physical

The Large Hadron Collider is about to enter its longest continuous operational period, in preparation for full-strength particle-smashing.

On Wednesday, Steve Myers, the LHC's director for accelerators and technology, blogged that CERN had decided last week to run the giant particle collider for 18 to 24 months at a collision energy of seven tera-electron-volts (TeV)--or 3.5 TeV per beam--with the powering-up phase starting later this month.

After that, the LHC will "go into a long shutdown in which we'll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC's design collision energy … Read more

Blimp: The Flying Adventures is a blimp-piloting arcade game that has polished production values and gameplay similarities to both taxi and classic thrust-and-land games. Its interface makes great use of the iPhone and iPod Touch: you tilt your device left and right to control your blimp's pitch, and you tap a touch-screen button (again and again) with your right thumb for thrust. After the first few levels, you can also drop a limited supply of bombs with a left-thumb button.

In the game's sci-fi story, you play Captain Zed Pelin working for a merchant company on the planet … Read more

The world's largest particle accelerator has performed its first collisions, and its first beam acceleration.

Progress on the giant experiment has been rapid in the four days since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was restarted, CERN director of communications James Gillies told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

"These collisions are the first in the LHC at all," said Gillies. "We've been going into new territory. It's been going quite remarkably fast."

Gillies told ZDNet UK that not only had scientists recorded the first collisions of protons on Monday, but that overnight one of the … Read more

Crayon Physics Deluxe Demo has a lot of surprises for a simple art game. We were impressed by its addictive play, and we think kids will fall in love with it, too.

The program's interface was stunningly beautiful and easy to navigate. It's primarily set up for a child or a child and parent, so the onscreen directions were appropriate. There's no Help file, but the program's intuitive design was easy to understand. The crayon-on-paper game centers on rolling a ball so that it meets up with a star. Each "island" contains several levels … Read more

I am all for discovering the Meaning of Life. And though I was once concerned that you could never trust scientists enough to find it, many wise people persuaded me that we should still try.

However, I am concerned with the news reported by the Guardian that a hungry bird has halted testing on the Large Hadron Collider.

The Collider, positioned on the increasingly sensitive border between France and Switzerland, has been quiet for more than a year after electrical faults and helium leaks.

It is now being tested to prepare it for action and reaction. However, a de-beaked piece … Read more

Every now and again we encounter highly specialized software that offers unusual value. RRR's Data Master 2003 is such a program. It's a comprehensive scientific and technical graphics package for the automization of testing, measuring, and data-acquisition systems. Its data visualization tools include a graphics editor, a plot digitizer, a base line subtractor, and various numeric and symbolic calculators. Data Master does more than acquire and visualize data, though. It will also analyze data, including linear and nonlinear NLSF (Levenberg-Marquardt) regression analysis. It's completely programmable, too, from a customizable user interface to the capability to add new … Read more

A 32-year-old nuclear physicist, part of the Large Hadron Collider project on the Swiss-French border, has been arrested by French police on suspicion of involvement with al-Qaeda.

According to The Independent, the arrest was made after anti-terrorist police had followed his movements for more than a year. Le Figaro newspaper suggested that the man's name had originally come to light in connection with the "Afghan network" of terrorist groups based in Europe.

Of Algerian origin, he was arrested together with his brother, who was not working on the Collider.

Sources told The Independent that the scientist was … Read more

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for "two revolutionary optical technologies."

Charles K. Kao, who discovered how to transmit light through fiber optics, and the team of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who designed the first digital-imaging sensor, split the Nobel Prize, announced by the Nobel Foundation on Tuesday.

Born in Shanghai, Charles K. Kao made a discovery in 1966 that would lead to today's fiber optics. A man ahead of this time, Kao calculated how it would be possible to transmit light over 100 kilometers (62 miles), compared to only 20 … Read more

The world's largest particle accelerator is on course for a November restart. Six out of eight superconducting sectors are down to working cryogenic temperatures, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

James Gillies, head of communications for CERN, told ZDNet UK on Monday that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would probably be ready to collide beams of particles by mid-November.

"Things are going well," said Gillies. "We hesitate to say 'hurray' just yet, but things are going smoothly."

Gillies said CERN plans to restart the giant experiment in incremental stages.

Read more of … Read more