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The Pioneer Anomaly & Other Breaking Physics News

Posted by kdawson on from the explaining-the-unseen dept.

David Harris, editor-in-chief at Symmetrymagazine.org (a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC), sends us to his blog covering the American Physical Society meeting now going on in St. Louis. Among the breaking physics news relating to topics we have discussed in the past: results that explain about 1/3 of the Pioneer anomaly by differential heat flow in the spacecraft; an analysis of the Fermilab Tevatron's chances of spotting the Higgs "God particle"; and a hint that an Italian team has replicated their results from the year 2000 pointing to a detection of dark matter.

3 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Sloppy editing by Harmonious+Botch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We have three separate subjects crammed together in one article. So some of the briliant, insightful comments by my fellow shashdotters may get buried. How about three separate articles?
    Or is this a new trend? Are we going to see twenty subjects crammed into the one daily article tommorow?

  2. You must be new here. by Valdrax · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So some of the briliant, insightful comments by my fellow shashdotters may get buried. When's the last time you've read the comments section on any science article on Slashdot, particularly over discoveries in physics?

    Insightful comments are *always* buried under senseless meme-tossing and political (or other off-topic) ranting.
    --
    If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
  3. Enough of the "God Particle" please by smolloy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Who first used the name "The God Particle" for the Higgs? It certainly wasn't a high energy physicist!

    The Higgs field is supposedly responsible for mass generation -- and that's it. Nothing else. Maybe something about "spontaneous symmetry breaking...mumble... big bang.. mumble... inflationary expansion... mumble", but hardly anything "God-like".

    This nickname comes across as something dumb invented by the popular press in a half-assed attempt to communicate to regular folk how exciting the LHC is to us physicists.

    Maybe /. could lead the charge to kill this nickname?