3 Things the Higgs boson can teach you about physics.
And, more interestingly, a not-so-obvious things within the recent announcement.
The great Richard Feynman's answer to Fucking Magnets, re: how do they work?
TL;DR: it is not a miracle, but you don’t know enough about physics to understand.
On Infinite Smallness
I just watched a pretty rad video of an electron microscope zooming in on a mint leaf and it got me thinking, as these things can do, on the idea of infinite largeness and smallness. The fact is, we have yet to discover the source of mass. No matter how far we zoom in, there’s just more empty space. Technically speaking, we should all be transparent if all that nothing weren’t somehow packed together so tightly.
So you have to wonder… if and when we find the God particle, the source of all our mass and all the mass in the dirt and the air and the sea and space, what will it be? What will it look like? Even electrons are made up of smaller particles orbiting still smaller particles. When you get down far enough — when we smash apart some atoms in the LHC — maybe we’ll find us? The fact is, the idea of these baby universes isn’t improbable. We just don’t know.
The coin flip is a fundamentally unfair proposition.
I’ve always suspected the difference in mass on each side of a coin could affect the result.
Crayon Physics Deluxe
Has anyone else played this game? I was introduced to it yesterday, and I can’t believe how addictive it is. It’s so elementary in concept but somewhat challenging to solve at the same time. A free demo here
