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 […]
Tag Archives: special relativity
The Trouble With Neutrinos
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Tagged Albert Einstein, Big Science, CERN, Chrissie Giles, Ed Gerstner, faster than light, Fermi, Gran Sasso, leptons, MINOS, neutrinos, OPERA, particle physics, Pauli, physics, Resonance FM, Ryan Nichol, science, special relativity
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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Tagged antimatter, Big Science, Chris Weaver, Dirac equation, Ed Gerstner, Paul Dirac, physics, positrons, quantum mechanics, Resonance FM, science, special relativity
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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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Ed Gerstner, Einstein, light, Maxwell's equations, physics, Resonance FM, science, special relativity
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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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Ed Gerstner, Einstein, light, Maxwell's equations, physics, Resonance FM, science, special relativity
