I kinda like the notion we live in molasses…it explains so much perversity, like butterside down…
On Wednesday night Through the Wormhole (Science Channel) is going to have a special on the Higgs field theory.
Higgs-Boson news…
by CJ | Mar 18, 2013 | Journal | 15 comments
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Ar! Now the rigging will be tidy on the HMS Higgs.
Could I please have warm honey instead? Falling asleep feels like sinking into warm honey, but the smell of molasses just doesn’t give me that feeling!
When the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was de-funded, everyone around me was saying “well, what could it do anyway”?
My answer was, it might explain ‘inertia’. When you shoot pool, the cue stick taps the cue ball and it rolls til it transfers it’s inertia to one or two other balls and sinks them… but where is the energy that you give the cue ball? It doesn’t heat up, or gain weight, and then with a click the energy is transferred to the target balls… how?
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider might have been able to shine a light on ‘inertia’.
Is the Higgs field the key to inertia?
I’m not a Physicist, but the balls have kinetic energy–mass times velocity squared, over two, E=mv²/2. Energy is conserved (none is lost), so the kinetic energy in the moving balls remains the same, less friction which is dissipated as heat. The reason the kinetic energy transfers well from one ball to another is due to the physical properties of the pool balls. If you coated everything in, just for Tommie, warm honey, you would end up with the balls collected in a sticky mass of slightly warmer honey, all the kinetic energy being dissipated as heat. Masses would remain the same, excepting temporary and hopefully undetectable relativistic effects due to motion. (If the relativistic effects are noticeable, I don’t think you want to be in that pool hall!)
Where did I see this one….oh, wait, I think it was George Takei. The Higgs Boson walks into a Catholic church, and is immediately told that it can’t be there in the church. To which it replies, “Without me, you can’t have mass.”
I wonder if the super collider just north of Hampton, VA is still operating. I can’t remember what it was called, even though I used to drive by there every so often, the sign on the highway would identify which exit to take to get to it. I think they renamed it the Franklin High-Energy Particle Accelerator, or something like that. It’s been a long time since I was there.
Found it! Thomas Jefferson National Particle Accelerator Facility, used to be called CEBAF, for Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility.
You know, I really shouldn’t put jokes out on the interwebz unless I’ve got them correct…..sorry….
I just read a couple different articles on the Higgs Boson, and suddenly it’s turning up everywhere I turn.
Or I guess it was there all along.
That’s OK, Joe, I got a good chuckle out of the “We can’t have mass” joke.
I’ll catch “Through the Wormhole,” probably via iTunes or Netflix. (Gotta take my cable box in next week to be replaced, or I could watch it tomorrow evening.)
In the webcomic Girl Genius, there is a sailor named Higgs. Want to guess what his rank is?
Is he the fellow who tweetles on that odd looking two note whistle?
I’m sure that’s the one! and I haven’t even seen it!
Mr. Higgs is a minor character in the webcomic opus “Girl Genius” which is “Gaslight Fantasy” Very funny, and very well drawn. It’s the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius. The current page is pretty far into the story so sometime when you’ve got a free afternoon, start from the beginning. Also check out “Buck Godot” which is an earlier comic of the Foglios which can also be accessed on line from the Girl Genius website. “Buck Godot” is SciFi in that it is set in outer space, and is about a character named, oddly enough, Buck Godot. I happen to think it’s hysterically funny, and very well drawn.
WOL, take another look at Higgs. He’s about to become a MAJOR character… my best guess is he’s one of the “missing” Heterodyne Boys!
You’ll need more than a free afternoon to get through all of Girl Genius, more like a weekend or a week. You will have to take breaks to catch your breath and hold your sides. There is a book version of the first season or so, but you should see all the pictures, I think. It’s been a part of my morning coffee for at least a couple of years now.