CERN has begun webcasting a public seminar in which there may or may not be some announcement regarding the significance or otherwise of recent observations regarding the possible existence of something that might be the Higgs boson. I am not a nuclear physicist, so I will try and keep up but will mainly be trying to catch the significance of the observations they have collected so far. In case these are talked about in terms of sigmas (there's scuttlebutt going around that this is a 3.5 sigma event), here's a table of sigma and probability. [more inside]
posted by carter on Dec 13, 2011 - 85 comments

Physicists have managed to observe light behaving both as a particle and wave in the same double-slit experimental condition, by means of a new method to weakly observe a particle's momentum. This article in Nature summarizes the results in non-mathematical terms. [more inside]
posted by leibniz on Jun 3, 2011 - 49 comments

Fifth Gear Loop the Loop. (SLYT, in the interest of science) prev 5th gear
posted by allkindsoftime on Nov 28, 2009 - 40 comments

The DiVincenzo Code [youtube trailer, geekery]. Faced with a strict demand from a funding agency to allocate research funds towards the dissemination of research ideas to the public, an experimental physics group at the University of Oxford produced a feature-length (55 min) action thriller about murder, ancient prophecy, tea breaks, and quantum computation. [more inside]
posted by fatllama on Nov 5, 2008 - 6 comments

Demonstrate one of the weirdest quantum effects in your home using a laser pointer, some tinfoil, a piece of wire, and a $7 polarizer. The device, called a quantum eraser, operates in a way very similar to the famously mind-blowing double slit experiment that was voted the most beautiful experiment in physics.
posted by blahblahblah on Apr 30, 2007 - 49 comments