Science, scicomm, and scepticism
When I was writing in August about physicist Sheldon Glashow’s objection to Abdus Salam being awarded a share of the 1979 physics Nobel Prize, I learnt that it was because Salam had derived a theory that Glashow had derived as well, taking a different route, but ultimately the final product was non-renormalisable. A year or so later, …
Continue reading “A physics story of infinities, goats and colours”
One of the more fascinating bits of high-energy physics is the branch of physics called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Don’t let the big name throw you off: it deals with a bunch of elementary particles that have a property called colour charge. And one of these particles creates a mess of this branch of physics because of its …
Because powerful accelerators take at least a decade to realise, physicists have started work on two machines to aid physics research of the future.
In particle physics, CPT symmetry is an attribute of the universe that is held as fundamentally true by quantum field theory (QFT). It states that the laws of physics should not be changed and the opposite of all allowed motions be allowed (T symmetry) if a particle is replaced with its antiparticle (C symmetry) and …
Continue reading “On meson decay-modes in studying CP violation”
Accomplished physicists I have met or spoken with in the last four months professed little agreement over which parts of physics were set-in-stone and which parts simply largely-corroborated hypotheses. Here are some of them, with a short description of the dispute. Bosons – Could be an emergent phenomenon arising out of fermion-fermion interaction; current definition …