When must science give way to religion?
When I saw an article titled 'Sometimes science must give way to religion' in Nature on August 22, 2012, by Daniel Sarewitz, I had to read it. I am agnostic, and I try as much as I can to keep…
Large Hadron Collider
56 posts
Getting started on superconductivity
After the hoopla surrounding and attention on particle physics subsided, I realized that I’d been riding a speeding wagon all the time. All I’d done is used the lead-up to (the search for the Higgs bo…
Ramblings on partons
When matter and anti-matter meet, they annihilate each other in a "flash" of energy. Usually, this release of energy is in the form of high-energy photons, or gamma rays, which are then dete…
Putting particle physics research to work
In the whole gamut of comments regarding the Higgs boson, there is a depressingly large number decrying the efforts of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. Why? Because a lot of people think the Large Ha…
Gunning for the goddamned: ATLAS results explained
Here are some of the photos from the CERN webcast yesterday (July 4, Wednesday), with an adjoining explanation of the data presented in each one and what it signifies. This first image shows the data…
After the Higgs-boson-like particle, what's next?
This article, as written by me, appeared in print in The Hindu on July 5, 2012. -- The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) collaboration at CERN has announced the sighting of a Higgs boson-like particl…
Hunt for the Higgs boson: A quick update
And it was good news after all! In an announcement made earlier today at the special conference called by CERN near Geneva, the discovery of a Higgs-boson-like particle was announced by physicists fro…
So, is it going to be good news tomorrow?
As the much-anticipated lead-up to the CERN announcement on Wednesday unfolds, the scientific community is rife with many speculations and few rumours. In spite of this deluge, it may be that we could…