Scientific Readings: Physics
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Dark Energy: Still a Puzzle | Cosmic VariancePeople should not be afraid of dark energy. Remember that the problem with the cosmological constant isn’t that it’s mysterious and ill-motivated — it’s that it’s too small! The naive theoretical prediction is larger than what’s required by observation by a factor of 10^120. That’s a puzzle, no ...
Charles Daney
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3 months ago
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Death Rays From Space: How Bad Are They? -- Space.comCosmic rays pour down on Earth like a constant rain. We don't much notice these high-energy particles, but they may have played a role in the evolution of life on our planet.
Charles Daney
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3 months ago
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Top quark chefs -- symmetry breakingFermilab physicists are examining the production, properties, and decay of top quarks to gain the most complete picture of the particle possible. They compare their observations to predictions made in the Standard Model of physics and in theories that build on that model.
Charles Daney
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3 months ago
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The secret lives of particles -- US LHC BlogWhat do quantum particles do when we're not looking? Probably not what you'd expect.\n\nWhile the mathematical formalism 'behind the scenes' is perfectly well-defined and the predictions by the theory are completely sensible (and rigorously tested), it is often difficult to interpret the ...
Charles Daney
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3 months ago
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Particle Imbalance May Upset The Apple Cart / Science NewsResearchers have found an unexpected asymmetry in particle production that could hint at exotic physics. The tentative evidence, announced August 21, could be the fingerprint of a massive elementary particle that would help unify three of the four known forces in nature.
Charles Daney
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4 months ago
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New Limits on the Big Bang - SkyandTelescope.comThe first few moments of the Big Bang according to most theories of how it actually worked should have produced gravitational waves in the fabric of space-time that are still rippling through all of space today.
Charles Daney
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4 months ago
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SPACE.com -- Quantum Astronomy: Information in the UniverseThis is a short addition to the four-part series on Quantum Astronomy previously written for SPACE.com. Here, we add some details resulting from the process of submitting a paper to the scientific literature. If you'd like to read the technical paper it is entitled, "Quantum Uncertainty ...
Charles Daney
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4 months ago
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'Nondiscovery' creates media ripple - physicsworld.com BlogIn this week’s edition of Nature, a cohort of researchers report the latest findings from two of the major players in this search for gravitational waves - The LIGO Scientific Collaboration located in the US and the Virgo Collaboration in France and Italy. The paper reports the latest data from ...
Charles Daney
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4 months ago
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Cosmological Gravitational Radiation : Dynamics of CatsInteresting new paper coming out in Nature this week, presenting early scientific results from LIGO on the amplitude of stochastic gravitational radiation background of cosmological origin.
Charles Daney
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4 months ago
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The Math of the Expanding Universe : Starts With A BangYesterday, I explained to you that the only thing that determines how the Universe expands is the amount of energy density in it. But many of you wanted more details. So, by popular demand -- including one insistence that there is no equation that tells us how the Universe expands -- here is the ...
Charles Daney
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4 months ago