MetaFilter posts tagged with bigbang and science

Dark Flow

homunculus — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:28:16 -0800

Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space. "As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered. Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon 'dark flow.' The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude." Here's the paper (subscription required): A Measurement of Large-Scale Peculiar Velocities of Clusters of Galaxies: Results and Cosmological Implications. NASA has preprints you can download: results and implications and technical details (PDFs).

Star Stories and the Nobel Prize

ozomatli — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:27:27 -0800

Star Stories explains the life and death of stars using a multimedia approach that incorporates images, animation, video and text. From the official website of the Nobel Foundation. Don't miss out on the other cool games . One of the games has been posted before, but Star Stories is hot off of the presses.

T-Minus...

chuckdarwin — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:51:21 -0800

In a scant few hours, scientists will make the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider. Terrified of nothing, a few deeply misguided morons have sent death threats to the CERN team, probably because of Faith-Based Science. *sigh* Anyway, what follows is the Just Some Of The Cool Shit About The LHC:

When the accelerator is fired up, two parallel beams of particles will be blasted around the underground ring in opposite directions. At four locations on the circuit, superconducting magnets will bend the beams so that groups of protons smash into each other in a giant chamber rigged with equipment to record the collisions and their aftermath.

Around 300 computer centres in 50 countries will handle data from the vast atom smasher for the next decade, marking what will be the biggest computing exercise in history. Handing the deluge of data will mark a test for the next generation of computing, called The Grid or "the cloud", and the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the internet, wrote "www" on a blackboard in 1989 on the site of the huge machine. The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. The biggest concentration is the 80,000 PCs in a "farm" at the Large Hadron Collider, part of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, near Geneva. When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually. "If you put them on CDs and stacked them up, that stack would be more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall." said Dr Bob Jones, Director of the EGEE, Enabling grids for e-science project, which is co-funded by the European Commission. Or, in terms of iPod data, the annual output of the atom smasher is equivalent to a song running for 24,000 years.

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.

BBC Radio 4 will devote a day of programming to the LHC, including covering first injection of beams live on the Today programme. See the BBC website for programming, background etc. You can try your hand at running the LHC and interpreting collisions on the simulator at www.particledetectives.net Good luck to all involved. Previously

Atom

empath — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:41:22 -0800

Atom. -- The Clash of the Titans -- The Key to the Cosmos -- The Illusion of Reality

The Universe is Finite

snsranch — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:52:17 -0800

Remember CERN from The Da Vinci Code? And their mega-project the Large Hadron Collider(previously mentioned here?) This BBC Horizons show, The Six Billion Dollar Experiment, does a good job illustrating why such an experiment is so cool, important and fascinating. Apparently, the universe is finite. (Includes Google Video-last link)

The truth behind the first cheesy special effects

Gyan — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:57:05 -0800

Misconceptions about the Big Bang

greyscale — Sun, 01 Jul 2001 10:21:47 -0800

$145 million in a search for evidence of Big Bangs! So far the popular vote indicates most are in favor of the spending--whatever the cnn data is worth. Am I the only one who'd prefer it spent on my undergrad work, or even biosciences research?

Zosia Blue — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 10:56:54 -0800

The Big Re-run? "In the first millionth of a second after the universe’s beginning, the entire cosmos consisted of this ultradense, ultrahot brew, scientists say." And now scientists are trying to re-enact the Big Bang. Too big of a task to take on?