Higgs boson: Call to rename particle to acknowledge other scientists 22 April 2013Last updated at 13:00 ET By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News "Fathers" of the Higgs, L-R: Francois Englert, Peter Higgs, Carl Hagen and Gerald Guralnik One of the scientists who helped develop the theory of the Higgs boson says the particle should be renamed. Carl Hagen believes the name should acknowledge the work of others - not just UK physicist Peter Higgs. The long-running debate has been rekindled following speculation that this year's Nobel Prize for Physics will be awarded for the Higgs theory. The detection of a particle thought to be the Higgs was announced at the Large Hadron Collider in July last year. American Prof Hagen told BBC News: "I have always thought that the name was not a proper one. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Peter Higgs was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognised. End QuoteProf Carl HagenRochester University, New York Peter Higgs is open to a name change to "H Boson" Nobel Prize
A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics That's an easy one: it's the science of things so small that the quantum nature of reality has an effect. Quantum means 'discrete amount' or 'portion'. Max Planck discovered in 1900 that you couldn't get smaller than a certain minimum amount of anything. This minimum amount is now called the Planck unit. The meaning of quantum physics is a bit of a taboo subject, but everyone thinks about it. To make it all a bit more respectable, it is better to say 'ontology' than 'meaning' -- it's the same thing. Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) This is the granddaddy of interpretations, championed by the formidable Niels Bohr of Copenhagen university. The CI has a bit of a cheek calling itself an interpretation, because it essentially says "thou shalt not ask what happens before ye look". When you do try to take Copenhagen seriously you come to the conclusion that consciousness and particle physics are inter-related, and you rush off to write a book called The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. Consistent Histories
Fluid Experiments Support Deterministic “Pilot-Wave” Quantum Theory For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice. This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. Particles at the quantum scale seem to do things that human-scale objects do not do. Magical Measurements Bottom: Akira Tonomura/Creative Commons Some physicists now disagree. Riding Waves The neglect continues.
Introduction to quantum mechanics Non-mathematical introduction Quantum mechanics helps people understand chemistry, because it explains how atoms interact with each other and form molecules. Many remarkable phenomena can be explained using quantum mechanics, like superfluidity. For example, if liquid helium cooled to a temperature near absolute zero is placed in a container, it spontaneously flows up and over the rim of its container; this is an effect which cannot be explained by classical physics. James C. Evidence of quanta from the photoelectric effect [edit] The seeds of the quantum revolution appear in the discovery by J.J. Very hot – red hot or white hot – objects look similar when heated to the same temperature. Einstein's revolutionary proposal started by reanalyzing Planck's black-body theory, arriving at the same conclusions by using the new "energy quanta". Ten years elapsed before Millikan's definitive experiment[7] verified Einstein's prediction. Quantization of bound electrons in atoms Quantization of spin
Bohr and beyond: a century of quantum physics › Opinion (ABC Science) In Depth › Analysis and Opinion Our understanding of the quantum world began with Niels Bohr's discovery of the quantum atom in 1913. Bohr would be astounded by where his theory has since led, says Professor David Jamieson. Bohr's discovery of the quantum nature of the atom, published when he was a young man of 28, was an important pioneering contribution to the earliest days of quantum physics. This field emerged to explain the common sense-defying behaviour of atoms, molecules and light at the smallest scales, forming the foundations on which we have built one of the greatest and most successful theories of all time — quantum mechanics. What is quite remarkable to modern eyes was that Bohr had very little to go on. The true nature of the atom as an incredibly tiny nucleus surrounded by a cloud of orbiting electrons had only been discovered a few years earlier, in the separate work of physicists Thomson and Rutherford. ^ to top Bohr's quantum atom: nature is digital From theory to evidence
So you think YOU'RE confused about quantum mechanics? An invitation-only conference held back in 2011 on the topic "Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality" (QPNR) saw top physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science specializing in the meaning and interpretation of quantum mechanics wrangling over an array of fundamental issues. An interesting aspect of the gathering was that when informally polled on the main issues and open problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics, the results showed that the scientific community still has no clear consensus concerning the basic nature of quantum physics. Quantum mechanics (QM), together with its extensions into quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, is our most successful scientific theory, with many results agreeing to better than a part in a billion with experiment. However, at its roots QM is ghost-like – when you try to pin down just what it means, it tends to slip between the fingers. Introduction to QM Now knock the balls together. The quantum measurement problem
How world works. Dark energy and dark matter Four things you might not know about dark matter Not long after physicists on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory discovered the Higgs boson, CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer was asked, “What’s next?” One of the top priorities he named: figuring out dark matter. Dark matter is five times more prevalent than ordinary matter. It seems to exist in clumps around the universe, forming a kind of scaffolding on which visible matter coalesces into galaxies. Dark matter shows up periodically in the media, often when an experiment has spotted a potential sign of it. Here are four facts to get you up to speed on one of the most exciting topics in particle physics: 1. Illustration by: Sandbox Studio, Chicago At this moment, several experiments are on the hunt for dark matter. In the 1930s, astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky was observing the rotations of the galaxies that form the Coma cluster, a group of more than 1000 galaxies located more than 300 million light years from Earth. 2. 3. 4. First, they could detect it directly.
In a "Rainbow" Universe Time May Have No Beginning What if the universe had no beginning, and time stretched back infinitely without a big bang to start things off? That's one possible consequence of an idea called "rainbow gravity," so-named because it posits that gravity's effects on spacetime are felt differently by different wavelengths of light, aka different colors in the rainbow. Rainbow gravity was first proposed 10 years ago as a possible step toward repairing the rifts between the theories of general relativity (covering the very big) and quantum mechanics (concerning the realm of the very small). The idea is not a complete theory for describing quantum effects on gravity, and is not widely accepted. Nevertheless, physicists have now applied the concept to the question of how the universe began, and found that if rainbow gravity is correct, spacetime may have a drastically different origin story than the widely accepted picture of the big bang. Yet the concept has its critics.