Slashdot Mirror
The Pioneer Anomaly & Other Breaking Physics News
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.
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?
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").
The article states that Fermilab can begin exploring to 160GeV in the summer. LHC is due to be switched on before that. From all I've read, LHC has a MUCH better chance of being sure of what it finds at around those energies. I think any article on this subject can't even pretend to be balanced without discussing LHC.
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The bump in the CDF two-tau decay channel went away with more data, which wasn't too surprising. I'm not sure how all that got so blown up in the science press, the original blog post that started it at Cosmic Variance surely didn't make any discovery claim. Having said that, the other half of the story, the rumored huge excess in the D0 three-b-quark channel, is still unresolved as they have not released any results for over a year. We'll probably see something within a few weeks I guess, I have heard that it is close to ready.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
I know right? And what about that sensationalist headline: "Breaking Physics News"??? If they had actually broken physics, I probably would have heard it on the news...
End transmission.
I read a discussion somewhere that many spacecraft pick up a sizable electric charge and keep it (they are after all in a vacuum), and that electrostatic forces from the Sun and the solar wind are enough to account for course deviations. It's certainly true that gravity is not the only force operating out there.
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?
hey baby, wanna see my large hardon collider? I'll make you see the God particle.
I read the article on Higgs, and it is entirely conjecture based on specified rumor after rumor. Is this TMZ.com?
Rumors? About me? *sigh* I'm always the last to hear of them.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
> Is it so hard to see that they're just dealing with the (luminiferous) (a)ether?!?
Oh course. History doesn't repeat exactly but it does tend to rhyme. Is it any wonder that science falls prey to the same human failings since it IS just another human activity?
Democrat delenda est
Sadly, 10% of Fermi's staff is being laid off, and the rest must take a mandatory week off of unpaid leave every two months due to the funding SNAFU at the DOE.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I was a bit put off by the tone of TFA with respect to the Pioneer anomaly. While it is unlikely that the anomaly will disprove our models of gravity, it is an excellent example of a gap in our understanding of physics.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
....the god particle????
Is god that small?
I would post that sort of nonsense as an AC, too. For those that are unaware, the theory of a luminiferous aether posits that there exists some sort of medium in interstellar space which conducts light. It was completely superseded around the beginning of the last century, mostly by the theories of a man named Einstein. Which explain quite well our observations of the universe on a large scale. Dark matter is an entirely unrelated question related to the amount of matter in the universe. Dark energy, zero-point field...you're just throwing around terms. What we know about the forces in the universe is not exhaustive, but to invent a completely new one just to account for a minor anomaly is not good science. What you are doing here is the equivalent of fighting for the Flat Earth theory, and it disturbs me to see that modded informative here...
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The Higgs field and dark energy are about the closest things directly comparable to the aether in modern physics. Dark matter is very different: it clumps, so it isn't everywhere.
That's just the creationists. Everyone else is fine with it.