Short Circuit Snags Giant Atom Smasher Restart
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has run into a bit of a snag in its plans to have its upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator — up and running by this week for its second three-year run. Officials are suggesting that the delay in getting […]
Speed of Light May Not be Constant
The speed of light has long been calculated to be 299,792.458 km per second, but now new research from France and Germany indicates that light may not travel at a fixed rate after all, but instead can fluctuate. A key component of Einstein’s famous E=MC2, the speed of light has been thought to be finite […]
Does ‘God Particle’ Spell End of the Universe?
Last summer, when scientists finally cornered the elusive building block of the universe known as the Higgs boson, they apparently also discovered something else: that the universe’s days might be numbered. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable,” said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s […]
Is There Another Higgs Boson Out There?
Tired, and rushing to meet a looming deadline, Dr. Pierre Savard and his colleagues didn’t realize what they’d found when they first came across a particle that looked a lot like the long-sought-after Higgs boson. But it didn’t take long for them to realize their hard work had paid off. “When we looked at it, […]