The physics of mass, charge and media spin

The Higgs boson should not be called "the God particle," says Marc Merlin, director of Atlanta Science Tavern. "A better name for it might be 'the peace particle.' It's really a testament to international cooperation that transcends politics." Image: CERN.

By Carol Clark

It’s too early to know for sure whether a newly discovered subatomic particle is the long sought-after Higgs boson, but one thing is clear: A lot of people outside of particle physics are interested.

CERN, a multinational research center in Geneva, generated worldwide buzz July 4 by announcing its Large Hadron Collider had produced data showing the existence of a “Higgs-like” particle.

“People are fascinated by the big questions of the universe,” says Marc Merlin, director of Atlanta Science Tavern, an informal group of science enthusiasts.

The Large Hadron Collider, a 38,000-ton underground device that accelerates and collides protons, is “like a time machine,” Merlin says. “Not only can it tell you the nature of the microscopic world now, it also reveals the universe as it was when it was just getting started,” a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

Merlin graduated from Emory with a degree in physics. After going on to earn a masters in the subject at the University of Pennsylvania, he became a computer programmer, but remains passionate about physics.

Amid growing hints that CERN was closing in on the elusive particle, Merlin gave an Atlanta Science Tavern talk on the Higgs boson in May that filled a private room at Java Vino coffee shop. An encore of the talk was scheduled in June for a much larger room at Manuel’s Tavern, and the waiting list quickly grew to 140. That led to scheduling a third Higgs boson talk, for Saturday, July 21.

The Higgs boson explains only part of the mass of a proton, which also involves the action of quarks and gluons. Image: Fermilab.

“Maybe the third one will be the charm,” Merlin says. He readily admits that he is not an expert in particle physics. “I’ve got a big challenge, because I’m going to have to go over all the information from the CERN news conference and update my presentation.” Merlin has already posted "Checking the Higgs Arithmetic" on his blog.

The Higgs boson is the last missing particle from the Standard Model of physics. According to the model, the Higgs boson plays a role in giving mass to everything. “That’s incredibly fundamental,” says Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz. “It’s part of the story of how protons, neutrons and quarks came together and made us.”

Whether the particle is the Higgs boson, or something entirely new and unexpected, the find is momentous, Merlin agrees. “It’s one of the most important discoveries for physics in the past 50 years.”

Neither Perkowitz or Merlin, however, believes that the Higgs boson deserves the title “key to the universe,” as many headlines have proclaimed.

“That’s a bit of hype,” Perkowitz says.

The Higgs boson completes the picture of the Standard Model, but the Standard Model is far from comprehensive, lacking explanations for gravity, dark matter and dark energy, Merlin notes. He’s especially irked by the Higgs boson nickname “the God particle.”

Marc Merlin sees CERN as a kind of sandbox for learning international cooperation on a mammoth scale. Image: CERN.

“It’s misleading, and it sounds too mysterious,” he says. “I’m committed to the demystification of the Higgs boson. A better name for it might be ‘the peace particle.’ It’s really a testament to international cooperation over several generations to develop knowledge that transcends politics.”

Ironically, it was the atomic bombs of World War II that brought big science to the fore in ways it never had been before, Merlin says. CERN formed shortly after the war ended. “Since the 1950s, we’ve had these trans-national collaborations slowly but surely developing theories and models and experiments for particle physics. More than 100 nations are involved with CERN, and that’s a remarkable thing in a world fraught with divisions of religion, ethnicity and politics.”

The benefit of such cooperation extends far beyond particle physics, Merlin says.

“One of the triumphs of the search for the Higgs boson is an international computer grid, involving physicist programmers from all over the world, who have come together to do the number crunching involved,” he says.

Merlin thinks of CERN as a kind of sandbox for learning international cooperation on a mammoth scale. “It shows what we can do when we put our hearts and minds together, and it could serve as a prototype for addressing the dislocations that are going to occur with global warming.”

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Is a dog your baby's new best friend?

Daniel DeNoon writes about a new study involving pets and babies for WebMD Health News. An excerpt:

"Babies in homes with dogs have fewer colds, fewer ear infections, and need fewer antibiotics in their first year of life than babies raised in pet-free homes, Finnish researchers find. Homes with cats are healthier for babies, too, but not to the same extent as those with dogs, note researchers Eija Bergroth, MD, of Finland's Kuopio University Hospital, and colleagues.

"'The strongest effect was seen with dog contacts. We do not know why it was stronger than with cat contacts,' Bergroth tells WebMD. 'It might have something to do with dirt brought inside by the dogs, especially since the strongest protective effect was seen with children living in houses where dogs spent a lot of time outside.'...

"A time-honored theory, the hygiene hypothesis, suggests that children's immune systems mature best when infants are exposed to germs in just the right amount. Too many germs are unhealthy, but so is a sterile, germ-free home.

"That theory is now giving way to the 'microbiome hypothesis,' says Karen DeMuth, assistant professor of pediatrics at Atlanta's Emory University.

"'The microbiome hypothesis is that early-life exposure to wide varieties of microbes lets them mix with the microbes in the gut and helps them keep the immune system from reacting against itself and causing autoimmune disease, or from reacting against stuff you should ignore and causing allergy,' she says."

Read the whole article in WebMD Health News.

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Image: iStockphoto.com

The math of 'The Amazing Spider-Man'

Spider silk, the protein fiber spun by spiders, has the tensile strength of high-grade steel. But how much spider silk would you need to stop a train?

In the above video, Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi considers this question and others raised by “The Amazing Spider-Man,” the latest in the series of films inspired by the beloved Marvel Comic super hero.

And if you decide to build your own web shooter, click on the sketch, above, that was released to promote the film.

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The ethics surrounding placebo effects

Karen Rommelfanger, assistant director of the neuroethics program at the Emory Center for Ethics, wrote about the placebo effect in the Huffington Post. An excerpt:

“Placebos are generally inert substances, like sugar pills, thought to relieve patient symptoms through an expectation of getting better. It seems that, in some reported cases, simply the act of taking medicine or believing that medicine might work can impact patient outcomes. Because of this, placebo effects have historically been discounted as effects that aren't medically ‘real.’

“But what if placebos and their effects were not as ‘inert’ as we once thought, that they might really provide therapeutic benefit? This raises a new ethical question: Are we harming patients by withholding treatments like placebo therapy that might actually help them? …

“Indeed, while placebos are generally defined as having no inherent effectiveness in physically curing illnesses, a growing body of neuroscientific evidence challenges this assumption. Accumulating data suggest that placebos have measurable effects on the brain as well as objective (physicians can measure improvement in patients) and subjective (patients report feeling better) benefits for patients. …

“Some have called placebo effects ‘the endogenous (or your body's own) healthcare system.’”

Read the whole article in the Huffington Post.

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Image: iStockPhoto.com 
 

Now we're cooking: Ovens for a hot, crowded world

The recent record hot day in Atlanta, 106 degrees, inspired an Emory staffer to bake chocolate chip cookies on his dashboard. Photo by Stephen Beehler.

As a heat wave bakes the eastern United States, nearly 2.4 million people who are accustomed to pressing a button to alter the air around them have been left without power. It’s a good time to think about all the people who live their whole lives without modern-day appliances, and how the burgeoning human population, climate change and declining resources are converging into a recipe for disaster.

Every branch of science will be needed to solve this simmering stew of problems, says Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz. For a recent issue of Physics World, he writes about the history of stoves and ovens, and how physics is tackling some of the environmental and resource usage issues associated with cooking.

“Despite the rapid development of cooking technology and its gastronomic application since 1800,” Perkowitz writes, “two to three billion people worldwide, mostly in developing countries, still eat food prepared by the ancient method of cooking over open fires or in rudimentary stoves fed by solid fuel – wood, agricultural residue, animal dung and sometimes coal.

“Cooking over open fires or on primitive stoves presents a series of costs. Most sobering is the health cost, in the form of some two million annual deaths caused by respiratory illnesses arising from indoor smoke. Our climate also suffers, with these cooking methods increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by about 3 percent per year and producing black carbon (a main component of soot) and other emissions caused by inefficient burning. Also, the heavy consumption of biomass at up to two tons per family per year, often in a non-sustainable form, leads to deforestation.”

Perkowitz describes several stove designs aimed at helping solve the global cooking issue:

The rocket stove is a simple device based on convective flow of heated air.

The Oorja stove, developed for Indian households by First Energy and the Indian Institute of Science, uses a combustion process, powered by rechargeable batteries, to lower fuel use and emissions.

The Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity (SCORE), developed at the University of Nottingham in the UK, actually uses sound waves to generate electricity along with heat for cooking.

It remains to be seen if these designs will prove successful in the developing world, where many people struggle to afford food, much less something to cook it on.

Meanwhile, if you're an American planning to cook out this 4th of July, you may want to consider using the dashboard of your SUV.

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Bottom photo: iStockphoto.com.