Periodic Table which includes common uses for each element.
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Daily Archives: October 14, 2009
Wackiness is not a Conserved Quantity
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Update: Good discussion of why this is crazy, but not crackpot, over at Cosmic Variance
Waiter, There's a Photonic Crystal Around My Soup
Hot soup in a thermos is surrounded by a vacuum between the inner and outer walls, which prevents heat from conducting directly through the sides, as it would if the walls were a one-piece solid. But the soup still loses heat by “glowing” in infrared light because the light radiated through the walls takes energy away with it.
Shanhui Fan of Stanford University in California and his colleagues wondered if photonic crystals–periodic structures famous for blocking narrow frequency ranges of light–could block the broad range of infrared frequencies radiated by a warm body.