Understanding Quantum Mechanics Through Super Mario

Enjoy.

Link.

Ode to the LHC

Joel Achenbach has a great write-up in National Geographic on the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator which scientists hope will uncover the Higgs Boson, the so called "God particle". The photos taken by Peter Ginter, which accompany the article, are truly stunning.

Link:

If you were to dig a hole 300 feet straight down from the center of the charming French village of Crozet, you'd pop into a setting that calls to mind the subterranean lair of one of those James Bond villains. A garishly lit tunnel ten feet in diameter curves away into the distance, interrupted every few miles by lofty chambers crammed with heavy steel structures, cables, pipes, wires, magnets, tubes, shafts, catwalks, and enigmatic gizmos.

This technological netherworld is one very big scientific instrument, specifically, a particle accelerator-an atomic peashooter more powerful than any ever built. It's called the Large Hadron Collider, and its purpose is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.

The Superbowl of Particle Physics

There's a fantastic post up on Cosmic Variance on the Higgs boson, which is what scientists are hoping to discover after spending billions of dollars on the LHC at CERN, granted of course a black hole isn't created that inhales the planet...(just kidding according to Hawkings' formulas that is improbable, and if you can't trust him who can you trust).

I wish I could say more on this topic but I have a huge paper due tomorrow that I do not have the luxury of time to neglect.

You can find a peerty slide show of images of the Collider in this NYtimes article.

Quantum Weirdness

I just came across this fantastic series (though at the moment there appears to only be three) on what I like to call quantum conundrums, the most infamous of which are addressed by Dr. Quantum, one of the foremost experts on quantum mechanics in the 3dimensional world, as you will soon see.

Enjoy!

Law Of Attraction: Double Slit experiment


Dr. Quantum visits Flatland


And lastly--and to me what is the strangest phenomenon of all--Entanglement