We Regret to Inform You the Large Hadron Collider Will Not Annihilate Earth
There’s a tired, much-debunked doomsday theory pushed by British physicist Martin Rees that powerful particle colliders have the potential to destroy Earth. They don’t. However, since the story has once again turned up as a top Google News hit, we will deign to debunk it once more.
New Particle Could Explain 'Unusual' Antarctic Weather Balloon Detection
An enormous weather balloon in Antarctica spotted what looked like a high-energy particle from outer space striking the ice back in 2006. Except the particle didn’t hit from above—it somehow traveled all the way through the planet. Eight years later, it happened again.
The EU Copyright Directive, Starforce, Ray-Tracing and Apple: Best Gizmodo Posts of the Week
The European Union passed its disastrous Copyright Directive this week, including amended versions of its onerous Articles 11 and 13 (the so-called “link tax” and “upload filter,” respectively). There’s still time to make sure it never passes into law by defeating a final ratification vote in January, though given the …
The Large Hadron Collider Turns 10: Here's What's Next for Particle Physics
September 10 marked the 10th anniversary of when the Large Hadron Collider first powered on. Since it’s already achieved its most well-known goal—to discover the Higgs boson—you might wonder what else is happening at the famous collider.
The Large Hadron Collider Accelerated 'Atoms' With Electrons for the First Time
You can feasibly put anything inside the world’s largest physics experiment, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, so long as it can be vaporized. You could even stick a sandwich in there. But for the first time, scientists have accelerated an atomic nucleus with electrons still attached.
The Large Hadron Collider Is Getting an Upgrade
Today, workers at the world’s largest atom smasher are breaking ground on a performance-enhancing upgrade that will allow scientists to conduct even bigger and better physics experiments.
The Universe Is Not in Danger of Ending From a Higgs Boson Vacuum Bubble
There are few easier ways to get people to read your website than to scare them. That’s how we ended up with the media frenzy surrounding Tiangong-1, and it’s why InfoWars continues to exist. It’s also how we’ve ended up with folks telling you the universe is due to end. Heck, we’re guilty ourselves.
How Physicists Recycled WWII Ships and Artillery to Unlock the Mysteries of the Universe
A million Russian artillery shells helped scientists discover the Higgs boson. And all over the world, remnants of World War II weapons are built into the most mysterious experiments in physics.
In the mid-1990s, physicists needed tons of a metal strong enough to withstand the massive magnetic fields of the house-sized…
Nobel-Winning Physicist Worried About 100 Chocolate Coin Wager Over New Particles
Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek was optimistic back in 2012. After all, he’d just won a wager after scientists had just announced their Higgs boson discovery at the Large Hadron Collider particle physics experiment in Switzerland. He made another bet—but he’s doesn’t feel as confident today.
Groundbreaking Observation Confirms an Important Prediction of Quantum Physics
Particle accelerators have a lot of important jobs, like looking for new stuff by slamming beams of old stuff together. But a new particle accelerator observation has managed to be important while doing almost precisely the opposite of what we’d expect. Physicists have found evidence for hard-to-detect stuff by, well, …
The Scientists Who Look for Nothing to Understand Everything
Physicist Usama Hussain laughed uncomfortably every time the conversation even got close to the question, “Do you look for nothing?” His professors would kill him if they heard him agree with that. After all, he’s technically looking for a brand new particle that may or may not exist, with the hopes that it might help…
The High Schoolers Hunting for the Universe's Secrets
Four British schoolboys had just been called from class. They were ten days away from their A-level exams, the ones that determine the direction the rest of their lives would take, but they’d been interrupted from their studies to discuss the deepest secrets of the universe—their work hunting for the magnetic monopole…
Scientists Are Exploring a Strange New Way to Create an Exotic Phase of Matter
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND— Hiding in the suburbs behind trees and a meadow with furry brown donkeys is a warehouse with an elevator that only visits negative floors. Hundreds of feet down, hyper complex detectors inside an octagonal tube the color and size of a large barn whistle loudly and peer like cameras at protons, the…
A Trail of Strange Physics Results Offers Tantalizing Hints of New Particles
Conceptually, particle physics experiments are surprisingly simple. Smash a shitload of particles together, and look at what comes out. The results will either confirm whatever the business-as-usual theory is, or, if there’s a really crystal clear deviation from that theory, they might prove some new hypothesis about…
Watch a Large Hadron Collider Experiment Get a Major Upgrade
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beneath Geneva, Switzerland isn’t just one, but a handful of experiments sprinkled along the length of the 17-mile-round ring. One of the biggest, the Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS, is getting a major upgrade today, which CERN is comparing to an open-heart surgery.
Does the Large Hadron Collider Actually Disprove Ghosts?
The Large Hadron Collider sits underground, spanning over five miles across beneath the bucolic suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. This metal behemoth serves to try and understand the most basic building blocks of our universe. The question stands, then: if ghosts are real, shouldn’t the LHC have found them?
Corpse of Weasel Killed by Large Hadron Collider Displayed in Twisted Museum ExhibitionÂ
The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex machine in the world, but it only took one adventurous weasel to shut it down in November of last year. The unfortunate fellow jumped over a substation fence and was hit by 18,000 volts of electricity. Now, its stuffed corpse is on display at the Rotterdam…
It's Official: The LHC Didn't Find a New Particle [UPDATED]
Well, shoot. It’s been confirmed that early hints of a possible exotic new particle at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have vanished. That disappointing news was announced this morning at a physics conference in Chicago.
CERN Physicists Have Discovered a Batch of New Exotic Particles
Scientists working at CERN have found four new “tetraquark” particles comprised of the same four subatomic building blocks. These exotic particles don’t last very long, and they probably don’t play an important cosmological role, but the discovery reveals the surprising diversity of the tetraquark family.
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