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Has science found the God particle?
Greenland hardest hit by climate change
Trends Prof Yash
Pal
THIS UNIVERSE
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Has science found the God particle?
Despite excited reports on the BBC that the particle has been “glimpsed”, the Cern laboratory in Geneva merely confirmed that measurements by its £5bn Large Hadron Collider have come closer than previous searches to detecting the sub-atomic particle whose existence was first hypothesised in the 1960s. Scientists said they had eliminated 95 per cent of the energy range where the Higgs might have been hiding, but were not yet ready to exclude the possibility that what they had detected was merely background noise rather than the real thing. They said that final, definite proof would now have to wait until 2012. Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, head of Cern, urged: “Please be prudent. We have not found it yet. Stay tuned for next year.” Professor Themis Bowcock, head of particle physics at the University of Liverpool, said: “If the Higgs observation is confirmed, this really will be one of the discoveries of the century.” Dr Stephen Haywood, head of the Atlas Group at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, said: “This is what many of us have been working towards for 20 years. This is just the start.” Q. What is the Higgs boson? A. It is a sub-atomic particle, or “boson”, that was first proposed theoretically in the 1960s by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University. He suggested that in order for matter to have mass, it must be influenced by a hypothetical particle that creates a field, called the Higgs field, which spreads throughout the Universe. No one, however, was able to detect the Higgs boson because of the energy levels needed to collide other sub-atomic particle together in order to winkle it out. Q. How does the Higgs work? A. The most celebrated analogy is to compare the Higgs particle to a party activist as a famous politician, perhaps a former female Prime Minister, moves through a room full of activists all wishing to see or talk to her. The movement of the politician is influenced by how many other people cluster around her. The Higgs particles are like these party activists and the former Prime Minister is like matter itself. The more interaction there is between the Higgs particles and matter, the more mass that this particular matter possesses — and the heavier it is in gravity. Q. Why is the Higgs particle so important? A. To try to understand what is going on at the sub-atomic level, physicists have come up with a theory called the Standard Model. It explains three of the fundamental forces that interact at the nuclear level: the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The Higgs particle is part of this Standard Model, which is why it was proposed in the first place. Frustratingly, though, it is the only boson or particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not so far been detected. This may be because it is difficult to detect (which is undoubtedly is) or that it doesn’t exit. Q. Why is the Higgs particle so difficult to find? A. To find sub-atomic particles, it is necessary to collide other particles together at high energies using a machine such as the £5bn Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates sub-atomic particles called hadrons at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light. Sensitive detectors at the sites where the hadrons collide are then designed to monitor the tell-tale signs of a Higgs particle. There are two detectors or experiments trying to find the Higgs, one is called Atlas the other is called CMS and both are searching at similar energy levels. Unfortunately, there is a lot of “noise” coming from other particles and collisions that can mask the existence of the Higgs. Sophisticated statistical analysis is the only way of improving the certainty that a Higgs has truly been detected. Q. What if the Higgs does not exist? A. Then it would mean that the Standard Model is not correct, or at least not correct in the way it has been understood. Failing to find the Higgs has been said by CERN scientists to be an even more intriguing event than actually discoving its existence — although particle physicists would say that given that they have built a hugely expensive machine largely on the belief that it exists. The non-existence of the Higgs would mean that physicists would have to go back to the drawing board in terms of trying to understand what is going on at the sub-atomic level. — The Independent
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Greenland hardest hit by climate change
AN unusually hot melting season in 2010 accelerated ice loss in southern Greenland by 100 billion tonnes, according to new findings by American researchers, indicating the impact of climate change.
Large portions of the island’s bedrock also rose an additional quarter of an inch in response to the heat, according to data collected from a network of nearly 50 GPS stations planted along the Greenland coast to measure the bedrock’s natural response to the ever-diminishing weight of ice above it. Every year as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, the rocky coast rises, explained Michael Bevis, Ohio eminent scholar in geodynamics and Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. Some GPS stations around Greenland routinely detect uplift of 15 mm or more, year after year. But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period — as high as 20 mm in some locations. In a presentation at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Bevis described the study’s implications for climate change. “Pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we’ll experience pulses of extra sea level rise,” he said. “The process is not really a steady process,” Bevis, also the principal investigator for the Greenland GPS Network (GNET), said. Because the solid earth is elastic, Bevis and his team can use the natural flexure of the Greenland bedrock to measure the weight of the ice sheet, just like the compression of a spring in a bathroom scale measures the weight of the person standing on it. Bevis is confident that the anomalous 2010 uplift that GNET detected is due to anomalous ice loss during 2010. “Really, there is no other explanation. The uplift anomaly correlates with maps of the 2010 melting day anomaly. In locations where there were many extra days of melting in 2010, the uplift anomaly is highest,” he said. In 2010, the southern half of Greenland lost an extra 100 billion tons of ice under conditions that scientists would consider anomalously warm. Southern Greenland stations that were very close to zones of heavy ice loss rose as much as 20 mm over the five months. Even stations that were located far away typically rose at least 5 mm during the course of the 2010 melting season. But stations in the North of Greenland barely moved at all. —
PTI
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Trends
SEATTLE: Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen is planning to build a spaceship that could replace the Space Shuttle and put paying passengers into orbit this decade. Lifelong space enthusiast Allen is hoping to launch unmanned rockets from a massive flying carrier plane to put government and commercial satellites into space and eventually evolve to human space missions. Durban deal may do little to cool heating planet DURBAN: The world is forecast to grow hotter, sea levels to rise, intense weather to wreak even more destruction and the new deal struck by governments in Durban to cut greenhouse gas emissions will do little to lessen that damage. Climate data from UN agencies indicates that the accumulation of heat-trapping gases will rise to such levels over the next eight years - before the newly agreed regime of cuts in emissions is supposed to be in place - that the planet is on a collision course with permanent environmental change. —
Reuters |
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THIS UNIVERSE
It is true that no machine can produce energy without consuming energy. So, if we rotate a turbine and leave it in the space, how does it come to a halt?
When we rotate a turbine, it loses energy by producing electricity and also due to friction in its bearings, besides some friction in air surrounding it. If the turbine is in vacuum, it will still lose energy due to friction in its bearings. But if that is forgotten, it will stop as soon as it starts producing energy. It will not go on rotating. All attempts to design and build perpetual motion machines are bound to fail. This is a fundamental law. If we mix red and white, we get pink. Then, why doesn’t our blood become pink when we drink white-coloured milk? Please explain. There are several objections to your proposal of changing the red colour of your blood by drinking white-coloured milk. Blood is not a simple mixture of some different coloured chemicals. It arises from a complex series of biochemical reactions involving various things we eat, including, sometimes, milk. Our digestion system is not just a simple mixer. Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal a question can e-mail him at
palyash.pal@gmail.com |
EUROPEAN nuclear research scientists say they are close to discovering the elusive Higgs boson, the “God particle” that confers mass on matter and is thought to be one of the building blocks to the universe. But they are still some way from confirming the existence of a sub-atomic particle that is one of the cornerstones of modern physics.
