Today’s theme is cosmic puzzles. The technology that fires our imaginations here at RWW wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t understand fundamental physical laws.
But how well do we really understand them?
Joselle at Mathematics Rising wonders whether all the matter and energy in the universe really just boils down to abstraction. Are we living in a mathematical object?
How could that be? It might help if Edward Witten, “the most intelligent human alive,” explained String Theory to you.
In order to make sense of space itself, scientists have searched high and low for the Higgs boson.
Need a super-simple primer on what the Higgs boson is? Here’s a blog-style slideshow.
On a slightly bigger scale, dark matter is another theoretical placeholder in our model of the universe. Why is there so little of it in our solar system?
Meanwhile, cosmic rays pass through us all the time, but we don’t know where they come from.
The many weird experimental results this week suggest to Sean Carroll that the “big news might be creeping up on us.” It might frustrate the humans, but “the universe loves puzzles.”
