Suicidal mice

Evolution by natural selection says that those characteristics that enable organisms to survive and reproduce more than others will tend to end up dominating the population. In that model, organisms seek to propagate their genes as much as possible. Suicide as a biological instinct is clearly not advantageous and should be selected against and disappear over time. So what are we to make of some mice that seem to commit suicide by actually running towards cats and being killed and eaten by them? [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 20: Concluding thoughts (and bibliography)

It is time to wrap up what turned out to be a much longer series of posts on the Higgs than I anticipated when I started it, probably with a lot more information than readers wanted to know! (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)

The story of the detection of the Higgs is a prime example of what Thomas Kuhn described as ‘normal science’ in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He said that most of the time, scientists are not seeking novelty but instead are carefully looking for things in which almost everything is known and anticipated, except for a few minor details. In the case of the Higgs, experimenters knew almost everything about it except its mass, and even then we had some idea of the possible range of values. It should not be surprising that the final confirmation comes as somewhat of an anti-climax. [Read more…]

What our ancestors may have looked like

The so-called ‘Cambrian explosion’ that occurred 500-600 million years ago saw the appearance in the fossil record of an extraordinarily wide diversity of life forms. Whether there was a sudden flurry of evolutionary advances at the time or whether that time marked the beginning of animal bodies that were fossilizable and so gave the illusion of an explosion of life forms is not clear. The suspicions are that it was the latter. [Read more…]

Stumping the stumpers

Recently someone told me that a friend of his was a science teacher in the American south who was teaching his students about anatomy and said that apart from a few small differences, the form of male and female skeletons were identical. He was nonplussed when a student said that that was not quite correct since men had one less rib! He of course knew where this weird belief came from but did not know how to reply and so quickly moved on. He later sought and obtained a teaching position in Ohio just to avoid having ot teach students who were so burdened with incorrect biblical knowledge. [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 19: Nobel dilemmas

As soon as the discovery of the Higgs was announced in July 2012, there was immediate talk of who would get the seemingly inevitable Nobel prize for it, with some anticipating that it would be awarded even as soon as the same year. This did not happen and I personally did not expect it. For one thing, the Nobel committee is cautious and usually wants to wait until a discovery is totally nailed down before they honor it. Since the LHC has been shut down for a couple of years for upgrades, the corroborating evidence could take some time in coming, although further analysis of the data already taken indicates that the spin of the particle matches that expected of the Higgs. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 18: What else is the Higgs good for?

So now that the Higgs has supposedly been discovered and an important prediction of the Standard Model confirmed, what’s next? Is it of any use or is it just going to sit on the particle physics shelf as a trophy to the success of big science? This is hard to answer now and may become easier as the properties of the Higgs are studied in more detail. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 17: Other design challenges of the LHC

Magnetism is weird but in a fun way. Who as a child has not played with magnets and wondered how they worked? And for many a scientist it was what first attracted them to their field. Magnets are our first introduction to the idea of invisible forces that seem to permeate all space and can act to move objects without being in contact with them. Gravity is also such a force but it is too ubiquitous and outside our control for us to notice its peculiarity. We grow up so used to the idea that released objects fall to the ground that we do not give a second thought as to why they behave that way. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]