mechanism

“If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.” -J. Richard Gott III It may not occur to you that it's a special thing that the Earth and everything found on it is made of matter; it seems intuitive that it couldn't be any other way. And yet, the very laws of nature themselves haven't yet told us why or how the Universe is this way! For this week's Ask Ethan (and leave your own questions or suggestions here), our regular reader Michael Fisher wants us to get at the heart of this, asking: Is it true that in the early universe matter &…

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -Charles Darwin There are problems with science today, no doubt. With all the knowledge we've accumulated about the Universe, from the smallest subatomic scales to the farthest recesses of deep space, there are still realms and regimes where our best theories fail, where the predictions and the data don't match, and where no known explanation is sufficient for the phenomena that shows up…

"We knew that we had indeed done something that was very different and very exciting, but we still didn't expect it to have something to do with physical reality." -Gerald Guralnik, co-developer of the Higgs mechanism Might as well make this entire week "Higgs week" here on Starts With A Bang, given how important yesterday's discovery/announcement was! It isn't every day, after all, that you see a theoretical physicist on the 7PM news. (Video here.) Image credit: KGW.com. (So proud of Portland, OR's local TV station, KGW NewsChannel 8, for being willing to promote science to the whole city…