Shut Up and Calculate!

My brain is dying.

The ultra-shy Higgs boson may have finally shown itself at the LHC. Both of the main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, have uncovered hints of a lightweight Higgs. If it pans out, the only remaining hole in the standard model would be filled.

Read more…

More on this here, here and here.

“Sometimes I look at the stars at night and I really wonder, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ “

Explanation: If you stay up long enough, you can watch both suns set. Such might be a common adage from beings floating in the atmosphere of Kepler 16b, a planet recently discovered by the space-based Kepler satellite. The above animated video shows how the planetary system might look to a visiting spaceship. Although multiple star systems are quite common, this is the first known to have a planet. Because our Earth is in the orbital plane of both stars and the planet, each body is seen to eclipse the others at different times, producing noticeable drop offs in the amount of light seen. The frequent eclipses have given Kepler 16b the most accurate mass and radius determination for a planet outside our Solar System. To find a planet like Saturn in an orbit like Venus — so close to its binary star parents — was a surprise and will surely become a focus of research.

First World Problems

GPOY. It’s so annoying! Math and physics ruined sci-fi for me forever :(

(Source: twitter.com)

cahier:

Horizon: Richard Feynman - No Ordinary Genius (1:35:39)

(via project-argus)

This doesn’t take into account the energy imparted by orbital motion (or gravity assists or the Oberth effect), all of which can make it easier to reach outer planets.

(Source: xkcd.com)

14-billion-years-later:

This is a picture that shows the simulated magnetic field lines around Earth at any one moment and also a simulation of the magnetic field lines during geomagnetic reversal. Geomagnetic reversal is where the North and South poles on the Earth swap place, this last occurred 780, 000 years ago and happens at least once every million years. The reversal process itself takes between 1 and 10 thousand years.

An interesting bonus fact is that the “True North” of a compass actually points to the South pole due to naming problems.

(via theaxiomofchoice)

BOOM!

(Source: enkiseshat)

intothecontinuum:

Use your cursor to create Moiré patterns below (try dragging the image).
View a larger version here.

Epic.

rhydin:

Wow this has got to be the best animation of Calabi-Yau manifolds I’ve seen! All of the still pictures don’t really do it justice. Beautiful.

From source:

“String Theory predicts the existence of more than the 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension we are all familiar with. According to string theory, there are additional dimensions that we are unfamiliar with because they are curled up into tiny complicated shapes that can only be seen on tiny scales. If we could shrink to this tiny, Planck-sized scale we could see that at every 3D point in space, we can also explore 6 additional dimensions. This animation shows an array of Calabi-Yau spaces which are projections of these higher dimensions into the more familiar dimensions we are aware of.”

Here’s a close-up of one of these beauties:

Oh my god this is so amazing I can’t even… *physicsgasm*

The Three-body Gravitational Interaction has gotta be my favourite. So pretty!

(Source: sznurek)

This is the beast that is the E8 Lie Group which has 248 dimensions and its structure took 120 years to solve. You have to look at the high-res version to fully appreciate its complexity. (Click picture for high-res)

Garrett Lisi realised that this structure could be used to describe fully the laws of physics. It could be a step towards a Theory of Everything. This does a much better job than me at explaining it.

See here for some other amazing lie group patterns and stuff. Phenomenal stuff.