Browsing Archive: November, 2011

Superbubbles and Cosmic Rays

Posted by on Friday, November 25, 2011, In : News

Yet another mystery of space has been at least partially explained now.

For many decades (since 1912 to be precise) it has been known that the Earth is constantly being hit by high energy particles, known as cosmic rays, which originate from somewhere far out in space. And these are not just mildly energetic like we produce on Earth in particle accelerators, but many orders of magnitude more energetic than anything scientists can produce. But the source of these particles has been an unknown ...
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The Search For Life

Posted by on Sunday, November 20, 2011, In : News

Canadians have one more thing to be proud of today.

Today NASA launched the Curiosity probe, the latest in a long history of robotic explorers sent to Mars to collect data and to search for signs of life present or past. This mission is going to travel to the red planet, and a robotic rover will descend to the surface. The target region was identified several years ago by an orbiting probe which identified a region of Mars which is covered in clay.

The presence of clay indicates that at some po...
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A New Preprint Server

Posted by on Saturday, November 19, 2011, In : Interesting Websites

This entry might be repetitive, but the article I wrote earlier this week didn't get saved or got erased, so I am reprinting it today. I apologize to those who have already read it.

This article is only of interest to a tiny fraction of readers, as it concerns a new preprint server for academic papers in physics and mathematics.

As most of you know, the physics community has made its research papers freely available on the internet for over a decade, using a website known as the arXiv. It has b...
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Faster Than Light Revisited

Posted by on Saturday, November 19, 2011,

It seems not so long ago I was writing an article on this blog about a new result from the OPERA experiment in which neutrinos were observed to travel faster than the speed of light. At the time I commented about how it could still be an error in the data.

Today the same group of experimentalists released an updated report in which they reduce one source of error and still see FTL neutrinos. One criticism of the first result was that the different in flight time of the neutrinos was approximat...
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The Hidden Structure of Electrons?

Posted by on Friday, November 18, 2011,

I was watching a lecture a few days ago on particle physics and the latest research into that field, and I was interested in a comment that there is no indication of internal structure for the leptons. Not because I disagree - in all the years of searching for structure through high energy experiments no clear evidence has appeared - but because many people seem unaware of the Koide formula which does seem to indicate some hidden properties of the leptons.

Let me start with some background inf...
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A Visitor From Space

Posted by on Tuesday, November 8, 2011, In : News

I thought I would let everyone reading this know that there will be an interesting astronomical event today. The asteroid YU55 is scheduled to pass close to the Earth today (actually 320,000km but to astronomers that is close) and could be visible in amateur telescopes. It should arrive around 3:28pm PST today.

This will be the first time such an event has happened since 1976 (or the first time in most of our lifetimes if you are of my generation or younger), and will allow the professional sc...
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A New Experiment

Posted by on Tuesday, November 8, 2011, In : News

In all of the excitement last week, I fear that I failed to mention a new experiment starting up which is lead by of two of my former employer institutions. For now I can only outline the project, but it is my hope to give a more detailed explanation when the first results are published. (Not because of any restrictions right now, but rather because I have been too busy with other projects to compile and compose a proper review for this blog).

There is an ongoing problem in (some) branches of ...
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A Hacking Update

Posted by on Friday, November 4, 2011, In : News

For anyone who is interested, I am still in the process of undoing the changes and additions made by the still anonymous hacker who illicitly modified my website at some point in the previous few weeks or months. So far I have found three new entries that I did not write, and five that were modified after writing. And some of my e-mail messages were also either deleted or redirected. And of course the biggest threat of all was that someone removed the password protection and privacy settings ...
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I've Been Hacked!

Posted by on Wednesday, November 2, 2011,

I am feeling pretty depressed tonight - someone hacked into my website and edited things. They have removed the password protection on one of my pages, and added entries to my private blog without my knowledge.

So for the record, this blog is the only one on my website that you should be able to access if you do not know me personally. If you are accessing another blog, then someone has tampered with the password protection. And if you read something here which is insulting or offensive, pleas...
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Dr. Christopher Bird