The Large Hadron Collider or LHC was to find new particles. Aside from possibly the expected Higgs boson the report from the physics front is a deafening silence. This silence says a lot. At some $10 billion, the LHC is the world’s biggest and most costly science experiment ever. It pushes atom-smashing to new energy […]
The mystery of the missing WIMPs is heading for a crisis. It’s looking like the reason we can’t find them is they don’t exist. Most people never heard of them. What is a WIMP? It is Dark Matter by another name. It stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. They must be weakly interacting because no-one’s […]
In recent posts we’ve touched upon the sorry state of physics. ‘Sorry state’ is not just my view; many physicists and science writers see this the same way. Physics has now all but lost experimental contact with the real world. What went wrong? How can we fix it? And why should we care? What went […]
These days we all have a stake in physics. It’s not just that physics costs and we, the public, pay. Physics drives our economy. We should be concerned when physicists start writing about how badly it is going. When they write books about this, we should worry. It’s almost a decade since American physicist Lee […]
We need a New Year’s Revolution. (No typo: Revolution with a v.) Last week I suggested that the Large Hadron Collider may find no superparticles and that this could lead to a big change in physics. Indeed a common theme in last year’s posts was the need to complete the Physics Revolution that began a […]
Sounds like a The Big Bang Theory episode. Maybe someday it will be. But even in the fields of physics, supersymmetry is esoteric. What is it? What is its calamity? Why should you care? What it is is an idea: Particular superheroes! Here’s their story. The Standard Model is the crown jewel of physics. It […]
In recent posts I have suggested that the physics ox is in the ditch and this is bad for the economy and for all of us. That physics is mired in difficulties is no secret. American physicist and economist Lee Smolin says: A growing number of theoretical physicists … see the present situation as a […]