Today’s stories range from How the Higgs Boson Ruined Peter Higgs’s Life to Rogue Black Holes Might be Neither ‘Rogue’ Nor ‘Black Holes’ to The Mysterious Essence of the Fourth Dimension, and much more. The Galaxy Report brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene Epoch.
Today’s stories from our Pale Blue Dot range from A Periodic Table of All Animal Intelligence to How a Moon-Sized Deep Impact Affected Early Life on Earth, and much more. The 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.
“The Standard Model as it stands cannot possibly be right because it cannot predict why the universe exists,” said Gerald Gabrielse, the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics at Northwestern University. The Standard Model describes the seventeen known fundamental particles and their interactions, and provides us with a detailed set of predictions for how each of them should behave and interact. The model is a mathematical picture of reality, and no laboratory experiments yet performed have contradicted it. “We should be very careful about making assumptions that we’re getting closer to solving the mystery, but I do have considerable hope that we’re getting closer at this level of precision,” Gabrielse added.
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“They say great discoveries often start with someone saying “Huh, that’s weird,” observes Tyce DeYoung, a member of the IceCube and HAWC collaborations, two large international groups of physicists who are building and operating experiments to detect the highest energy particles in the Universe in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “But unfortunately, most of the time we say “That’s weird” it really is just some everyday weirdness, not a great discovery.”
“When antimatter and matter meet, they annihilate, and the result is light and nothing else. Given equal amounts of matter and antimatter, nothing would remain once the reaction was completed. As long as we don’t know why more matter exists than antimatter, we can’t know why the building blocks of anything else exist, either. This is one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics,” says quantum physicist Jens Oluf Andersen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”