From the NYT

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Sirens of Titan,” all of human history turns out to be reduced to delivering a piece of metal roughly the size and shape of a beer-can opener to an alien marooned on Saturn’s moon so he can repair his spaceship and go home.

Whether the collider has such a noble or humble fate — or any fate at all — remains to be seen. As a Red Sox fan my entire adult life, I feel I know something about jinxes.

In another tweet under her name mccainBlogette she wrote: "When I am alone in my apartment, I wear tank tops and sweatpants. I had no idea this makes me a 'slut'. I can't even tell you how hurt I am".

In her column on Daily Beast, McCain continued on the topic.

"It's not like I was caught making a sex tape. I certainly didn't pose nude for Playboy. And I hadn't even exposed a nipple.

"Could it be it's because I have breasts? Because for those of you who didn't know, I have two. They're larger than some women's and not as big as others.

"I don't usually show off my cleavage — as I did in the photos I posted — which I will admit is not the smartest thing I have ever done. But it's just not worth the drama it caused."

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By NOAM COHEN

TWITTER has been credited with helping to organize political protests and shine a light on abuses around the world. At the same time, the ubiquitous service has been criticized for disrespecting the sanctity of once-private halls of deliberation — whether a criminal jury’s chambers or an N.B.A. locker room.

In the rarest of cases, apparently, Twitter can do both. That is the view of the editor of The Guardian in London, Alan Rusbridger, who, after prevailing in a legal fight over the publication of secret documents, wrote that “the Twittersphere blew away conventional efforts to buy silence,” as a headline on his column put it.

Last month, a British judge ruled that material obtained by Guardian journalists about a multinational corporation had to be kept secret. Unlike other such injunctions, however, the “gag order” applied to the existence of the injunction itself. That is, The Guardian was forbidden to report that it had been gagged.

Thus, we have a Kafka-esque experience that, fittingly, has been imposed an unknown number of times by the courts, according to the British newspapers.

The documents involved in the superinjunction could not have been more serious.

...

The superinjunction was issued on Sept. 11. “Presumably the reason for this expansive intrusion into liberty is the theory that in the Internet era any clue to the origin of information will lead to the information becoming available and easily accessed,” James Edelman, a media law expert at Oxford University, wrote in an e-mail message.

Even with the superinjunction, the report appeared on the whistle-blower Web site Wikileaks three days after the injunction. Last week, a member of Parliament asked a question about the case and, by mentioning the Trafigura scientific report, forced a legal crisis of sorts. The court order ran against the British tradition that what is spoken in Parliament is beyond censorship.

Sparked by a teasing article in The Guardian about the newspaper’s being prevented from identifying the member of Parliament— and Mr. Rusbridger’s tweet about it — readers discovered the question on a government Web site and set about broadcasting it on the Internet.

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Meanwhile, even Marge Simpson shows her Higgs bosons... see toon at top.

Marge Simpson poses naked for Playboy – but what would Lisa think?
To commemorate The Simpsons 20th anniversary, Marge is to appear naked on the cover of US Playboy. For some, it's a bold satirical move from a cartoon used to raising issues of female empowerment, but to others, its a betrayal of the show's feminist ideals

Playboy has a new cover girl – or make that cover woman: none other than Marge Simpson will strip to her lingerie for the November issue of the original lad's mag, complete with a three-page pictorial spread, pullout, and an interview entitled The Devil in Marge Simpson.

Many fans of The Simpsons have expressed surprise, even dismay, at Marge's choice. After all, when Bart got a job at the local burlesque house (Maison Derrière ), Marge "shared her moral outrage" and took a bulldozer to it (the good men of Springfield stopped protesting when they realised she didn't know about the town's bordello).

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Meanwhile at Higgs boson headquarter, time flies:

"The fast magnets must be synchronised to accelerate the beam and transfer it from one accelerator to the next and eventually to the LHC, which must be synchronised to accept it.

"This whole process happens within a few hundred picoseconds - one picosecond is a millionth of a millionth of a second."

The beams were injected at 450 billion electron volts, only a fraction of the energy that scientists will aim for when they attempt to collide two particle beams.

Two beams of particles will be fired down pipes running through the magnets - travelling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light.

Mr Arduini said: "The aim once the beam is circulating is to accelerate [it] up to 3.5 [trillion electron volts].

"But that will be in stages. We will first go to one, then 3.5... then from 2011 we're going to try to go to seven."

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, smashing into one another.

Scientists hope to see new particles in the debris of these collisions that could reveal insights into the "Big Bang" and the nature of the Universe.

Nasa peers back into the 'cosmic dark ages'
A massive gamma-ray burst 13 billion light years away has thrown new light on the early years of the Universe

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Thursday, 29 October 2009

The most distant object ever observed in space has provided scientists with an unprecedented insight into the "cosmic dark ages" following the birth of the Universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

A gigantic explosion on the edge of the known Universe has been confirmed as the furthermost object in the cosmos. It occurred nearly 700 million years after the Big Bang and its radiation has taken some 13 billion years to reach Earth – making it 13 billion light years away.

The world's biggest atom-smasher, shut down after its inauguration in September 2008 amid technical faults, has restarted, a spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research said.

"The first tests of injecting sub-atomic particles began around 1600 (local time)," CERN spokesman James Gillies said.

He said the injections lasted a fraction of a second, enough for "a half or even a complete circuit" of the Large Hadron Collider built in a 27 kilometre-long tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

"If all goes well tonight we will try to circulate a beam of particles for several minutes around 0700 (local time)," on Saturday, Mr Gillies said, adding that he would open a bottle of champagne if the accelerator kept on working.

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I wll postulate here my theory that throughout the universe there are "sub-particles" (call them "energy bytes") that are "unresolved", sub-particles that have not created a particularly fruitful partnership with other particles, or have created the wrong partnership thus not leading to matter/energy being "expressed" as we know. Thus these particles are in a flux of uncertainty, yet they do not create uncertainty in our reality since they are not "expressed". More of this in time...

See toon at top.

Science fiction movies should be allowed only one major transgression of the laws of physics, according to a US professor who has won backing from a number of his peers after creating a set of guidelines for Hollywood.

The proposals are intended to curb the film industry's worst abuses of science by confining scriptwriters to plotlines that embrace the suspension of disbelief but stop short of demanding it in every scene.

The guidelines are by Sidney ­Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an advisory body run by the US National Academy of Sciences.

Perkowitz said he liked Starship Troopers, but criticised its giant insects, saying if you scaled up a real bug to that size it would collapse under its own weight. He hated The Core, in which a team of scientists travel to the centre of the Earth and detonate a nuclear device to start the planet's core spinning again.

The Science and Entertainment Exchange is backed by Dustin Hoffman, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perkowitz said: "The hope is that it will get better science into film while still making them interesting."

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Obviously these maniacs have never ever travelled with THE DOCTOR...

And, while we're at it, religion should also obey the law of physics... Yes!!! No more of this hocus pocus where wine is changed into blood (although I've seen warriors getting pissed to go to war) and miracles are performed by dead not-yet-declared saints so they can be canonised by popes... Yes, Genesis 101 would only be allowed one twist away from science. It's a choice between a deviously speaking snake, a couple of instant-soup monkeys or an apple tree that bears forbidden fruit.

There may be multiple versions of the elusive "God particle" - or Higgs boson - according to a new study.

Finding the Higgs is the primary aim of the £6bn ($10bn) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment near Geneva.

But recent results from the LHC's US rival suggest physicists could be hunting five particles, not one.

The data may point to new laws of physics beyond the current accepted theory - known as the Standard Model.

The Higgs boson's nickname comes from its importance to the Standard Model; it is the sub-atomic particle which explains why all other particles have mass.

However, despite decades trying, no one, so far, has detected it.

The idea of multiple Higgs bosons is supported by results gathered by the DZero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator, operated by Fermilab in Illinois, US.

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 see toon at top...

from the BBC

Scientists have simulated the sounds set to be made by sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs boson when they are produced at the Large Hadron Collider.

Their aim is to develop a means for physicists at Cern to "listen to the data" and pick out the Higgs particle if and when they finally detect it.

Dr Lily Asquith modelled data from the giant Atlas experiment at the LHC.

She worked with sound engineers to convert data expected from collisions at the LHC into sounds.

"If the energy is close to you, you will hear a low pitch and if it's further away you hear a higher pitch," the particle physicist told BBC News.

"If it's lots of energy it will be louder and if it's just a bit of energy it will be quieter."

The £6bn LHC machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

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 see higgs boson versus Marge's bosom at top...

A LEAKED internal note from researchers at the world's largest atom-smasher has sparked speculation that the first evidence of an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson has been found.

But physicists have urged caution, saying the results have not yet been verified and could be a false alarm.

One of the main scientific goals of the Large Hadron Collider, built deep underground near Geneva, has been to determine the existence or not of the mysterious boson.

Also known as the God particle because of its importance, it is a missing piece - the last of the many particles predicted to exist by the standard model of particle physics that has not yet been detected. It is thought to give all the other particles their mass.

You wait millions of years for a god particle to come along, and then two clusters turn up at once.

Scientists in the US announced they may have detected the elusive and potentially universe-changing Higgs boson particle yesterday, just two days after rivals in Switzerland signalled that they, too, have caught their first sight of it.

The physicists working at the Fermilab facility in Illinois may not be as well known as their more illustrious competitors at the Cern Institute near Geneva, which attracted widespread media attention and predictions of an apocalypse when its Large Hadron Collider was turned on in 2008.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/breakthrough-hailed-in-quest-for-god-particle-2319902.html

The future of animated TV comedy The Simpsons is up in the air after 20th Century Fox Television said it could no longer afford to produce the show without a huge pay cut for its cast.

Fox Television, a unit of News Corp, issued a tough statement after reports surfaced that it had threatened to end the subversive series unless the voice actors took a 45 per cent pay cut.

"We believe this brilliant series can and should continue, but we cannot produce future seasons under its current financial model," Fox said.

"We are hopeful that we can reach an agreement with the voice cast that allows The Simpsons to go on entertaining audiences with original episodes for many years to come," the statement added.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-05/simpsons-future-in-doubt/3299080

Yes, Marge's hairdressing bill must be way over the top. And how can Uncle Rupe pay for the disastrous News of the World tanking? One of the major problem here is that the Simpsons have vanished from mainstream TV... No longer are they a must-watch program... People like me have short attention span, which means my addictions are temporary...

see toon at top...

Scientists have hailed a "new era" in their quest to unravel more mysteries of the universe as the world's biggest particle smasher started experiments with nearly doubled energy levels in a key breakthrough.

The tests at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) came after a sweeping two-year revamp of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

They will help scientists study fundamental particles, the building blocks of all matter, and the forces that control them.

During its next run, researchers will look for evidence of "new physics" and probe supersymmetry, a theoretical concept informally dubbed Susy.

They will also seek explanations for enigmatic dark matter and look for signs of extra dimensions.

The new collisions of 13 teraelectonvolts (TeV) followed a muscling of the LHC, used in 2012 to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which confers mass and is also known as the God particle.

CERN said everything went according to plan at the giant lab, a 27-kilometre ring-shaped tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border.

During what it dubbed as its season two, the LHC will in the course of the next three years strive to fill gaps in the so-called Standard Model, the mainstream theory of how the visible universe was created but which does not explain dark matter.

"It is time for new physics," declared CERN's outgoing director general Rolf Heuer.

"We have seen the first data beginning to flow. Let's see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works.

"It's not going to happen tomorrow, be patient," he added, as scientists monitoring the event broke into sustained applause and uncorked champagne.

On May 20, the LHC broke the record for energy levels colliding protons at 13 TeV — or 99.9 per cent of the speed of light — for the first time.

The LHC's previous highest energy for collisions was eight TeV, reached in 2012 before it closed for the upgrade.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-04/new-era-in-physics-as-large-hadron-collider-cranks-up/6520144