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…
Uncategorized
767 posts
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…
The philosophies in physics
As a big week for physics comes up–a July 4 update by CERN on the search for the Higgs boson followed by ICHEP '12 at Melbourne–I feel really anxious as a small-time proto-journalist and particle-…
Eigenstates of the human mind
1. Would a mind's computing strength be determined by its ability to make sense of counter-intuitive principles (Type I) or by its ability to solve an increasing number of simple problems in a se…
Necessity of the interdisciplinary
A strange cosmic "crucifix" in 774 AD, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, could be explained by the occurrence of a supernova, perhaps rendered unobservable by a dense cloud of gas betwe…
Understanding the Solar System from within a shard
A new variant of titanium oxide was discovered less than two days ago at Caltech, embedded within the famous Allende meteorite, which crashed on Earth in 1969. Using electron diffraction, mineralogist…
What's allowed and disallowed in the name of SUSY
The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) is due to begin on July 7 in Melbourne. This is the 26th episode of the most prestigious scientific conference on particle physics. In keepi…
The post-reporter era
One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad nuances…
Fizzed-out futures
Initiatives are arising to plug holes in the Indian education system, or so they claim. Many are ambitious, some even overreaching, but they also exist in the company of those that are honest. However…
A simplification of superfluidity
* Haruki Watanabe, co-author of the paper To those who've followed studies on superfluidity and spontaneous symmetry-breaking, a study by Hitoshi Murayama and Haruki Watanabe at UC, Berkeley, w…
SciAm's new blog on the block!
Scientific American has announced the introduction of a new blog, Critical Opalescence, edited by senior editor George Musser. It will focus on the quirky and the fascinating, attempting to revive int…