quantum gravity

"Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me." -Craig Ferguson Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate -- albeit not incredibly precisely -- which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go. In other words, unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for having found the Higgs Boson and nothing else, meaning that there's no window into what lies beyond the Standard Model via traditional experimental particle physics. Image credit:…

"The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other." -James Smithson The entirety of the known Universe -- from the smallest constituents of the atoms to the largest superclusters of galaxies -- have more in common than you might think. Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of http://blog.deepskycolors.com/about.html. Although the scales differ by some 50 orders of magnitude, the laws that govern the grandest scales of the cosmos are the very same laws that govern the tiniest particles and their interactions with one another on the…

"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" -Stephen Hawking After a long search spanning more than my entire lifetime (so far), the Higgs boson has finally been discovered at both detectors -- CMS and ATLAS -- at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Image credit: CERN / Particle Physics for Scottish Schools. For a little more on this, check out the earlier posts here celebrating Higgs week: The Biggest Firework of them all: The Higgs How the Higgs…

There is a very techincal paper this morning by Martin Bojowald that asks the question, How Quantum Is The Big Bang? Let me break it down for you. If you took a look at empty space and zoomed in on it, looking at spaces so small that they made a proton look like a basketball, you'd find that space wasn't so empty after all, but was filled with stuff like this: What are these? They're little pairs of matter particles and anti-matter particles. They spontaneously get created, live for a brief fraction of a second, and then run into each other and disappear. That's what happens on very small…