Time Mag: Big obscure news from Fermilab and weird physics – a primer on why to bother
Time Magazine‘s Michael D. Lemonick took some time on a pure physics story this week, and it was worth it.
Earlier this week ( post) we tracked a few outlets’ take on news from the Tevatron machine’s operators at Fermilab near Chicago. They have results implying why it is that the universe has so much matter and not much anti-matter (or no matter at all). Some readers will devour this, most will avoid it as incomprehensible, and a few may decides it’s a waste of time to do or care about such arcana as this.
So Lemonick warms up his audience by getting it into a reflective, philosophical, perhaps even intellectual mood. He then goes through the observations by Fermilab’s DZero team and their tiny destruction derbies. He gets in a small dig at the NYTimes’s and Dennis Overbye’s overinflated but harmless description of this work (attributed to a source, to be true) as revealing why we exist at all – it’s true, but it is not THE reason but one of many.
At the end, Lemonick returns to his effort to warm up his readership first – and concedes that there are some people for whom this is futile, who will persist in having a tin, or even deaf, ear for the music of the cosmos.
More on the Matter-Anti-Matter News:
- Science News – Ron Cowen: Matter beats out antimatter in experimental echo of creation ; Cowen even includes a link to the raw papers announcing the results, put down there in Grist. This is a serious, straight-on explainer of the research and the issue’s place in the history of physics.
Grist for the Mill: arXiv paper on “dimuon charge asymmetry.”
May 21st, 2010 at 2:38 am
So, a bit like reading a popular science magazine article? Not as much editorial fluff though. I recently went over the threshold point and stopped my subscription to New Scientist, now dwelling in the realm of scientific journals (and not understanding much). And on the topic of Tevatron, a whole lot cheaper and way more productive than LHC. I bet it’s going to be a small particle accelerator that will discover the god particle.
May 21st, 2010 at 10:18 pm
A bit like reading a popular science magazine article? Not as much editorial fluff though. I recently went over the threshold point and stopped my subscription to New Scientist, now dwelling in the realm of scientific journals (and not understanding much). And on the topic of Tevatron, a whole lot cheaper and way more productive than LHC. I bet it’s going to be a small particle accelerator that will discover the god particle.