The following entries were tagged with “physics”. They are displayed with the most recent entries first. (1–2)

A Nobel Spirit

Posted in and on Mon, 04th Jun 2007 at 14:16

From Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking (pdf):

For large P , the three-form fluxes are dilute, and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti-D3 to embiggen is very mild.

(Emphasis mine.)

Comments:
Tue, 05th Jun 2007 (01:58)

Surely as a TP (does anyone ever really leave?) you appreciate the games we physicists like to play 'who can get the most ridiculous word or reference into a journal'?

Just check out this analysis of the 'Crapola' model: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0953-4075/32/14/314

Even better, I hear tell that there is a paper on anisotropy in the early universe that references a Nature paper that examined the asymmetry in the relative size of testicles in Greek sculptures. Unfortunately I don't have a reference for it.

by Joe

One Point Twenty-One Gigawatts

Posted in , , and on Sat, 03rd Mar 2007 at 13:18

There's a video of a wonderful lecture at the LIFT Conference in Geneva (“LIFT” doesn't appear to stand for anything). The lecture is about the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research—apparently no-one in particle physics knows how acronyms work.) The speaker, Brian Cox (X-Men 2—no, not that one) gives a very clear idea of the current state of particle physics. Since I graduated in 2004 I've paid very little attention to the whole field, so it was a good refresher for me.

To be honest, I think I just like any lecture where they get to throw around ridiculously large numbers, like describing the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (10,000 galaxies in a patch of sky 1% of the size of the visible moon), the amount of matter converted to energy by our Sun (four billion tonnes a second), or the energy of a beam of protons in the LHC less than the size of a dime (the same as the energy of an aircraft carrier travelling at 35mph).