A physics two-fer

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Physics is Phun!

First - from the UK Telegraph:

Homer Simpson 'discovered the Higgs boson'
Homer Simpson predicted the mass of the Higgs boson in a 1998 episode of The Simpsons, according to a science writer.

In The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace episode, Homer is shown in front of a blackboard working on an equation.

Twelve years later, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson.

A bit more - from Science author Simon Singh:

"That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson. If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that's only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is.

"It's kind of amazing as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered."

 A perfectly cromulent show!

Second from the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of...):

Physicists gear up to catch a gravitational wave
This patch of woodland just north of Livingston, Louisiana, population 1893, isn’t the first place you’d go looking for a breakthrough in physics. Standing on a small overpass that crosses an odd arching tunnel, Joseph Giaime, a physicist at Louisiana State University (LSU), 55 kilometers west in Baton Rouge, gestures toward an expanse of spindly loblolly pine, parts of it freshly reduced to stumps and mud. “It’s a working forest,” he says, “so they come in here to harvest the logs.” On a quiet late fall morning, it seems like only a logger or perhaps a hunter would ever come here.

Yet it is here that physicists may fulfill perhaps the most spectacular prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, or general relativity. The tunnel runs east to west for 4 kilometers and meets a similar one running north to south in a nearby warehouselike building. The structures house the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), an ultrasensitive instrument that may soon detect ripples in space and time set off when neutron stars or black holes merge.

This would be a major discovery if they find them. More:

Einstein himself predicted the existence of such gravitational waves nearly a century ago. But only now is the quest to detect them coming to a culmination. The device in Livingston and its twin in Hanford, Washington, ran from 2002 to 2010 and saw nothing. But those Initial LIGO instruments aimed only to prove that the experiment was technologically feasible, physicists say. Now, they’re finishing a $205 million rebuild of the detectors, known as Advanced LIGO, which should make them 10 times more sensitive and, they say, virtually ensure a detection. “It’s as close to a guarantee as one gets in life,” says Peter Saulson, a physicist at Syracuse University in New York, who works on LIGO. 

They are using optical interferometry - great for tiny measurements but very sensitive to external vibration. It will be interesting to see if they get a positive signal. 

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on March 3, 2015 4:59 PM.

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