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Saturday, December 21, 2013

"Higgs Boson" Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Physics

We are a bit late on this, but James Morgan at BBC News has the story at Higgs boson scientists win Nobel prize in physics, where the following explanation is given for what a Higgs boson is in the context of the "mass" of particles:
"Scientists' best theory for why different things have mass is the "Higgs field" - where mass can be seen as a measure of the resistance to movement. The "Higgs field" is shown here as a room of physicists chatting among themselves.

A well-known scientist walks into the room and causes a bit of a stir - attracting admirers with each step and interacting strongly with them - signing autographs and stopping to chat.

As she becomes surrounded by admiring fans, she finds it harder to move across the room - in this analogy, she acquires mass due to the "field" of fans, with each fan acting like a single Higgs boson.

If a less popular scientist enters the room, only a small crowd gathers, with no-one clamouring for attention. He finds it easier to move across the room - by analogy, his interaction with the bosons is lower, and so he has a lower mass."
So that's the new standard model of the universe, allegedly, in modern theoretical physics, without gravity of course, which turns out to be a bother.

If gravity were added, we suspect the floor under the scientists in the above model would collapse at some point of idolizing boson accumulation and then what would we have?

The Guardian wrote more recently in The Higgs boson does a new trick (probably):
"In the Standard Model of physics, the fundamental building blocks of nature are quarks (which live inside hadrons) and leptons (such as the electron, and its heavier siblings, the muon and the tau). These building blocks interact with each other via fundamental forces carried by bosons - the photon carries electromagnetism, the W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, and the gluon carries the strong force.

All those particles (except the photon and the gluon, which are massless) acquire their mass by interacting with the Higgs boson, the discovery of which was announced last year on the fourth of July."
We always wonder where those "fundamental forces" that are taken as givens come from, or where the boson gets its "interactive" power, but this does not appear to bother the physicists. The main thing is that the current math formulas work and they get enough "bumps" in the hadron colliders.

Somehow, we think these epicyclic-type theoretical models do not yet really explain the "real" universe. Give it another few thousand years, at least.


Sky Earth Native America

Sky Earth Native America 1 :
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2 :
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America,
    e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy
    comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving
    and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens,
    "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically
    in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."

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