Verifiability, access, and allocation in maths
When I was talking about this post with a friend, he asked a thought-provoking question. In the post, I’d argued that I believe it should be appropriate for mathematics to consider a solution to a…
Large Hadron Collider
Worlds between theory and experiment
Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict that a comet that…
Is the Higgs boson doing its job?
At the heart of particle physics lies the Standard Model, a theory that has stood for nearly half a century as the best description of the subatomic realm. It tells us what particles exist, how…
Physicists test if they can load antimatter on a truck
Physicists in Europe have reported that it’s possible to transport charged particles on a truck for four hours without disturbing them in any way. This seemingly run-of-the-mill announcement, reported in Nature on May 14, actually…
Found: clue to crack the antimatter mystery
Imagine you’ve put together a torchlight. You know exactly how each part of the device works. You know exactly how they’re all connected togetger. Yet when you put in fresh batteries and turn it on,…
Technical foundation for a muon collider laid at J-PARC
A particle collider is a machine that energises two beams of subatomic particles and smashes them head on. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe is the world’s largest and most famous particle collider. It…
“Who are we?”
From ‘‘The physics community has never split like this’: row erupts over plans for new Large Hadron Collider’, The Guardian, March 29, 2025: However, if the FCC were given the go-ahead, it could lock up…
“Why has no Indian won a science Nobel this year?”
For all their flaws, the science Nobel Prizes – at the time they’re announced, in the first week of October every year – provide a good opportunity to learn about some obscure part of the…
New LHC data puts ‘new physics’ lead to bed
One particle in the big zoo of subatomic particles is the B meson. It has a very short lifetime once it’s created. In rare instances it decays to three lighter particles: a kaon, a lepton…
Science’s humankind shield
“Science benefits all of humanity,” they say.
What arguments against the ‘next LHC’ say about funding Big Physics
A few days ago, a physicist (and PhD holder) named Thomas Hartsfield published a strange article in Big Think about why building a $100-billion particle physics machine like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a bad idea. The…
On tabletop accelerators
Tabletop accelerators are an exciting new field of research in which physicists use devices the size of a shoe box, or something just a bit bigger, to accelerate electrons to high energies. The ‘conventional way’…