (IAS); Kitaev (Caltech); Kontsevich (IASS); and, Sen (Chandra Institute).
String theory, inflation and quantum computing.
Heavy on IAS, the Techs and Russian expats.
All good choices.
Follows hard on the heels of the Simons Foundation Investigator awards.
Aleiner (Columbia); Brenner (Harvard); Glotzer (Michigan); Hastings (Duke); Hirata (Caltech); Kane (UPenn); Ooguri (Caltech); Pretorius (Princeton);…
catdynamics | July 31, 2012Continuing lazy live blog of the LHC Shows the Way workshop, with random interludes of alternative considerations, including the more esoteric aspects of German finance...
Patio session (informal presentation of in-progress results on blackboard, outside) - didn't catch speaker's name, got here a couple of minutes late.
Being reminded that Higgs is not the only scalar that may exist out there - could the LHC 125 GeV bump be a dilaton?
Paper by Csaki and collaborators coming out in August on arXiv.
Aside: the proliferation of chargeless scalars in quantum field theories has always bothered me…
oracknows | July 29, 2012And now for something completely different...
Well, not really, but kind of different.
I realize that my niche here has become discussing science-based medicine, evidence-based medicine, and the atrocities committed against both by proponents of so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine, but every so often I need a change of pace. Unfortunately, that change of pace was something I came across in the New York Times on Sunday in the form of a commentary so bad that I seriously wondered if it was a parody or a practical joke. Alas, it wasn't. I'm referring to an article by Andrew Hacker…
catdynamics | July 26, 2012LHC Shows the Way workshop: general colloquium reviewing the LHC and the Higgs discovery.
Kyle Cramner from NYU: "We discovered the goddamned particle"
More slow live blog.
Cute opening video of LHC construction.
Factoid: kinetic energy of LHC beam is about that of a jumbo jet at cruise speed
Starting point: Standard Model is ridiculously successful, at the part per million quantitative level.
In the regime in which it is valid.
Add Higgs and you don't just get mass, you get coupling to fermion decay is proportional to the Higgs induced mass of the fermion.
Can calculate Higgs boson…
catdynamics | July 26, 2012The LHC Shows the Way workshop rolls on, looking at the implications of the Higgs at 125-126 GeV for supersymmetry.
I live blog, slowly.
Where are the sparticles.
Coloured supersymmetric partners, the quark and gluon supersymmetric partners, must be massive - greater than ~ 1,000 GeV
in some natural implementation of supersymmetry, natch, clever theorists can of course think of increasingly contrived ways to get around most any limit, at the expense of fewer and fewer people believing them.
Minimal supersymmetric extensions to the standard model, with the Higgs mass assumed to be 126 GeV and…
catdynamics | July 24, 2012For reasons too complicated to explain, I am at The LHC Show the Way workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics.
This is a three week workshop on the latest results from the LHC, to be followed by a four week workshop on new physics from the LHC and possible connections to dark matter.
The kickoff presentation is on the current status of the experimental results. Relayed from the ICHEP meeting.
Just for fun I'll do some liveblogging from the somewhat outside perspective of an astrophysicist.
The current run at the LHC will be extended to Dec 17, couple months beyond planned before going into a…
pharyngula | July 24, 2012There is an extremely common sort of experiment to understand plasticity of the developing brain. These are important experiments to understand an important phenomenon: the brain does not simply unfold ineluctably to produce a fully functional organ, but actually interacts constantly with its environment to build a functioning organ that is matched to the world it must model and work with. This was one of the very first things I learned as a budding neuroscientist; my first undergraduate research experience was in the lab of Jenny Lund at the University of Washington, where we were given…
pharyngula | July 23, 2012The NY Times is touting a computer simulation of Mycoplasma genitalium, the proud possesor of the simplest known genome. It's a rather weird article because of the combination of hype, peculiar emphases, and cluelessness about what a simulation entails, and it bugged me.
It is not a complete simulation — I don't even know what that means. What it is is a sufficiently complex model of a real cell that it can uncover unexpected interactions between components of the genome, and that is a fine and useful thing. But as always, the first thing you should discuss in a model is the caveats and…
pharyngula | July 19, 2012Somedays, it's just awful to have the mind of a 12 year old boy. So I'm reading this serious and interesting paper on Neandertals, and learn something new.
Two particular characteristics have received considerable attention; pronounced humeral diaphysis strength asymmetry and anteroposteriorly strengthened humeral diaphyseal shape. In particular, humeral bilateral asymmetry for cross-sectional area, and torsional and average bending rigidity, appear exceptionally high in Neandertals (averaging 24–57%) compared to skeletal samples of modern Holocene H. sapiens (averaging 5–14%).
That's…
pharyngula | July 17, 2012Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called "Negotiation is Over". NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on the internet.
Whoa. That ought to give one pause — arrested for free speech, you're thinking? That does cause one's knee to jerk.
But then she was also arrested in May when she chained herself to a library door to protest being banned from the Wayne State campus in Detroit. She's…
pharyngula | July 14, 2012Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that's always on display. Here's all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:
The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.
If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation
It won't. It can't.
I read the paper he recommended: it's by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is…
pharyngula | July 13, 2012A very familiar story: a creationist is told that her views are unsupported by any legitimate science, and in reply she rattles off a list of creationist "scientists".
Here we are told by a creationist housewife — as she describes herself — defending her belief that the Giant’s Causeway is only as old as the Bible says it is, a claim which assumes, of course, that there is a definite chronology in the Bible which can be used to date the age of the earth, and that this chronology, such as it is, supersedes all other forms of chronology, because the Bible is, after all, the inerrant word of God…
pharyngula | July 12, 2012I'm always telling people you need to understand development to understand the evolution of form, because development is what evolution modifies to create change. For example, there are two processes most people have heard of. One is paedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood — a small face and large cranium are features of young apes, for instance, and the adult human skull can be seen as a child-like feature. A complementary process is peramorphosis, where adult characters appear earlier in development, and then development continues along the morphogenetic trajectory…
pharyngula | July 11, 2012If you ever get a chance, spend some time looking at fish muscles in a microscope. Larval zebrafish are perfect; they're transparent and you can trace all the fibers, so you can see everything. The body musculature of fish is most elegantly organized into repeating blocks of muscle along the length of the animal, each segment having a chevron ("V") or "W" shape. Here's a pretty stained photo of a 30 hour old zebrafish to show what I mean; it's a little weird because this one is from an animal with experimentally messed up gene expression, all that red and green stuff, but look at the lovely…
catdynamics | July 9, 2012time for all new linkedy links here at the new digs
Quantum Frontiers - a new blog from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, with kickoff by John Preskill hisself.
Question of the day: explain quantum mechanics in five words
My attempt: Probability Amplitudes, Observables don't Commute
Good to know John still does khakis and chalk, but we gots to know: does he still have the diet pepsi?
Took me years to break the habit... not that I was overly impressionable as a tender young grad turkey taking QFT or anything.
Subtleties of the Crappy Job Market - for Scientists, that is.…
catdynamics | July 7, 2012In which we remind people of the Ten Commandments of the God Particle.
Now with added footnotes.
I I am the Higgs. Thou shalt have no other Higgs before me.1
II Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the HIGGS thy God Particle am a jealous God Particle, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. 2
III Thou shalt not take…
stoat | July 6, 2012The Economist, celebrating the Higgs:
Without the Higgs there would be no mass. And without mass, there would be no stars, no planets and no atoms.
But that's wrong. No stars and no planets, because they are gravitationally bound. But atoms aren't. Unless they mean in the very indirect sense that most Earthly atoms were created in supernovae?
They continue:
Massless particles are doomed by Einstein’s theory of relativity to travel at the speed of light.
I don't think I believe that either, really. Relativity doesn't say massless things have to travel at SOL. Does it?
However, neither that…
catdynamics | July 4, 2012In the beginning there was light.
Sort of.
When energies were high enough, particles were effectively massless and the universe was a nice seething mess of particle/anti-particle creation and annihilation.
As the universe cools, a symmtery, the Electroweak symmetry breaks, a field condenses out, and interesting stuff starts happening.
Hence we get chemistry, and the autocatalytic evolving goo that reaches out and ties to puzzle out where it all came from.
In the Standard Model of Particle Physics, the rest mass of the spectrum of normal matter particles is dynamically generated. The mass we…
pharyngula | July 3, 2012OK, so you can't make it to Convergence in Bloomington, Minnesota this weekend, because you live in some strange foreign backwater like the United Kingdom. I guess you could go to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition instead, if you live somewhere out that way. It's going on right now, 3-8 July.
Oh, wait: they've got a whole suite of online science videos and interactive games? And the whole world can participate? Even if you're in Bloomington? Uh-oh, we've got bigtime competition.
Maybe some homeschoolers can check in and learn cool stuff, too.