Salon.com > Higgs Boson

Salon limerick contest

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:59:00 +0000

Salon's poet army takes on DOMA and the Higgs Boson

It's now known there's a boson named Higgs,

That creates both electrons and pigs.

So it really does matter,

How particles scatter.

Some by zags, yet still others by zigs.

Marilyn Hewitt

Media, Pa.

A justice named Antonin Scalia,

Was vexed by the very idea,

That gays want to wed,

"It's unchristian," he said.

But that actually sounds like Sharia.

Mike Moulton

Gainesville, Fla.

Though a mister and a mister want to marry,

DOMA made it incendiary.

If a miss and a miss,

Tie the knot with a kiss,

No one's shocked (except maybe Rick Perry).

Shirley Stuart

Berkeley, Calif.

Next week we’ll try something different. Stay tuned!

Could Higgs boson spell the end of the universe?

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:06:00 +0000

Physicists recently confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had indeed found a Higgs boson last July, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science. The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news," says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable."

The Higgs boson helps explain why particles have the mass they do. The Higgs particle that the LHC has found possesses a mass of approximately 126 giga-electron volts (GeV)—roughly the combined mass of 126 protons (hydrogen nuclei). (One GeV equals a billion electron volts.)

Physicists claim to have found long-sought Higgs boson

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:52:00 +0000

GENEVA (AP) — The search is all but over for a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe.

Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.

The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the "God particle."

The discovery would be a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. Last July, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but they stopped short of saying conclusively that it was the same particle or was some version of it.

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data.

Salon.com > Higgs Boson

Salon limerick contest

Could Higgs boson spell the end of the universe?

Top 5 investigative videos of the week: Higgs boson explained

Physicists claim to have found long-sought Higgs boson