CERN Scientists Looking for the Force 284
An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"
Re:Here's a question: what if it's not there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Christ I sounded like a politician right there...but it's true.
In Other (Real) News (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:such a thing as "overpopularising" science (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps so. Another way of looking at it is that they're trying to explain the article in such a way that allows more individuals - and motivates more individuals - to actually take an interest in, and have a chance of understanding this.
Also, from what I understand from reading the articles, technically they are correct (if a little simplistic). Both affect all particles, living or inert.
Re:Midichlorians don't explain the force (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we all hate the midistupidans. Let's get over it already. We won't convince Lucas to cut them out of the new trilogy, so either endure it or refuse to watch it.
Sorry, but it's really getting old. It's a friggin' movie. Well, two trilogies, but it's not a religion for crying out loud. I'm with Sir Guinness here, who told a fan that he'll only sign his autograph if he won't watch the movie ever again. It's a movie. A fantastic movie (I'm talking Ep IV and V and to a lesser extent VI here), but still just a movie.
Yes, the second trilogy (I-III) can't hold a candle to the old movies, neither in quality, nor script, nor acting. So they weren't great. Ok. I didn't like the change in pace one bit, but it's still Lucas' movies. Not mine. I may say that I don't like it. But when I keep repeating that over and over and over and over even after the movies have been out for near a decade, I start to look like some kind of fanboy without a life.
For the sake of Pete, get over it already!
(Yes, I have plenty of karma to burn, now mod me Troll and keep whining about midiwhatever)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you are going to invoke "relativistic mass" (fewer and fewer physicists use this term—mainly because a relativistic mass is the same damned thing as relativistic energy, given the correspondence between mass and energy), photon has no mass.
Nevertheless, my sibling posters are right, and the source of gravity (the source term in the Einstein equations, analogous to the electric charges in Maxwell's equations) is the stress-energy tensor (not simply rest mass of particles) and photons do contribute to that.
Don't Be So Rude! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Midichlorians don't explain the force (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Space doesn't curve (Score:4, Insightful)