From OpenTable to Amazon to your Netflix queue, algorithms sift through what we seem to like and offer future suggestions tailored to fit those trends. But the problem is they do this for everybody. So if everyone gets the same recommendations on OpenTable, everyone will try to reserve a table, and there won't be any seats left. What's more, if everyone gets a movie recommendation and everyone decides to watch it, the movie gets more popular - creating biases in the system. To improve matters, some researchers in Switzerland took a cue from the master rules of physics.
On July 4, 2020, a panel of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced the discovery of a new particle, the long-anticipated Higgs boson (or something very much like it). The Higgs is the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that accounts for everything we experience in our lives, from rocks to puppies to stars and planets. After decades of searching and billions of dollars, the Higgs discovery marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, which scientists will embark upon in 2013.
It took the Large Hadron Collider just three years to find the Higgs boson - but it took nearly 20 years to create the Large Hadron Collider. High energy physics happens at the speed of light, but the underlying practicalities move at the speed of bureaucracy, funding requests, and setting concrete. So to keep things moving forward, the global physics community is constantly envisioning and re-envisioning the next big things in high energy particle physics - things big enough to dwarf even the largest and most expensive science experiment mankind has ever created.
We first became aware of Kate Findlay's work thanks to Symmetry Magazine, which publishes articles relating to particle physics. Kate isn't a particle physicist; in fact, she's not even a scientist. She works as an art teacher at a private elementary school in the UK, and also makes these amazing quilts. Symmetry's interest (and ours, and yours, we think) comes from her inspiration for one particular line of quilts: the hardware of the Large Hadron Collider. We've put together a little Q&A with her which you can read after the jump.
Not content with just stirring the pot in particle physics, CERN has embarked on an experiment aimed at addressing whether or not comic rays from deep space might be seeding clouds in Earth's atmosphere, influencing climate change. The early findings are far from deciding the issue of whether climate change is man made or otherwise, but they have borne some interesting results. It turns out that cosmic rays could be influencing temperatures on Earth. Perhaps even more groundbreaking, it turns out they also might not. Welcome to climate science.
