Tag Archives: special relativity

The Trouble With Neutrinos

In September, a group of particle physicists working in Italy made a dramatic announcement. They announced results — and not just one or two outlier results but a metric truckload of results — that suggested that beams of particles known as neutrinos created at CERN in Switzerland were violating the laws of physics established by […]

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Antimatter – Fantasy to Reality

By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, physicists increasingly realized that quantum mechanics provided a powerful means of describing the behaviour of subatomic particles. But until that point it only described slow moving particles. When Paul Dirac combined special relativity with quantum mechanics, he found something even stranger, antimatter!

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Everything is light, Part Two

We took a bit of a detour last week, into ideas about warping of space and time, that we’d originally intended to put off until this week. No problem with that — science at its very essence is about taking unexpected detours. So this week, we going to try to go back to last week […]

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Everything is light, Part one

Wouldn’t it be nice if the laws of physics where the same everywhere in the Universe? What if they were? In episode one of BigScienceFM, we discuss the laws that govern electricity and magnetism, and how their universality leads to directly to the famous equation, E=mc2, the atomic bomb, and the large hadron collider.

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