I’ve always thought that one of the the great things about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you.

-- XKCD

Stephen Hawking loses $100. Universe gains mass.

Basically, you slam two very high energy beams of protons together, and once every trillion collisions or so, you produce a Higgs boson.

Higgs Boson discovered.The Higgs boson, responsible for the mass of everything in the Universe, itself has mass (go figure). About 125 Gev worth. So we could say that the Higgs boson has personal ( Read more... )

It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.

Computers have feelings too. Just ask Mitt Romney.

Via Daily Kos

Physicists Almost Certain The Universe Is Not A Hologram

NPR

Would it matter?

Berkeley physicists... report they have trapped and stored a few dozen atoms of antimatter ( Read more... )

...superconductors are finally being rolled out for use in national electricity grids... Superconductive wiring carries about ten times as much power as the same volume of conventional copper wiring. Although some of that power is lost and liquid nitrogen must be used to keep the superconducting cables cool, such cables are still more efficient ( Read more... )

... the hydrogen atoms in the sun are not sitting around in a cloud of possibilities waiting for a cosmic mind to signal them to fuse together to form helium atoms ...

Michael Shermer, via Andrew Sullivan, God and Quantum Mechanics.

But what about daemons?

This is basically taken from From Eternity to Here, the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time by Sean CarrollYou might at first think the question makes no sense, since entropy (disorder) doesn't seem to have much to do with volume. But it turns out that is incorrect ( Read more... )

A new measurement of the proton particle shows that it is 0.00000000000003 millimetres smaller than previously thought.

Gizmodo

That might not seem like much, but it turns out to be about a 4% shrinkage.

"it's a very serious discrepancy," pointing that "there is really something seriously wrong someplace." Jeff Flowers, a scientist with the ( Read more... )