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.
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 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 …
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.
This month, Italian physicists will turn on an experiment hunting for a fifth, dark force of nature, the Guardian reports.
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.
Scientists can’t take pictures of the Higgs boson. But they can find proof of its existence by watching “E=mc2” play out in hundreds of millions of particle collisions per second and detecting how it decays into other particles they do know how to spot. Now, six years after officially discovering the Higgs boson,…
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.
It appears that the Universe is full of dark matter—around six times more of it than there is regular matter. It has obvious visible effects, like the way it bends light from distant galaxies. Despite dedicated searches, no signs of a dark matter particle explaining these effects have turned up.
Scientists have uncovered some preliminary evidence for a nuclear physics effect first predicted back in the 1970s. The physics universe you’re about to enter into in order to understand it is especially mind-bending.
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.
We live in a universe filled with weird stuff that we don’t really understand: dark matter. Physicists have observed its spooky effects but have’t seen it directly. Even scarier: There seems to be around six times as much dark matter in the universe as regular matter.
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, …
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…
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…
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…
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.
The AmerÂican artist Peter Halley has taken over 5,000 square feet of the Schirn Kunsthalle exhibition hall in FrankÂfurt, turning its huge rotunda into a futuristic exploration of architecture and space that’s inspired in part by the LHC.
A tiny mammal has reportedly brought the world’s largest scientific experiment to a halt. The Large Hadron Collider suffered a power outage last night, after a luckless weasel decided to chew on a 66-kilovolt power cable.
The Large Hadron Collider is impressive for a great many reasons. But forget about all that cutting-edge science for a moment and instead marvel at the scale of the engineering behind the project.
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