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A Superset Universe?
How would you draw a Universe with all theories as being part of, as a subset? [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95F8JPIE_1U%5D Pictorial representations can be very useful in presenting information or assisting reasoning. Venn diagram is an example. Venn diagrams are used to represent classes of objects, and they can also assist us in reasoning about the relations…
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Particle Constructs
Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass. Higgs Update Today What use the Higg’s Mechanism? Just as one might look at GRB examples of motivation that come to us in natural cosmic particle collisions, by looking back in…
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Infographics: Magnifying the Universe
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Brian Greene: Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?
At the heart of modern cosmology is a mystery: Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? In this tour de force tour of some of science’s biggest new discoveries, Brian Greene shows how the mind-boggling idea of a multiverse may hold the answer to the riddle. Brian…
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Do Gamma rays hint at dark matter?
Using a new statistical technique to analyse publicly available data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope, an astrophysicist in Germany says he may have spotted a tell-tale sign of exotic particles annihilating within the Milky Way. If proved to be real, this “gamma-ray line” would, he claims, be a “smoking-gun signature” of dark matter. There is…
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What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?
Top quark and anti top quark pair decaying into jets, visible as collimated collections of particle tracks, and other fermions in the CDF detector at Tevatron. HiggsJetEnergyProfileCrotale and HiggsJetEnergyProfilePiano use only the energy of the cells in the jet to modulate the pitch, volume, duration and spatial position of each note. The sounds being modulated…
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Songs of the Stars: the Real Music of the Spheres
With the discovery of sound waves in the CMB, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology in which we can begin to talk with certainty about the origin of structure and the content of matter and energy in the universe.-Wayne Hu The Pythagoreans 2500 years ago believed in a celestial “music of the…
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Near-Future Photon-Collider Setups
In the search for a quantum theory of gravity it is crucial to find experimental access to quantum gravitational effects. Since these are expected to be very small at observationally accessible scales it is advantageous to consider processes with no tree-level contribution in the Standard Model, such as photon-photon scattering. We examine the implications of…
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A Musical Score on Particles?
Schema created by Vicinanza with an example bubble chamber particle track, which has been converted into a melody and then orchestrated as music. Image courtesy Domenico Vicinanza. Positrons – antiparticles of electrons, a trillionth of a meter in size – make no sound. But with a little help from the grid, music composer Domenico Vicinanza…
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Lagrangian Worlds
Diagram of the Lagrange Point gravitational forces associated with the Sun-Earth system. In a certain sense a perfect fluid is a generalization of a point particle. This leads to the question as to what is the corresponding generalization for extended objects. Here the lagrangian formulation of a perfect fluid is much generalized by replacing the…
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A Blue Flash in Ice
Little is known about the ultra high-energy cosmic rays that regularly penetrate the atmosphere. Recent IceCube research rules out the leading theory that they come from gamma ray bursts. (Credit: NSF/J. Yang) Future directions The lack of observation of neutrinos in coincidence with GRBs implies, at face value, that the theoretical models need…
