Gravitational Attraction
What would happen if two people out in space a few meters apart, abandoned by their spacecraft, decided to wait until gravity pulled them together? My initial thought was that …
Nobel Prize - The "Higgs" and Predictions
So around 50 years ago a number of scientists made a prediction for an unseen particle (typically referred to as the 'Higgs boson' but also sometimes as the 'God particle' - a silly name if I ever heard one) which, if it existed, [helped to fill in an explanation of the fundamental laws of the universe][]. It took 50 years, thousands of people, and millions of dollars to directly confirm this prediction butit was done last year...and thus is deserving of a Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Prize can only be give to at most three scientists, so the letter-of-the-law committee omitted three other scientists who also contributed to this prediction. I had the fortune to take high energy physics with one of these, Prof Gerry Guralnik, at Brown University.
To think that we, as a species, are able to predict something so subtle in the universe, decades before our ability to actually confirm it, is truly astounding. In times like this I have a feeling of optimism for our species, an awe for the amazing structure in the universe that we have uncovered, and an excitement for the things that we have yet to discover.
