Gaucho wrote:Live bacteria found deep under Antarctic ice:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/science/living-bacteria-found-deep-under-antarctic-ice-scientists-say.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
columbia wrote:That was my thought too.
stopper40 wrote:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21785205
Higs-Boson discovered...........probably
Pucks_and_Pols wrote:stopper40 wrote:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21785205
Higs-Boson discovered...........probably
I spent most of my lunch trying to figure out what this means exactly.
Here is a pretty good two part article, the first link explains the basics of sub-atomic physics, the 2nd link explains why scientists are trying to search for these undiscovered particles, such as the Higgs-Boson.
http://io9.com/5639192/the-ultimate-fie ... -particles
http://io9.com/5640527/the-undiscovered ... wn-physics
stopper40 wrote:Pucks_and_Pols wrote:stopper40 wrote:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21785205
Higs-Boson discovered...........probably
I spent most of my lunch trying to figure out what this means exactly.
Here is a pretty good two part article, the first link explains the basics of sub-atomic physics, the 2nd link explains why scientists are trying to search for these undiscovered particles, such as the Higgs-Boson.
http://io9.com/5639192/the-ultimate-fie ... -particles
http://io9.com/5640527/the-undiscovered ... wn-physics
A guy I work with has a degree in physics and he's not 100% sure what it all means.
At first glance, quantum spin doesn't seem that much different from things we observe in the classical world. If you take a charged object and spin it around, the charge creates a loop of current, and that current in turn creates a magnetic field. That is, more or less, how you make an electromagnet, and that's basically what spin is in a quantum sense as well. Seems simple enough, right?
Here's where things get a bit weird.
If we're talking about an electromagnet in the observable, classical world, it's perfectly easy to make the charged object spin a little slower or a little faster, alternately decreasing or increasing the strength of the magnetic field. But an electron doesn't work that way - its spin will always be the same, and there's absolutely nothing in the universe that will change it. The electron's spin is an intrinsic, unchanging property - rather like if our charged object in the physical world was always spinning at the same speed, regardless of any outside interference.
Besides, this analogy only works for particles that have a charge to begin with. Particles with neutral charge like the photon and neutrino also have spin, but since they have no charge there's no related magnetic effect. There's really no completely accurate way to talk about spin without at least a few semesters of college level physics (at the very least), but for our purposes, three things are really important to know: it's an intrinsic, unchanging property of all particles, it represents the angular momentum of the particle, and it creates a magnetic moment. As for the elementary particles, all the leptons and quarks have spin-1/2, and all the bosons have spin-1.
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