physics

You can put Kate McAlpine in a giant particle accelerator 300 feet underground. You can even put her in a rap video. Just don't put her in a box.

That's a tenet the 23-year-old Michigan native--who recently climbed the YouTube charts with a rap video on the Large Hadron Collider--embraced long ago in choosing a career as a science writer. She tips the hat to her dad, who was annoyed by the results of her career aptitude test in high school that sought to place her in a particular field.

"They're trying to put you … Read more

Professor Peter Higgs will have to wait at least a few additional seasons to find out whether his long-held theory on how matter has mass is right.

That's because officials announced Tuesday that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could confirm the existence of a theoretical particle name after Higgs, will remain shut down until at least early spring.

The LHC, the world's largest particle collider, is located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel along the French-Swiss border about 330 feet underground. Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN), it promises to push forward theories … Read more

The ever-shrinking record album--its latest iteration being the compact disc--just got a lot more compact, or shall we say, micro.

Backed by four major music labels, SanDisk on Monday announced a new physical music format dubbed "SlotMusic" that's essentially an entire album on a MicroSD compact memory card. Wal-Mart and Best Buy are among the retailers that have already signed on to start selling the cards for the upcoming holiday season.

With CD sales continuing to flounder, this latest effort to boost physical media sales is aimed at users of the millions of cell phones and MP3 … Read more

The world's largest particle collider has been shut down for at least two months due to a large helium leak stemming from an incident Friday, officials said.

The Large Hadron Collider is a gigantic particle accelerator located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel along the French-Swiss border about 330 feet underground. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.

The collider was officially launched on September 10 when the first particle beam was successfully sent around the full circuit. On the heels of an earlier malfunction due to a faulty transformer, CERN said … Read more

I am not an intelligent designer. Nor am I a resident of France or Switzerland.

But this Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which particles are breaking the speed limit somewhere beneath the French/Swiss border and then crashing into each other like teenage drunks in fairground bumper cars scares the semi-comatose bejaysus out of me.

These scientists claim to know what they are doing. But scientists always claim to know what they are doing. Then they discover, while doing the thing that they claim to know they are doing, that they are doing something entirely different.

Is any government monitoring … Read more

Correction, 11:00 a.m. PDT: This story incorrectly reported the size of the particle accelerator. It has a circumference of 17 miles.

Remember the fear that the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in 1945 might ignite the atmosphere? The Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator 17 miles in circumference that will begin operation Wednesday, comes with its own apocalyptic possibility: teensy black holes with gravitational appetites voracious enough to swallow the Earth.

But you can breathe easy, because some scientists believe that worry is just as baseless as the A-bomb's flaming atmosphere.

On Tuesday, the … Read more

Star Trek fans, you'd better sit down.

Because there are scientists out there, out there in Texas, to be precise, who believe that you will soon be able to propel yourselves at warp speed.

Alright, I'm not going to put a time frame on the 'soon'. Because, well, what is time anyway? Merely one dimension of our truly warped lives.

But here's the idea that Dr. Gerald Cleaver, Associate Professor of Physics at Baylor and his Associate Associate, Richard Obousy (I have not located a picture of this man, but he is reputed to have elongated ears) … Read more

A date has finally been announced for the switching on of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

The LHC is located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel that lies beneath the French-Swiss border. The first attempt to circulate a beam of particles around the tunnel will take place on September 10, according to a statement Thursday by the LHC's builders, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.

This event will follow a long commissioning process that has seen the structure cooled down to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-27 degrees … Read more

AMD will work with game giant Havok to tailor Havok's game technology to AMD processors, the companies said Thursday.

The plans call for optimizing game-physics effects utilizing AMD's multicore processors and graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Game physics brings the laws of physics--or physical-world simulation--to a game. For example, explosions may be modeled differently depending on the terrain.

Havok, which Intel acquired in September of last year, provides development tools and services used by digital-media creators. Havok's technology has been used in game titles such as BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, and has been used … Read more