Physicists Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng update us on life after finding the Higgs Boson (make sure you watch it in HD and fullscreen). Visit the website: http://phdcomics.com/tv
If only there were a graphic novel that could guide you around the frontiers of physics! We mused over that possibility on "Virtually Speaking Science" just a couple of nights ago, during a discussion of what lies beyond the Higgs boson — totally unaware that PHD Comics' Jorge Cham had just put out a video graphic novel addressing that very topic.
Cham's latest animation draws upon the expertise of Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng, physicists at the University of California at Irvine, to explain how the discovery of a new "Higgs-like" particle at Europe's Large Hadron Collider is only the first of many blockbuster discoveries expected from the $10 billion facility over the next few decades.
One of the most way-out possibilities is that the LHC could pick up the signs of extra spatial dimensions beyond the three we know and love. Like the Higgs boson, which is thought to play a role in endowing other particles with mass, the existence of extra dimensions is suggested by some of the questions still outstanding in physics — for example, why is gravity so much weaker than the other fundamental forces of nature? But the evidence to back up that suggestion is devilishly difficult to come up with.
Cham literally sketches the outlines of the mystery in his animation, and graphically shows why the LHC is way bigger than the Higgs.
For more about the frontiers that lie beyond the Higgs, check out my Q&A with Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, listen to our hourlong conversation during Wednesday night's installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," and drop into the Second Life virtual world at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT/SLT) Saturday to hear about "The Quest for the Higgs Particle" from Rutgers' Matt Strassler, the physicist behind the widely respected "Of Particular Significance" blog.
More about the Higgs boson:
- Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
- Higgs explained in (more than) a minute
- The lighter side of the Higgs quest
- The Higgs boson made simple
- How the Higgs gives things mass
- Gallery: Your guide to the particle zoo
- Cosmic Log archive on the Higgs quest
Hat tip to Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance. By the way, you can also download the "Virtually Speaking Science" podcast from iTunes.
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.


Another experiment at CERN that should be of great interest. Do you, perhaps, have any insider updates?
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/AEGIS-en.html
No insider updates ... yet. I don't think I've heard all that much about this experiment, but it sure sounds intriguing. Thanks for the pointer, Thomas!
yes i do!!!
if i am right dont stop me! email me back....like now( dont stop to think about it)now email me!!
if am wrong go ahead ( lol) but one day ill have the chance to have all the greats thinkers and all the bads thinkers! whos soul i have gather togather in one space made up of of one more space,and so on and so on and so on etc....
and like thay hve told me! and i think thay said it but thought in my brain, but i was born with a curse!!! what everone else was born with i am sad to say i was not!
its a littel bit less and just when i hit the less of the lessespower starts in... and not the kind you
are thinking about
now that just it
i cant tell you what your thinking
give me time to school my self on it!!! and in it some more ..and ill let you test me on it!! thats the way to inlightment and you got to have a teacher to teach you in and on it and there is only one god i know of one god ive hear a lot of peaple talking about this god and that god, but what he change are knowed hearing see speking,feeling tasteing and thinking and talking to eacher was changed a long time ago but that was then this is now! we've learned to speak agan to one anuther agan and we can teach eacher the others lang, this we know now becouse i just told you you do! this it now and not then becouse there was no teachers to teach , now that we have travel back and forth from the fucher to past to pass back and forth is what the higgs thing is all about ( dont lol becouse i got that protplasmangetinsengery on and in me, it was from two projects ill get the info but you can look it up your selfs, do it why you can! the project 1:2:3:and4:(4:) is the big bang: and i did not like the first one woops info link leak!! you see we are in gods mind! we are his thoughts on what is right and want is wrong! what he can create and what he will not create and it done right here!! where we are at and we are at the ending!
thats just the ending of the old world, he puts us on a new world in a new space he call's heaven, i have been there in bouth and i got prof of it becouse some one here did a gray thing and are blinding you to it, it controls you brain with the tec, and guss what there looking for god to use it on him! id really hope you read this, no one here can remember what is to be! there time to come has not came yet, and yet:(to be useed in when you are from two or more places of in and out and back of this time fram and dimisons and difrount when in ill go into that later got a lot in that brain of mine or should i have his gen's godsgen linkedin a place i think used me
to get what thay did not heve corp's think thay know everything but thay have nothing but my work place,
and i could learn to do it but there is a path to inlightment
Be sure to brush up on your grammar, spelling, and academic writing while you're at it.
Ya know, it's a shame that the article about the Cop that groped the lady at the bar... that get's 1500 comments. Any political story (or any article that can POSSIBLY be made political) get's 3500 comments. And yet, science articles - FAR more fascinating - get so few comments.
Must be Obama's/Romney's fault! ;)
PS. Another interesting article Alan! Thanks and keep them coming!
ToddC... I agree.
Don't forget the ones about chewing somebody's face off or cutting their heart out, those also tend to do well.
Probably because science is wrong so often and often states things as "fact" when it's a theory. No one trusts science anymore.
Timothy1Mil -No one trusts science anymore.
You live in a modern world of creature comforts because of science, even your comment post. Everything built up in the modern world, every discovery was because of theories, testing and discovery - that's science.
Most people just don't care about science, you can't help it. We need to stop trying to spoon-feed science on people who aren't at all interested; scientists are born, not made.
"I am the light that shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendith it not"...we are trying to understand these things ,both the infinite in size and in smallness. If God had ment for man to fly,he would have given us the birds to watch and the brains to figure it out...and then the stars to look at from our back yards at night...gotta get back to those lifespans of the Old Testament so that we can at least "move about the galaxy" spend more on aging research too...:)
Let's see if finding the heavier force Higgs boson will gravitate (no pun intended) into some articles on Brane theroy of unification of forces. Possible gravity could be the membrane itself containing all the extra dimensions.
Boy you guys lost me way back when I was trying to fiqure out the local speed limit.
Eh, isn't time the fourth dimension that we love?
Still some debate going on about that.
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html
Well I actually heard something semi-intelligent in that little movie. First they talk about the 4 forces and then they proceed to say that EM and gravity are actually the same thing. Then they proceed to call the strong nuclear force " strong gravity" which makes it EM as well, if you can follow the convoluted logic and then they say that its all a geometric mirage with electrons duplicating themselves. Wow!!! That was trippy.
Well they are getting closer to the truth there at the end. All of that can be explained as follows: The universe is made up of 2 electrons and 1 positron. The positron is the singularity which projects the TIME Phase so it has no material parameters but creates 2 reciprocal vectors. The 2 electrons create the other 4 vectors to get a total of six, like the sides of the cube. The X,Y,Z axis in both directons create the 3 dimensonal time/space. The 2 electrons create the 2 standing polarized waves. The sine wave and the modulator wave are moving opposite to the time phase and therefore are standing. Everything else is a periodic effect which we see and feel because of the relativity between the time phase and the electron group phase. The apparent motion of the group is achieved with orbital eccentricity. There munch on that. :) I just described a radio transmission. Tune in, there is alot to be learned from the Grand Architect.
Uhhhhh... No.
Yes!
Haha, now I'm convinced! : )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_mass
Shouldn't space itself behave as having invariant mass -- it's a bound system and has photons traveling in all directions?
However, it's not so with space, otherwise space mass would have a crushing impact on celestial bodies. By 'bound system' they mean a system with atomic nuclei. Why do randomly or cross-moving photons exhibit invariant mass in a system where there are atomic nuclei? I tried to answer the question by the experiment which is now published as a US patent application.
Unfortunately, Higgs field cannot explain rest or invariant mass.
You should find better sources.