God particle? In physics?!

Photo courtesy of NASA

Smash two particles together at near light speed and you get the god particle, though this is a misleading name for an important particle in physics called the Higgs boson. This particle is important because it is what gives matter mass, otherwise you would not be able to exist. It was recently discovered at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. I interviewed Ritu Linhart, a researcher who was working there at the time of the discovery. Linhart was kind enough to tell me all about what the discovery was and why it is important.

What exactly is this mysterious Higgs boson and field and why is it so important? Linhart gives an example that was used at the facility, imagine a cocktail party where everyone is walking around and just mingling. Now suddenly Madonna walks in, what happens? Everyone is going to head right towards her. Madonna would be an example of the Higgs field, this is like the same thing as a magnetic field attracting something. This higgs field was also proved to exist because of the Higgs boson being found, this is why discovering this particle was so important. Madonna’s field brings everyone together just like the Higgs field gives matter mass.

The CERN scientists discovered the Higgs boson by using a machine called the Large Hadron Collider (pictured above). The LHC pretty much gets one little tiny piece of mass, called a particle, and another one and smashes them together at almost the speed of light, which is about 300 million meters per second or 671 million mph. Just for comparison, that’s about how fast you would have to go to run around the Earth seven times in a single second. It smashes them together by using massive electromagnets that curve the particles around in a circle. The whole machine that they go around is a circular tube underground that is 17 miles around.

The significance of the Higgs boson is that it will help physicists figure out the origin of matter. This in turn will help explain how the universe formed. Further research into this will help us figure out how other things in theoretical physics work too like other particles, and will probably help reveal other secrets of the universe.

All of science is summed up in the fact that we are trying to be able to accurately predict the universe and what it does and eventually getting to the point of being able to control these cosmological powers. We have the power of manipulating electricity for our own needs and we can use the nuclear force at our whim as well. If science can figure out enough about this Higgs boson how it works and affects other things, eventually we may be able to use this to create matter itself. The greatest goal of science, to be able to manipulate the universe.

Cavemen Are Smart Enough To Make Fire, But Are We Smart Enough To Figure It Out?

Illustration by Brendon Lies

BAM! Lightning hits a tree and a branch falls down on fire, what do you do? Well if you’re a caveman, you poke it. Then you scream in pain, but what if someone dropped something like food in there and then grabbed it and ate it? Well if caveman-you did that, you just invented cooking. Fire is mankind’s greatest discovery, and it seems simple, but it is pretty interesting. Get some wood and a spark and POOF, you get some bright orange stuff that’s extremely hypnotizing and fun to play with and stare at and and… what just me? Well carrying on, it’s so simple and common but how does it really work? If you really think about fire, it’s confusing. It’s orange and sometimes blue, there’s charcoal leftover when theres no more fire, and forget about why the wood slowly disappears. These are all interesting and common questions and here are the answers to some of them.

Why is fire hot?: Fire is hot for the same reason that fire emits light; it’s a byproduct of a chemical reaction. As the wood reaches a certain temperature it releases energy stored in the wood or other substance in a chemical reaction, this causes the fire.This heat is actually infrared light, we humans see light with our eyes, but we have nerve endings in our skin sensitive to infrared light, which is how we feel heat.

Why are there tongues of fire?: Fire moves and licks the air the way it does because of gravity. Earth’s gravity makes hot air rise, this is because hot air is less dense than cool air, and this makes an air current around the flame, drawing it upwards. Fire in zero-gravity actually burns in a sphere because theres no gravity to cause the air to rise.

Why are fires orange and red?: Normally the chemical reaction that causes fire makes the fuel burn a light blue, but it’s different with a wood fire or candle. Wood doesn’t burn completely, that’s why there is charcoal when all the wood is gone. Wood and candles do not burn as pure as gas, for example. Soot and other particles released from the wood is the smoke. These particles burn so hot that they give off light, they burn red hot. These particles burning is what we see as the flames, the colors come from them, not the wood.

Fire is quite the interesting thing and is not as simple as it may seem, though to caveman I think pretty much everything would be much more complicated than it may seem. Thinking about how fire works and how cool it is just shows how even the most simple things in life can be made more complicated but much more interesting when seen through the viewpoint of science.

How To Make a Hole in Space and Time

Illustration by Brendon Lies

So, punching holes in space. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Hell yeah it sounds like fun. The proper scientific name for this hole in space and time is actually black hole. You can try swinging your fist in the air all you want and as hard as you can, but you’re not going to punch a hole in the fabric of the universe. Usually, you need a perpetually exploding plasma ball floating in space (a star) for that, and a much bigger one than our sun.

Most black holes are formed when the mass of something gets compressed within a certain radius, called a Schwarzschild radius, which is determined by the amount of mass. For the Earth to become a black hole, which it would never do naturally, it would have to be squeezed into a marble the size of your pinky nail … yeah, that’s a lot of mass in one place. At this point, the escape velocity (the velocity needed to escape the object’s gravity) is equal to or greater than the speed of light. Hence, a black hole — no light escapes, so you can not see it, you can only see how it affects everything around it. This compression happens because of a star going supernova, a massive explosion 10 light-years across. Ten light-years. That’s about 16,000 solar systems next to each other. The aftermath is a hole in space and time. A hole
with very interesting properties as well.

Black holes are very weird. So freaking weird that no one believed they existed when a couple of physicists started describing them and their properties. Stephen Hawking even made a $100 bet against their existence … he’s a $100 dollars short now. All black holes have a point of no return — called the event horizon — where its gravity is so strong nothing can escape, not even light. If someone watches you go past this horizon, they will see you stop as soon as you enter it and never go any farther. This is because time literally stops at the event horizon.

One of the most interesting properties of black holes is their possible use for time travel. Something else interesting about them is that they are also theorized to be a possible gateway to other universes. The problem lies in the fact that the singularity, the really crazy physics-makes-no-sense-here part at the center of the black hole, is a point in a non-rotating black hole. This makes it useless to us because we can’t exactly travel through a point, we need something to travel through. We can travel through a ring, not a point. There is a specific kind of black hole called a Kerr black hole where the singularity spins, causing it to stretch into a hollow ring like the one possibly on your finger. The math was worked out by Roy Kerr in 1963.

So, if you’re ever strolling through space and see a stationary black hole, just think, “Damn I can’t go into that one or it will spaghettify me because its singularity is a point not a ring.” That way, your atoms won’t be forcefully squished into each other by the black hole’s immense gravity. This would possibly kill you without you knowing it because your brain will be squashed as well. Yay!

What is That Strange Weak Force Called Gravity?

Today we are going to be talking about gravity, since it had a big role in time travel last time. Gravity is a very odd force in physics because it’s so weak. The entire planet’s gravity can’t stop you from picking up a feather. Think about it! The whole freaking planet is pulling down on that feather and a baby could pick it up! But it can bend space and time, it keeps the planets in orbit and without

Illustration by Brendon Lies

gravity the universe would not be the way it is. Gravity’s effects are very weird and causes some problems in science, but it is very interesting.

Albert Einstein is famous for many things, one of them being his theory of relativity. One part of this theory describes gravity in a way that revolutionized science. Einstein described that gravity was not simply two objects being attracted to each other — he showed how those objects were instead warping space around themselves because of their mass and in turn other objects were falling towards them. So imagine a bowling ball on a mattress (I know I use this example repeatedly, its a wonderful example), if you put a marble next to the bowling ball it will roll towards the bowling ball because of the impression on the mattress from its weight. This is exactly what happens in space. The sun is a giant bowling ball on the mattress called space and our planets are marbles indefinitely rolling towards the sun but never hitting it because we are flying through space so fast. Our speed keeps our orbits large enough that we just fling around the sun instead of rolling into it. This example can go towards anything that has gravity, though it works the nicest with a spherical object, like a planet, because everything is uniform.

 

A large problem that may appear when describing this is trying to prove it. How does someone prove that such an insane theory is correct? It’s surprisingly easy. Since mass warps space around itself. anything passing by it would be affected by it — including light. The sun warps space around itself, so when light passes by the sun it warps the light’s path through space, making it a curve instead of a straight line. Now this is what relativity describes to happen and it was proved with a simple experiment. During a solar eclipse, the position of the stars near the blocked sun were written down and the same was done at night. By looking at the two pictures, one during the day and one during the night, they showed that the sun did indeed warp the light of the stars because they looked like they were in different places between the two photos. This proved the sun was bending where the light went, making us believe the stars where in one place when they were actually somewhere else.

Gravity is interesting and best described by Einstein’s beautiful theory of relativity. There are many other insane ideas that are described by Einstein’s theories but gravity is the most monumentous. Unfortunately, none of his theories describe how to make a time travelling DeLorean. Yet.

Parallel Worlds?!

Illustration by Brendon Lies

Imagine being able to meet yourself from a parallel universe. It’s tough to think of what you would do in such a peculiar and interesting situation. What if right now, somewhere else in the vastness of reality, there is a version of yourself that may be living on the moon? Or maybe your universal twin died long ago. Quantum mechanics is some very screwy stuff. The famous physicist Richard Feynman once said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” A little threatening if you’re trying to understand it, but we will just be looking at one interpretation of a certain part of quantum theory: the many-worlds interpretation.

According to the many-worlds interpretation, for every possibility of anything happening, it already has in some parallel universe. Almost tripped on the stairs? In some universe you did and fell down. Almost didn’t see that car speeding by as you were crossing the street? In some universe you didn’t see it and got hit. There’s an infinite amount of variations of universes according to this idea because in an almost infinite universe anything can happen.

There’s a famous thought experiment in quantum theory called Schrödinger’s cat. The idea is that there’s a cat in a box with some radioactive substance, poison and a geiger counter. When the radioactive substance sets off the geiger counter it lets in the poison and kills the cat, but that’s only when the substance sets it off. You can’t predict when the radioactive substance will set off the geiger counter — therefore you can’t predict when the poison will get released. You can never know whether the cat is alive or dead unless you open the box and check. The conclusion is that the cat is both alive and dead, because you can’t tell unless you observe it. This idea can be stretched further to say that instead of the cat being alive or dead, there are two universes: in one the cat is alive and in the other it is dead–the many-worlds interpretation.

This theory is unproven, but it is interesting. If these parallel worlds do exist, the next question is how to get there. This is a very complicated question, but one idea is that entering a black hole could be a doorway to these parallel worlds. Unfortunately, entering a black hole is not exactly easy.

Besides overcoming the massive amount of radiation, the intensely crushing gravity would squish you into a string: a process called “spaghettification.” Black holes are amazing, they are holes in space and time—the fabric of reality—and they have the possibility of bringing you to a parallel universe where you are the ruler of the world. A pleasant idea, but extremely difficult to do. The concept is simplistic enough, but doing it without dying in the process is the hard part. Usually, not dying is a good thing, so that issue would have to be resolved before we start traversing the multiverse.