Golf Ball 70,000fps 150mph. 

selfish paradox

If you were to call me selfish, for not doing what you wish me to do.. it’s makes you also selfish.

What you see is a myosin protein dragging an endorphin along a filament to the inner part of the brain’s parietal cortex which creates happiness. Happiness. You’re looking at happiness.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking

A good way to get an idea of what this is like is through water. Water has four different forms it could take depending on the conditions; frost, snow, ice and rime. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is sort of like this.

At the start of the big bang there was a single force which started off hot and as it expanded began to cool and in 1x10-46s (supposed to be scientific notation) gravity came into existence.

Now there is gravity and the force energy of the universe. This force energy then split into the strong nuclear force (SNF) at about 1x10-36s.

Then shorty after the massive inflation at 1x10-22s (where the universe expanded from about the size of a proton to that of a orange), the weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force (or electroweak force as we now know that they are the same) came into existence at the same time at 1x10-12s.

So from one force, in 1x10-12s all the different forces have fallen out.

In about 1x10-6 quark confinement would happen, from 3-20 minutes the nuclei would begin to form, there is still too much energy for the electrons to be bound to the nuclei. Atoms would not form for about 380,000 years.

Well this has been a brief and simple intro to spontaneous symmetry breaking, hope you guys liked it. 

5 things you didn’t know about...aluminium

Credit: beejung / Shutterstock

1. Despite being the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, aluminium is a young metal, discovered less than 200 years ago. It is now the second most used metal in the world, after iron.

2. Aluminium was named after alum, derived from the latin Alumenen, meaning ‘a bitter salt’, by Sir Humphry Davy. In 1808, Davy suggested Aluminium could be produced by electrolytic reduction from alumina (aluminium oxide), but did not manage to prove the theory in practice.

3. The first person to produce small amount of aluminium was Danish chemist Hans Christian Oersted, on 8 April 1825. However, this may not have been pure aluminium, but an alloy with the elements used in the experiments in the process of isolating the aluminium.

4. The first aluminium products are considered to be medals made during Napoléon III’s reign. Friedrich Woehler, a German chemist who improved Oersted’s isolation process, designed a rattle for Crown Prince Louis Napoléon made of aluminium and gold.

5. Aluminium is 100% recyclable. It is estimated that 75% of all aluminium ever produced, about 750 million tonnes, is still in use, and could all be recycled into new products.

Find out more about this on page 62 of the upcoming March issue of Materials World.  

Hehe 😀

Higgs Boson

On the 4th of July 2012, ATLAS and CMS experiments both reported a particle with a mass of around 126GeV at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The particle is consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model.

The Higgs boson creates a Higgs field which theoretically exists everywhere in the universe and interacts with subatomic fundamental particles like quarks and leptons to give them mass. How much mass a particle has depends on how much interaction is has with the field, all particles are equal before they enter the Higgs field, it is the Higgs field that gives the particles mass depending on their interactions with it.

In the Standard Model, the higgs field is a scalar tachyonic field ( “scalar” meaning that it doesn’t transform under Lorentz transformations and “tachyonic” referring to the field as a whole having imaginary, or complex, mass). While tachyons are purely theoretical particles that move faster than the speed of light, fields with imaginary mass have an important role in modern physics.

1938 Morgan F-Trike

@garretvoight

Helix Nebula

Images: NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO).