A To Z Challenge: Unified Theory And Unraveling The Universe's Mysteries

Unified theory, also known as Grand Unified Theory (GUT) or the Theory of Everything (TOE), is the name for an as-yet undiscovered theory that would unite all the known physical forces into one complete theory. Since Albert Einstein physicists have been attempting to combine gravitation, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism, and by so doing discover a fundamental equation or system that governs the universe.

One theory that holds promise toward producing a unified theory is M-theory. Gathering the attention of physicists like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene, M-theory is the unification of five separate string theories, which it can combine by adding an additional 11th dimension. It's still being hashed out--but string theory has potential to successfully combine all known forces into one.

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Sources:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/614522/unified-field-theory
http://physics.about.com/od/physicsmtop/g/M-Theory.htm
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/qg_ss.html
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/M-theory
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stephen-hawking-cedars-sinai-20130410,0,7704203.story
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-elegant-multiverse-professor-brian-greene.html

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Do you think scientists will develop a unified theory/GUT/TOE within the next few decades? Do you think it will have a effect on society, or that we haven't achieved enough to really take advantage of a fundamental theory?


-----The Golden Eagle

A To Z Challenge: Physics And Possible New Evidence Of Dark Matter

Physics is an enormous field concerned with the study of how things interact. It encompasses sound, light, heat, electricity, and just about any other physical phenomena you can think of. Physics also studies atoms and subatomic particles, as well as having some overlap with cosmology.

One recent development in physics is a couple of separate reports that scientists may be closer to figuring out  so-called "dark matter", that elusive component of the universe we haven't yet been able to detect for sure. But progress is being made: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer attached to the International Space Station has detected positrons (the antimatter version of an atom's electrons) that might have been produced by dark matter interactions. Also, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search in a mine in Minnesota has recorded three events involving supercool silicon wafers that could have been caused by dark matter particles, possibly supporting a supersymmetry theory involving "weakly interacting massive particles", known by the abbreviation WIMPs (got to hand it to physics sometimes when it comes to nicknaming things).

Obviously, three events is not enough to declare a discovery. Nor is detection of greater numbers of positrons than expected--but they're interesting glimpses of what could perhaps be one of the larger mysteries of the universe.

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Sources:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/physics
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/Possible-Dark-Matter-Signal-201307331.html
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/Dark-Matter--203199671.html
http://www.space.com/20674-dark-matter-detection-wimps.html
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/shedding-light-on-the-search-for-dark-matter-0410.html
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/04/ams-dark-matter/

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Do you think scientists will discover dark matter for certain in the coming decades?


-----The Golden Eagle

A-Z Blogging Challenge: Particle Physics

Particle physics (or high-energy physics) is a branch of physics that studies subatomic particles (also called fundamental or elementary particles) and the forces that act on them.

One of the main ideas in particle physics is of the Standard Model. According to the Model, there are three kinds of subatomic particles (which can have traits such as different spin, electric charge, mass, and lifetimes): quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom), leptons (electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino), and bosons. The bosons are the exchange particles of the four fundamental forces: the weak force (W and Z bosons), electromagnetic force (photons), strong force (gluons), and gravity (Higgs boson). The Higgs boson has yet to be found, so the Standard Model is currently incomplete, but there are ongoing experiments at CERN trying to find the Higgs.

(This is could be my all-time favorite video on YouTube. I mean it.)

The field heavily relies on the use of particle accelerators (atom smashers). They are machines that accelerate matter using magnetic fields and force particles to collide, the most famous of them probably being the Large Hadron Collider. Data is also gathered by recording cosmic radiation.

Some questions beyond the Higgs boson and the Standard Model include dark matter, supersymmetry ((the idea that there may be "shadow particles" for all fundamental particles), and extra dimensions. There is also antimatter, which carries the opposite charge as regular matter; for example, since an electron has a negative charge, an anti-electron is a positron. Antimatter is thought to have had a role in the Big Bang, in that matter and antimatter existed evenly at the very beginning and unequal decay of antimatter left behind the matter existing today (baryogenesis).

By Festival della Scienza, CC-BY-2.0. SOURCE.

Notable Particle Physicist:

Lisa Randall 

Lisa Randall is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and a former professor at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in Theoretical Particle Physics. She was the first tenured woman in the physics department at Princeton and the first tenured female theoretical physicist at Harvard and MIT.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, the Department of Energy (DOE) Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, the Premio Caterina Tomassoni e Felice Pietro Chisesi Award (University of Rome), the Klopsteg Award from the American Society of Physics Teachers, and the Julius Lilienfield Prize from the American Physical Society.

In 2007, she was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People. She is the author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.

Her research involves particle physics and cosmology, and her work has contributed to knowledge about the Standard Model, supersymmetry, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, dark matter, and other spatial dimensions.

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Sources:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/445074/particle-physics
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/randall05/randall05_index.html 
http://hepwww.rl.ac.uk/public/phil/ppintro/ppintro.html
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/particle%20physics
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/particle+physics
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1595329_1615997,00.html
http://www.particle-physics.com/information.html
http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall.html
http://randall.physics.harvard.edu/CV.html
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-particle-physics.htm

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How likely do you think it is that the Large Hadron Collider will find the Higgs boson?


-----The Golden Eagle

Talli Roland's Watching Willow Watts Launch Party!

Today is the day for the "If I Could Be Anyone, I'd Be . . ." Party, to celebrate the release of Watching Willow Watts by Talli Roland.

I had trouble deciding who I would be. There are plenty of fascinating people in the world, but I'm not sure I'd actually want to be many of them, since many have difficult lives, despite all the positive things they've done. But I finally decided on . . .

. . . Lisa Randall. Theoretical physicist, expert on cosmology and particle physics, first tenured woman at the physics department of Princeton University, first female tenured theoretical physicist at both Harvard and MIT, one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2007, writer of Warped Passages which was one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2005, and composer. Has worked on supersymmetry, the Standard Model, cosmic inflation, baryogenesis, general relativity, and current research focused on the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter.

Have I mentioned I love physics?

Sources:
http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Randall

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Where you can purchase Watching Willow Watts:
Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/qdGe2K
Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/n5UPFB

So, who would you be, if you could be anyone?


-----The Golden Eagle

A-Z Blogging Challenge: P Stands For: Particle Physics

Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary particles of matter and radiation. An elementary, also called fundamental, particle is something that has no substructure--it is not made up of smaller particles. Particle physics is also referred to as high energy physics, because fundamental particles can only be created in particle accelerators.

(SOURCE)

The classification of all those particles comes together in the Standard Model. The Standard Model has only twelve basic particles, which are governed by four forces.

The twelve matter particles are quarks and leptons. Each of these two groups has "generations"--the first generation being lighter and more stable, while the second and third are heavier and less stable. All the stable matter in the universe belongs to the first generation, because the particles that make up the second and third decay to a more stable level.

(SOURCE)

There are up quarks, down quarks, charm quarks, strange quarks, top quarks, and bottom quarks, to cover the first six out of the twelve. Then there are electrons, electron-neutrinos, muons, muon-neutrinos, taus, and tau-neutrinos.

(SOURCE)

Three of the four fundamental forces--the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force--result because of the exchange of "force carrier particles", called bosons. Fundamental particles exchange these bosons and, therefore, discrete amounts of energy. The strong force is carried by the gluon, the weak force by the W and Z bosons, the electromagnetic force by the photon, and the graviton for the gravitational force has not been found yet.

(SOURCE)

And last but not least, there's the Higgs Boson, which is thought to be the reason other particles have mass. The boson is predicted to exist because of the Standard Model, which incorporates it to solve problems with current theoretical physics. Experiments are being done to prove its existence with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and Tevatron at Fermilab (although the latter will cease operations in September), but it has yet to be observed.

(SOURCE)

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A very cool video on the Standard Model (the scientists probably explain things way better than I do):



Sources:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/science/StandardModel-en.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_model
http://particleadventure.org/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_physics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevatron
http://www.universetoday.com/26829/fermilab-putting-the-squeeze-on-higgs-boson/

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What do you think of particle physics? Do you think the Higgs boson will be found soon? Do you think the Standard Model, despite the fact it omits gravity from the calculations, will continue to be the way scientists describe fundamental particles?


-----The Golden Eagle