Browsing Archive: December, 2011

Year In Review

Posted by on Saturday, December 31, 2011,
What an exciting year 2011 has been! For the scientific community and the tech community, this year has been marked with many new discoveries and seen the start of some fascinating new lines of research.

In the astronomy community there was excitement over the discovery by the Kepler experiment of an Earth like planet which may support life. There is no method available yet for determining if life is indeed present, but this planet is the right size and position to support all of the building ...
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Merry Christmas!!

Posted by Chris Bird on Saturday, December 24, 2011, In : Events 
Thank you to everyone who has participated in my websites and blogs over the past year, and thank you to those who continue to support my many ventures, projects, and ideas. May you all have a very happy holiday and a prosperous and healthy new year.

Merry Christmas!!

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Beyond The Higgs

Posted by on Saturday, December 17, 2011,
Today's article should be considered as sort of a sequel to the last entry on the Higgs boson seach, and once again is inspired by the local media taking an interest in the possible discovery of a Higgs boson in the new year. (on a side note, I would like to remind the local media that a boson is a subatomic particle with specific spin properties, while a bosun is a member of the crew on a boat - there is a difference :) )

In the last few years there has been a lot of interest in searching for...
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The Higgs

Posted by on Wednesday, December 14, 2011,
Due to an article in the local newspaper this morning, I have received a few questions and comments from friends and family on the nature of the Higgs boson, the search for it and the theory behind it. Although I have commented on this topic several times in the past, the time seemed right to review the Higgs model one more time.

For the last forty years or so, particle physicists have been constructing and refining the Standard Model which contains everything that we know about subatomic part...
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Really Supermassive Black Hole

Posted by on Tuesday, December 6, 2011,
With the holiday season approaching, and everyone looking forward to devouring more than they should, comes an announcement from the astronomy community of an even bigger devourer...

Astronomers have new data from the depths of outer space, far past the edges of our own galaxy, to where there exists a galaxy which contains at its center a black hole thought to be 10 billion times more massive than our own sun. For comparison  our own Milky Way galaxy orbits a black hole which is a measly 4 mil...
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Monty Hall Problem

Posted by on Monday, December 5, 2011,
As usual on a Sunday night, I was watching the weekly episode of the Mythbusters TV show, and to my surprise they were testing the Monty Hall problem. I had thought that by now it was so well explored that it wouldn't qualify as a myth, but then I realized that most people are still unaware of this curious example of deceptive statistics. And so for that reason, although the TV show did an excellent job of demonstrating this problem, I will give an overview here.

 The Monty Hall problem is ver...
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Entangled Diamonds

Posted by on Sunday, December 4, 2011, In : News 
This week saw yet another interesting scientific result from Canadian physicists. Specifically, a team in Ontario has announced that they have detected quantum entanglement in a macroscopic system.

Since the birth of quantum mechanics over a century, it has been a puzzle due to its very odd but proven properties. Among these is the principle of quantum entanglement, in which two spatially separate objects affect each other without communicating in any ordinary way. 

The standard example of this...

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About Me


Dr. Christopher S. Bird I am a physicist recently graduated from the University of Victoria, with a doctorate in theoretical physics. I also have training in mathematics, engineering and computer programming.

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