Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

Advances in the investigation of the physical universe we live in.
Demon of Undoing
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Kinda like Gore-Tex, now that I think on it.
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Azrael
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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It's a clever idea. Potential issue: how much pressure can the thin graph mesh take until it breaks?
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Images of the LHC

Image
Typhoon wrote:
Typhoon wrote:CERN | CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson
“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”
JAlgX4FNiyM
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Been busy doing stuff
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Image
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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JGfynrsdaV0
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Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space, dies at age 61...

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Thank you Very Much for maintaining the board, Admins.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/artic ... ies_at_61/
LOS ANGELES—Space used to be a man's world. Then came Sally Ride, who blazed a cosmic trail for U.S. women into orbit. With a pitch perfect name out of a pop song refrain, she joined the select club of American space heroes the public knew by heart: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong and Aldrin.

Ride, the first American woman in orbit, died Monday at her home in the San Diego community of La Jolla at age 61. The cause was pancreatic cancer, an illness she had for 17 months, according to her company, Sally Ride Science.
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Sally Ride, First Lesbian in Space, dies at age 61

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Thank you Very Much for Maintaining the Board, Admins.

Sally Ride, First American Woman In Space, Revealed To Have Female Partner Of 27 Years

First Lesbian in Space or at least first American ;) Lesbian in Space........ *

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/2 ... ostpopular

*Resisted putting it in large type but...... "Did Sally take us for a Ride" ;wink; ........ Remembering an old ;wink; B.C. ;wink; strip ;wink; about her.....
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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BBC | Gravity waves spotted from white-dwarf pair
Researchers have spotted visible-light evidence for one of astronomy's most elusive targets - gravity waves - in the orbit of a pair of dead stars.
Until now, these ripples in space-time, first predicted by Einstein, have only been inferred from radio-wave sources.

But a change in the orbits of two white dwarf stars orbiting one another 3,000 light-years away is further proof of the waves that can literally be seen.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Number Theory | Proof of the ABC Conjecture claimed
The ABC conjecture, proposed independently by the mathematicians David Masser and Joseph Oesterle in 1985 but not proven by them, involves the concept of square-free numbers, or numbers that cannot be divided by the square of any number. (A square number is the product of some integer with itself). According to the mathematics writer Ivars Peterson in an article for the Mathematical Association of America, the square-free part of a number n, denoted by sqp(n), is the largest square-free number that can be obtained by multiplying the distinct prime factors of n. Prime numbers are numbers that can only be evenly divided by 1 and themselves, such as 5 and 17.

The ABC conjecture makes a statement about pairs of numbers that have no prime factors in common, Peterson explained. If A and B are two such numbers and C is their sum, the ABC conjecture holds that the square-free part of the product A x B x C, denoted by sqp(ABC), divided by C is always greater than 0. Meanwhile, sqp(ABC) raised to any power greater than 1 and divided by C is always greater than 1.

This conjecture may seem esoteric, but for mathematicians, it's deep and ubiquitous. "The ABC conjecture is amazingly simple compared to the deep questions in number theory," Andrew Granville of the University of Georgia in Athens was quoted as saying in the MAA article. "This strange conjecture turns out to be equivalent to all the main problems. It's at the center of everything that's been going on."

The conjecture has also been described as a sort of grand unified theory of whole numbers, in that the proofs of many other important theorems follow immediately from it. For example, Fermat's famous Last Theorem (which states that an+bn=cn has no integer solutions if n>2) follows as a direct consequence of the ABC conjecture.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Typhoon wrote:JGfynrsdaV0
3zoTKXXNQIU
Been busy doing stuff
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Azrael
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Math and visualization of catastrophe theory

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Re: Math and visualization of catastrophe theory

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Interesting. I haven't read a popular piece about catastrophe theory in decades.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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BBC | Popular physics hypothesis - supersymmetry - is running out of hiding places
Researchers at the LHCb detector have dealt a serious blow to this idea. They have measured the decay between a particle known as a Bs Meson into two particles known as muons. It is the first time that this decay has been observed and the team has calculated that for every billion times that the Bs Meson decays it only decays in this way three times.

If superparticles were to exist the decay would happen far more often. This test is one of the "golden" tests for supersysymmetry and it is one that on the face of it this hugely popular theory among physicists has failed.

Prof Val Gibson, leader of the Cambridge LHCb team, said that the new result was "putting our supersymmetry theory colleagues in a spin"
Supersymmetry a.k.a. SUSY: the short version is below

All the known matter particles in nature:
electrons, neutrinos, and quarks all have an intrinsic spin of 1/2 [in Planck's constant units: ħ = h / 2 Pi]
Half-integer spin matter particles are called fermions

All the known carriers of fundamental forces in nature:
photons [EM], vector bosons [W+, W-, Z0 - weak force] and gluons [strong force] all have an intrinsic spin of 1 [in Planck's constant units: ħ = h / 2 Pi]
Integer spin carrier particles are called bosons

Supersymmetry postulates the existence of companion particles: spin 1 matter sparticles and spin 1/2 carrier sparticles.

For example, a spin 1 selectron and an spin 1/2 sphoton.

Hence the bad physics pun of "putting our supersymmetry theory colleagues in a spin".

SUSY solves a number of outstanding problems in the Standard Model of nature.
Transforming a particle to a sparticle and back again naturally introduces gravity; solves problems with the Higgs boson, etc.

However, aside from discovering a Higgs-like particle, the LHC has been placing ever tighter constraints on the existence of supersymmetry.
The situation for this much loved hypothesis is not looking good. A depressing prospect if one has spent one's entire professional career on the subject:
It is easy to estimate the total number of active high-energy theorists. Every day hep-th and hep-ph bring us about thirty new papers. Assuming that on average an active theorist publishes 3-4 papers per year, we get 2500 to 3000 theorists. The majority of them are young theorists in their thirties or early forties. During their careers many of them never worked on any issues beyond supersymmetry-based phenomenology or string theory. Given the crises (or, at least, huge question marks) in these two areas we currently face, there seems to be a serious problem in the community. Usually such times of uncertainty as to the direction of future research offer wide opportunities to young people, in the prime of their careers. To grab these opportunities a certain reorientation and reeducation are apparently needed. Will this happen?
~ Mikhail Shifman

The other problem is a practical one. If no hint of new physics beyond the Standard Model is discovered at the LHC, then convincing funding agencies and govts to invest in the next generation of particle accelerators is going to be a bit of a challenge, to say the least.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

Post by Crocus sativus »

.

How to Make an Object Invisible


Making Something Appear Invisible

.

A hairbrush-shaped device has been theoretically designed that would use bristles made out of nanowires to bend light around it, rendering the object invisible. The researchers who came up with the design say that it's the first practical design for an "optical cloak" to work in the visible spectrum.

.



.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Levitating Lightbulb

XHcHG63tUqM

It's not magic, it's physics.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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mfgsQX78hg8
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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The name HAL is derived from "Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic Computer." HAL 10000 is the new generation computer destined to become the successor to HAL 9000, as suggested in Arthur C. Clarke's book.
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Need to Keep the Hands & Minds of Math Wizards Busy.........

Post by monster_gardener »

Typhoon wrote:BBC | Popular physics hypothesis - supersymmetry - is running out of hiding places
Researchers at the LHCb detector have dealt a serious blow to this idea. They have measured the decay between a particle known as a Bs Meson into two particles known as muons. It is the first time that this decay has been observed and the team has calculated that for every billion times that the Bs Meson decays it only decays in this way three times.

If superparticles were to exist the decay would happen far more often. This test is one of the "golden" tests for supersysymmetry and it is one that on the face of it this hugely popular theory among physicists has failed.

Prof Val Gibson, leader of the Cambridge LHCb team, said that the new result was "putting our supersymmetry theory colleagues in a spin"
Supersymmetry a.k.a. SUSY: the short version is below

All the known matter particles in nature:
electrons, neutrinos, and quarks all have an intrinsic spin of 1/2 [in Planck's constant units: ħ = h / 2 Pi]
Half-integer spin matter particles are called fermions

All the known carriers of fundamental forces in nature:
photons [EM], vector bosons [W+, W-, Z0 - weak force] and gluons [strong force] all have an intrinsic spin of 1 [in Planck's constant units: ħ = h / 2 Pi]
Integer spin carrier particles are called bosons

Supersymmetry postulates the existence of companion particles: spin 1 matter sparticles and spin 1/2 carrier sparticles.

For example, a spin 1 selectron and an spin 1/2 sphoton.

Hence the bad physics pun of "putting our supersymmetry theory colleagues in a spin".

SUSY solves a number of outstanding problems in the Standard Model of nature.
Transforming a particle to a sparticle and back again naturally introduces gravity; solves problems with the Higgs boson, etc.

However, aside from discovering a Higgs-like particle, the LHC has been placing ever tighter constraints on the existence of supersymmetry.
The situation for this much loved hypothesis is not looking good. A depressing prospect if one has spent one's entire professional career on the subject:
It is easy to estimate the total number of active high-energy theorists. Every day hep-th and hep-ph bring us about thirty new papers. Assuming that on average an active theorist publishes 3-4 papers per year, we get 2500 to 3000 theorists. The majority of them are young theorists in their thirties or early forties. During their careers many of them never worked on any issues beyond supersymmetry-based phenomenology or string theory. Given the crises (or, at least, huge question marks) in these two areas we currently face, there seems to be a serious problem in the community. Usually such times of uncertainty as to the direction of future research offer wide opportunities to young people, in the prime of their careers. To grab these opportunities a certain reorientation and reeducation are apparently needed. Will this happen?
~ Mikhail Shifman

The other problem is a practical one. If no hint of new physics beyond the Standard Model is discovered at the LHC, then convincing funding agencies and govts to invest in the next generation of particle accelerators is going to be a bit of a challenge, to say the least.
Thank You VERY Much for your post, Typhoon.
then convincing funding agencies and govts to invest in the next generation of particle accelerators is going to be a bit of a challenge, to say the least.[
IMVHO based on the American Financial Fiasco, it can be Justified Just on the basis of keeping Physicists busy doing Physics rather than going into the Phinancial :wink: oops I mean Financial markets and devising toxic financial products...... ;) :twisted: :lol: :roll:

Though if particle physics is really a waste of time, why not keep the physicists at work with Space projects....... Orion Rockets, Space Ladders things like that....


Have to keep the hand and minds of Math Wizards busy or they will get into worse business...
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Superradiant laser created for first time

Could end up being very useful . . .
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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List of Greatest Mathematicians of All Time according to James Dow Allen, Computer Programmer
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/mit- ... -1219.html

MIT Researchers discover a new state of matter, Quantum Spin Liquid.
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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The coolest place in the universe
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is a thing of wonder – not just for smashing 600 million protons together a second, but for uniting 10,000 scientists from 113 countries in the pursuit of knowledge.

By Brian Cox - Published 19 December 2012

The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is a thing of wonder – not just for smashing 600 million protons together a second, but for uniting 10,000 scientists from 113 countries in the pursuit of knowledge.

The discovery of a Higgs-like particle by the Large Hadron Collider at the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (known as Cern) was the greatest scientific story of 2012. It is also a spectacular demonstration of what can be achieved when the intellectual power of theoretical physics is coupled with engineering and international collaboration. In those first two sentences, I’ve already used two hyperbolic adjectives; let me explain why I feel justified in doing so.

The Higgs boson is a fundamental subatomic particle whose existence was predicted in a series of papers in 1964 by a group of theoretical physicists including Robert Brout, François Englert, Peter Higgs and Tom Kibble. The prediction was made partly on aesthetic grounds – by which I mean it was introduced to make the equations that describe how subatomic particles interact with each other more elegant. Technically, the Higgs mechanism is a means of preserving certain symmetry properties of the equations which are considered to be desirable, or even “beautiful”. As such, the successful prediction of the Higgs boson can be regarded as a prime example of what the physicist Eugene Wigner termed “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences”.

Its job is to give mass to the other fundamental particles, including the electrons and quarks out of which we are made. It does this by interacting with them, and the strength of the interaction determines the mass of the particle; electrons are less massive than top quarks because they interact more weakly with Higgs particles. The Higgs particles fill all of space. Every cubic meter of the room in front of you is crammed with Higgs particles. They occupy all of the space inside your body, outside your body, and throughout and between every galaxy in the observable universe.

How did the Higgs particles get there? The answer is not yet known but it is thought that they “condensed out” into the universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang as the universe expanded and cooled. This is a process not dissimilar to ice crystals forming on a cold window on a frosty morning. Water vapour in the air undergoes what physicists call a phase transition when it comes into contact with the cool glass. The symmetry of the vapour state is broken and the intricate structural forms of ice crystals spontaneously emerge. This happens because it is energetically favourable; at low enough temperatures, water molecules can release energy by bonding together into clumps, rolling down a metaphorical hill and settling into a valley floor. Similarly, the “empty” vacuum of space has a lower energy when filled with a condensate of Higgs particles, which is ultimately the explanation for why there is any large-scale structure in the universe at all.

This sounds odd and it gets odder. If we naively calculate the energy locked up in the Higgs condensate, it is bordering on the absurd. In every cubic meter of space the condensate stores 1,037 joules, which is more energy than the sun outputs in 1,000 years. This should blow the universe apart but it doesn’t, for reasons that nobody understands.

Despite all this, we have discovered that it is broadly correct: space really is crammed full of Higgs particles, and we really are bumping into them all the time. This gives us our mass at the most fundamental level, and without this strange and convoluted mechanism we would not exist. The slight caveat is that there are many differing Higgs-like theories, each leading to Higgs particles with different properties. Some of these theories predict that there is more than one type of Higgs particle. This is why, technically speaking, Cern always refers to the new particle as “Higgs-like”. There is more work to do to pin down precisely which Higgs has been seen, but what is now beyond reasonable doubt is that a new particle, which behaves roughly like the so-called Standard Model Higgs Boson, has been produced and detected.

The discovery of the Higgs is more than a profound vindication of advanced mathematics and its application in theoretical physics. It is also a surprising engineering and political achievement. No single nation is prepared to invest in a project as technically difficult and high-risk as the Large Hadron Collider. The machine itself is 27 kilometres in circumference and is constructed from 9,300 superconducting electromagnets operating at -271.3°C. There is no known place in the universe that cold outside laboratories on earth; in the 13.75 billion years since the Big Bang occurred, the universe is still roughly 1° warmer than the LHC. This makes it by far the largest refrigerator in the world; it contains almost 120 tonnes of liquid helium.

Buried inside the magnets are two beam pipes, which, at ultra-high vacuum, contain circulating beams of protons travelling at 99.9999991 per cent the speed of light, circumnavigating the ring 11,245 times every second. Up to 600 million protons are brought into collision every second, and in each of these tiny explosions, the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang are re-created. Four giant detectors, known as ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE, diligently observe each collision, searching for new physical phenomena such as the Higgs, searching for a needle in a thousand haystacks.

In order to construct and operate this group of complex, interdependent machines, more than 10,000 physicists and engineers from 608 institutes in 113 countries collaborate with each other for the sole purpose of enhancing our knowledge of the universe.

Cern’s founding convention, written in 1954 as part of the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War, makes this purpose explicit: “the Organisation shall provide for collaboration among European States in nuclear research of a pure scientific and fundamental character . . . the Organisation shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available”.

Cern, in other words, is a place of high ideals that actually works. Its budget, shared between many nations, is approximately that of a single medium-sized European university. Free from the usual bureaucratic and political interference that dogs large international collaborations, managed almost exclusively by scientists and engineers, it has consistently delivered some of the most complex engineering projects of the past 60 years on time and on budget. In doing so, as a spin-off, it has invented the World Wide Web and many of the technologies used in medical imaging and the newly emerging field of proton beam cancer therapy. This, in the modern jargon, is known as “impact” – a tremendous return on society’s investment. But, very importantly indeed, this impact came as a side effect of the exploration of nature for its own sake.

I find all this to be deeply inspiring; it makes me optimistic for the future of the human race. First, we have been able to discover something profound about our universe. How astonishing it is that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, a small group of apes on an insignificant rock among hundreds of billions in the Milky Way galaxy were able to predict the existence of a piece of nature that condensed into the vacuum of space less than a billionth of a second after the universe began 13.75 billion years ago. And how wonderful that they did this together; that there is a place where people put their religious, political and cultural differences aside in the name of exploring and understanding the natural world.

That sounds ridiculously idealistic and bordering on the naive, but Cern is a place that confounds and confuses in equal measure because it is idealistic. There is no agenda other than the advancement of our understanding. That is why it works and that is the key to understanding why it exists and what it does.

Over the coming decades, the LHC will continue to produce Higgs particles and the experimental scientists will measure their properties in ever-greater detail to understand better how nature works at the most fundamental level. They will also be on the lookout for unexpected physics, because the LHC is operating at the edge of our understanding. They will, no doubt, make further contributions to the economies of Cern’s member states and the well-being of their citizens but this is not a reason, and never can be, for the exploration of nature.

In 1969, the US physicist Robert R Wilson was called before a Congressional committee to justify the funding of Fermilab, the US equivalent of Cern. Asked to justify the expenditure on the project, in terms of enhancing national security and the economic interests of the United States, Wilson replied: “It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

Cern’s tremendous achievements in 2012 fall into the same category. Because of the Large Hadron Collider, we understand our universe significantly better than we did in 2011, and that is a wonderful thing.

http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sc ... e-universe
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Re: Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics

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Endovelico wrote:
The coolest place in the universe
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is a thing of wonder – not just for smashing 600 million protons together a second, but for uniting 10,000 scientists from 113 countries in the pursuit of knowledge.

By Brian Cox - Published 19 December 2012

The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is a thing of wonder – not just for smashing 600 million protons together a second, but for uniting 10,000 scientists from 113 countries in the pursuit of knowledge.

. . .

In 1969, the US physicist Robert R Wilson was called before a Congressional committee to justify the funding of Fermilab, the US equivalent of Cern. Asked to justify the expenditure on the project, in terms of enhancing national security and the economic interests of the United States, Wilson replied: “It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

Cern’s tremendous achievements in 2012 fall into the same category. Because of the Large Hadron Collider, we understand our universe significantly better than we did in 2011, and that is a wonderful thing.

http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sc ... e-universe
On a more humourous note:

Fermilab Fission`s Fizzlin` Without Females

[Poetic license with regards to use of "fission" for alliteration.]
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