The detection of the “Higgs” in 2012 -described by Caltech physicist Sean Carroll as “the particle at the end of the universe” –was the physics equivalent of the discovery of DNA. Higgs bosons have the capacity to share space because they are more like a force than a thing in the way we normally think of “things” or “particles”. It’s a vibration in the Higgs field, just as a photon of light is a vibration in the electromagnetic field. Bosons are entities that have effects; they carry the forces (strong, weak, gravitational or electromagnetic) described by the Standard Model in physics, making them what physicists call force-carrying particles.
“Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe,” wrote science-fiction author Robert Coover, “outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close…these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order.”
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
“We were all getting together and asking: what does this thing mean?” says radio astronomer Michael Johnson at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative about the glowing bright orange ring around the now iconic black hole the size of our solar system at the center of the monster elliptical galaxy M87 –the largest, most massive galaxy in the nearby universe–described by astronomers on April 10, 2019 as “paradoxical, intriguing, frightening” and “the end of spacetime.”
In the fall of 1967, Princeton’s great quantum physicist, John Archibald Wheeler was giving a lecture on pulsars at a conference where he was arguing that we should consider the possibility that the center of a pulsar is a gravitationally completely collapsed object. He remarked that one couldn’t keep saying “gravitationally completely collapsed object” over and over. That we needed a shorter descriptive phrase. “How about black hole?” asked someone in the audience, giving birth to the name of one of the most paradoxical objects in the universe.
