Posts by richard
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to James Butler,
Math in standard latex font is still infinitely more readable than in Microsoft’s equation typesetter – in particle the integral signs are always bloated, and somehow off the baseline of the rest of the equation.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to James Butler,
But for experimental physics junkies, it lacks a bit of that wow factor
But for actual experimental physicists, there is a fair bit of wow – this is not just about ticking the box marked Higgs and getting on with our lives.
The original idea of the Higgs is something akin to a mathematical guess (made independently by three different sets of people – Higgs, Brout and Englert and Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble). And the fact it was predicted long before it was seen just makes it better.
As it happens the Higgs could have been discovered a while ago – the Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled in the mid 90s, but was a more powerful machine than the LHC and would have been working a decade ago. Conversely, a 125 GeV Higgs is (paradoxically) harder to pick out from the “background” than the more massive version, so nature has not made it easy.
Perhaps the best analogy is to say that is like waking up to find out that a 30 long war has suddenly come to an end. Almost any particle physics theory beyond the Standard Model itself is conditional on the mass generation mechanism, and today is very, very different from yesterday,
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These slides actually present an interesting design issue.
As someone who regularly hears talks by high energy experimentalists, these were fairly standard examples of the genre, and the content was largely pitched to specialists, and I found them comprehensible (and that is a big screen).
But if you are not taking in much of the content, design elements probably look more important.
Personally, my feeling is that any mathematical typesetting done in Microsoft looks like arse -- I would have used LaTeX.
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I gave some thought to my analogy -- the Higgs is not "just another particle" but is the keystone to the Standard Model. In the 60s physicists realized they could make sense of particles with spin, and particles with mass, but not particles with spin AND mass -- and the electron and the quarks that make up the proton and neutron all have both spin and mass.
The Higgs solves the problem by postulating a particle with mass but no spin -- something which had never been observed in nature until yesterday (and creates it via an elegant mechanism called spontaneous symmetry breaking) -- particles with spin then acquire their mass by interacting with the Higgs.
The Higgs is not a surprise (although there was no guarantee it was there) -- but its discovery changes our understanding of the physical universe at the most fundamental level, just as the discovery of the electron, atoms and the nucleus did.
Each of these discoveries peeled another layer of the proverbial onion, and this takes us a level deeper than we were before.
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Guns and drugs -- Omar comin'
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Nice work all; this is a great new feature.
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Cracker: Spotted, in reply to Gareth Ward,
That's just the plural of Libertarian
Not a word one often needs to pluralize, I would have thought.
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to BenWilson,
That kind of sense of impunity was pretty widespread, I seem to remember a speedboat went missing from the waterskiing club, with no signs whatsoever of forced entry. $30,000 odd worth of equipment just disappearing isn’t a good look for anyone wanting to force people to join their organization
In fairness, this incident happened before some (most?) of today's students were born. This is a bit like refusing to vote Labour because of Nordmyer's Black Budget.
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to Tony Siu,
Now with the lost of AUSA funding, costs like airfares, motel and entry fees from long form debating tournments
Luxury! When I was occasionally debating in the early '90s, there was possibly a travel subsidy, but participants wore some of the costs themselves, and accommodation usually involved being billeted on the floor of someone's lounge.
Must be getting old.
Speaking of which though, I was startled (and my 25yo self would be shocked) to find myself agreeing with Keith that VSM is largely a sideshow -- and that the current debate is pretty much the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible (as Oscar W once said, albeit in a different context).
It may just be that the PA demographic trends more 40 than 20, but if a left-leaning forum like this one can't work up a decent head of steam about VSM, then it is presumably largely a dead issue for most people.
And if principles are things you have even when they are inconvenient, it is interesting to see ACT framing this as a "libertarian" issue, when they have embraced the thinking of that well-known moral philosopher Laura Norder when it comes to cannabis, despite the best efforts of Don Brash...
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I will decloak briefly and say that trim is something that has simplified dramatically over the last 100 years. Looking it at it, the overall frame trim involves something like 25 separate pieces of wood (it wraps round into two rooms) and has moulding on top of the larger boards -- whereas in modern construction might get away with three pieces of wood to do the same job.
It did cross my mind some time ago that we should have put the marks on something more portable :-)
Thanks for all the advice!