What's New 16 Oct 09

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park    Friday, 15 Oct 09   Washington, DC

1.  THE HIGGS:  DOES NATURE (GOD?) ABHOR THE HIGGS BOSON?
On Tuesday, an essay by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times discussed a 
recent physics theory.  Depending on your convictions, it’s either the most 
terrifying scientific theory of all time, or the silliest (I vote for 
silliest). Holger Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and 
Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto 
Japan explain their theory in a series of papers in arXiv.org.  According 
to the authors, any machine attempting to create the Higgs boson will have 
big trouble.  Why?  God just doesn’t like the Higgs.  Because he’s God he 
doesn't have to explain why.   He has decided to run time backward and stop 
the Higgs from being produced. So he undid the SSC in Texas in the summer 
of 1992; he started on the LHC a year ago.  This is powerful stuff.  I'm 
looking into whether it could explain why trees fall when they do.  

2.  CERN:  DID FORCES FROM THE FUTURE SABOTAGE THE LHC.
The plot in Dan Brown's novel "Angels and Demons" is to use the collider to 
make an antimatter bomb to blow up the Vatican, but this week the French 
police arrested a nuclear physicist at CERN on suspicion that he had links 
to terrorist organizations in Algeria.  According to Dennis Overbye in the 
New York Times, the suspect is Adlene Hicheur, a French particle physicist 
born in Algeria, who was studying differences between matter and 
antimatter. As difficult as it is to make even a little antimatter, it 
would be far more difficult to use it in a bomb. The problem would not be 
to get it to explode, but to keep it from exploding prematurely.  Even al-
Qaeda is not that dumb.  Most likely Hicheur’s job was just to supply al-
Qaeda with targets in France.

3.  MOONSHINE: STILL LOOKING FOR THE ROCKET FUEL?   
Millions sat on the edge of our chairs to watch this once-in-a-lifetime 
spectacular. Over and over the TV audience was shown a simulation of a 
rocket plunging into a deep crater near the lunar South Pole and ejecting a 
mighty plume of rocket fuel.  Uh, there was actually supposed to be water 
in the plume, along with stuff, but NASA sort of blurs the 
distinction:  "If we have water it can be separated into hydrogen and 
oxygen."  But doesn’t that require a lot of energy? "Yes.  But there’s 
sunlight on the Moon, so we’ll put solar power plants up there. That will 
give us the fuel to get to Mars, and when we find water on Mars we’ll use 
that for the return flight."  Back to the present, we began holding our 
breath as the final seconds counted down to impact.  "Bull's-eye," NASA 
exulted!  We looked at each other. Had I blinked at the wrong time?  We are 
now told that, "The spectra is where the information is.  Determining 
whether there was water in the invisible plume will take weeks or months."  
I hardly can wait.

4.  PSYCHOLOGY:  IS IT READY TO LOSE ITS "SOFT-SCIENCE" LABEL?
In neural imaging, as well as molecular and behavioral genetics, progress 
in recent years could have turned psychology into a robust science.  But a 
recent study found that a high proportion of practitioners consider 
scientific evidence to be less important than their personal clinical 
experience. An editorial in yesterday's Nature found the field in danger of 
becoming as irrelevant as Freud.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
---
Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org
What's New is moving to a different listserver and our
subscription process has changed. To change your subscription
status please visit this link:
http://listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=bobparks-whatsnew&A=1