I just took these photos of Venus and Jupiter from my apartment window. I couldn't believe how clear the sky was given that I live close to the centre of Dublin. Venus is slightly higher and on the right hand side. They will be this close for a few more days and then not again until June 2015.
Amazing.
In complete disagreement with my last post, it turns out that scientists at CERN might have actually found the Higgs boson. Separate experiments have independently confirmed the existence of something 'Higgs-like' at about 124-126 GeV:
Gianotti and Tonelli led two separate teams – one using Cern's Atlas detector, the other using the laboratory's Compact Muon Solenoid. At their seminar yesterday one team reported a 2.3 sigma bump in their data that could be a Higgs boson weighing 126GeV, while the other reported a 1.9 sigma Higgs signal at a mass of around 124GeV. There is a 1% chance that the Atlas result could be due to a random fluctuation in the data.
The search for the Higgs boson has apparently entered the 'endgame'. As I mentioned a few months ago, the mass/energy ranges in which Higgs was expected to be found have all but been ruled out. Since then, as this article in the latest edition of Nature explains, the searches in lower and higher mass ranges have been unsuccessful. The last remaining possibility is that the Higgs is lurking somehwere between 114–141 GeV.
The answer to the Higgs question lies in the data now being crunched at CERN and other academic-computing centres around the world. The first 70 trillion or so collisions turned up intriguing Higgs-like decays in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, hinting at a particle of around 140 GeV (see Nature 475, 434; 2011). But the second batch of collisions showed nothing. If the collisions now being analysed show further evidence of Higgs decays, then the teams on the two experiments are likely to announce that they have found a tentative signal, to be firmed up in 2012. If not, the search will probably continue until the LHC is shut down for an upgrade at the end of next year.
I've been reading a bit about magic squares. That is, a square consisting of an arrangement of numbers, such that the numbers in all rows, all columns, and both diagonals sum to the same constant.
Probably the most impressive of these has to be Durer's Square, which is shown below:
