PFE031: Thunderstorms

Thunderstorms are awesome am I right?

Lightning! Thunder! Rain [sometimes]! Pretty. Loud. Pretty LOUD!

So why am I looking to muck pretty awesome things up with numbers? Because, I don't know, it's you who's reading this, it's probably more of your fault anyways [see above image].

Right, so we're going to review a common and fairly well known trick: the five second rule.

Not that one, the one about lightning and thunder.

Lightning and thunder happen at basically the same time... at the location of the lightning. So if you get hit by lightning you'll see the flash and hear the thunder at the same time [or you won't because your brain will be rather well-done, I don't know]. But as you move away from the lightning [generally a good idea] everyone knows that the thunder slides away from the lightning too... in time. That is, you see a flash and then... BOOM.

Let's science this up now. Light goes fast. I mean, really fast. Count one second: "one one thousand". Light from the earth is basically to the moon in that time. So we can pretend that light's instantaneous for any distances on earth that we are ever going to care about.

Sound, on the other hand, is comparatively pokey. Since sound travels through something [air in this case] it is a little bit dependent on the properties of that material, but at 50F [a reasonable temperature for a thunderstorm I figured] sound travels at about 1107 feet per second. How fast is that? Well, let's see, it's certainly faster than I can run [thank goodness! Otherwise there would be sonic booms all the time]. If we then convert that into seconds per miles [which might seem like a weird unit unless you're a runner] we get about 4.77 seconds per mile - it takes sound just under five seconds to travel a mile.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

So apparently sound travels faster when there's more humidity in the air. This is actually a little bit complicated, but a simple model gives about a half a percent increase. This brings our timing down to an even shorter 4.75 seconds per mile. Whatever.

This gives us our standard five second rule [unlike the food one above, this one is rooted in SCIENCE, YEAAA!!!]. Start counting time as soon as you see lightning and stop as soon as you hear the corresponding thunder [if the storm is too active it can be tough to tell which boom corresponds with which flash - you're on your own in these cases]. Take the number of seconds and divide by five [then round up a teensy bit if you want to be more accurate] and that will tell you how far away the lightning is. If you counted 8 seconds you're looking at ~1.6 miles away. Is it just that easy? It's just that easy.

But... who cares how far away it is? What we really care about is

Shh. I'm counting between the lightning and the thunder to see if the storm is coming or going.

whether the storm is coming, leaving, or passing us by. If we repeat the above process, we can get the distance to the strongest part of the storm over a period of time. If the distances are shrinking head for cover. Of course, you can also probably tell if the lightning is getting brighter and the thunder is getting louder and if it starts pouring on your poor unprotected head - but this way is way more fun.

That's thunderstorms.

PFE030: The Higgs Mechanism Part 3 - The Discovery

The LHC is a pretty awesome machine. It took ten years to build the final component and uses five smaller accelerators to seed it. It is essentially the largest and most complex thing humans have ever built and the largest computing grid we've ever put together is employed to process the largest amount of data ever generated. It's also the largest refrigerator [okay, cryogenic facility but it's more fun to think about how much beer/potato salad would fit inside than super conducting magnets]. It also has reached the highest energy and luminosity in any man-made device ever. Whatever.

Kegs too.

I reiterate these things to emphasize how awesome of a machine it must be and how hard it must be to find whatever it's looking for.

While the Higgs field is everywhere and interacting with most things, it's hard to directly observe it. Luckily it has a side business creating additional particles, the Higgs boson. We can create, observe, measure, and quantify these particles - all those tasty things us physicists like doing. Unfortunately, it's not very good at making them. Lots of other boring particles [the kind of stuff we're made of and a zoo of other yawny stuff] are far easier to make. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack of haystacks [okay it's nothing like that because you or I could eventually suss out the needle and I have no idea how to even turn on an LHC - but it's really really hard].

Luckily, there are piles of physicists sorting out exactly how big the haystack is supposed to be. If it looks even teeny weeny bit [that's a technical term - move along] bigger than it's supposed to, then ta-da! We've got... something!

Just 365 short days ago [really they were all pretty average length days] on July 4, 2012 - it was announced that they had found something. It was definitely a boson, probably spin zero [remember that the Higgs is the only spin zero particle so far], and was consistent with the expected properties of the Higgs boson.

Put out the flag, grill some hot dogs, and call it a day, right?

If you look very closely you can see the SSC - the experiment that would have made this discovery an American one instead of a European one.

It's not done. We're not satisfied that easily. See, the predictions for this particle aren't just that they're a pain to make, but super specific. It should be this tall, this fast, this smart - it should have have these friends and hate those people. So on and so forth. But there are a bunch of crazy people who make things up [cough cough like me] who suspect it could be very slightly different. And to rule them out, or confirm their theories, they need measurements far more accurate than the general properties determined so far. Lot's more to do!

That's how you find a Higgs!

Spoiler alert: next week is both practical and not about particle physics!

PS - that isn't quite the end of the story. It appears that things could be rather more complicated than previously expected as indicated in my signoff. There may already be evidence of a second Higgs - don't go telling your friends or anything yet - but this is a key component of many popular theories whatever that means.