The Higgs Boson

     When you get on the scale in the morning, you may be hoping that it registers a smaller number than the day before -- you may be hoping that you've lost weight. It's the quantity of mass in you, plus the force of gravity, that determines your weight. But what determines your mass?
     That's one of the most-asked, most-hotly pursued questions in physics today. Many of the experiments circulating in the world's particle accelerators are looking into the mechanism that gives rise to mass. Scientists at CERN, as well as at Fermilab in Illinois, are hoping to find what they call the "Higgs boson." Higgs, they believe, is a particle, or set of particles, that might give others mass.
     The idea of one particle giving another mass is a bit counter-intuitive... Isn't mass an inherent characteristic of matter? If not, how can one entity impart mass on all the others by simply floating by and interacting with them?
     An oft-cited analogy describes it well: Imagine you're at a Hollywood party. The crowd is rather thick, and evenly distributed around the room, chatting. When the big star arrives, the people nearest the door gather around her. As she moves through the party, she attracts the people closest to her, and those she moves away from return to their other conversations. By gathering a fawning cluster of people around her, she's gained momentum, an indication of mass. She's harder to slow down than she would be without the crowd. Once she's stopped, it's harder to get her going again.
     This clustering effect is the Higgs mechanism, postulated by British physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s. The theory hypothesizes that a sort of lattice, referred to as the Higgs field, fills the universe. This is something like an electromagnetic field, in that it affects the particles that move through it, but it is also related to the physics of solid materials. Scientists know that when an electron passes through a positively charged crystal lattice of atoms (a solid), the electron's mass can increase as much as 40 times. The same might be true in the Higgs field: a particle moving through it creates a little bit of distortion -- like the crowd around the star at the party -- and that lends mass to the particle.

Read more: http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/higgs.html

Buddhism And The Family

Marriage and family relationships. Buddhism is not a family-centered religion. For a variety of reasons, it does not possess doctrinal standards or institutionalized models of the family. Some of these reasons include the role of renunciation, detachment, and the individual's pursuit of enlightenment. The virtue of renunciation derives from Siddhartha's Great Going Forth, at which point he forsook his family and familial obligations as son, husband, and father. The monastic lifestyle and the role of the religious community (sangha) formalized the renouncing of familial relationships. The goal of detachment also impinges negatively upon family life. The inherent nature of families and family relationships produces attachments that constitute formidable obstacles to achieving detachment from worldly affairs and desires. Finally, the practices for pursuing enlightenment are adult-oriented disciplines requiring significant amounts of time and effort in solitary study and meditation. Although these three factors adversely affect the role of family life, the vast majority of Buddhists are lay people with immediate and extended families.

Because Buddhism does not espouse any particular form of the family or family relationships, Buddhist family life generally reflects pre-existing cultural and religious values, customs, and socially sanctioned modes of expression. Within Asian Buddhist cultures, this typically translates into a traditional, patriarchal family structure with clearly defined familial roles. Buddhism's primary contribution to the family consists of five ethical prescriptions that inform all aspects of family life, including marriage, roles and expectations, sexuality, children, and divorce. Originally composed by the Buddha ...

Read more: http://family.jrank.org/pages/183/Buddhism-Buddhism-Family.html

Special Relativity Time Dilation phenomenon experiment

The experiment with m-Mesons, is a classic experiment on the time dilation phenomenon, performed by B.Rossi and D. Hall in 1941 .

In the experiment, cosmic rays entering the earth's atmosphere from space were monitored - in particular the production of particles termed 'm-Mesons'.

Here are the essential details of this experiment:

1) A m meson is a charged particle that decays into an electron or positron , a neutrino and an anti neutrino.

2) As produced by cosmic rays the mesons travel through the atmosphere at speeds very close to that of light.

3) With the help of a scintillation counter, the arrival of the mesons may be detected and at a measured time later, their decay into an energetic electron. Observation of the second stage means that the meson has stopped in the detector so the decay of mesons AT REST is being recorded. Detector showed 568 counts that were obtained in one hour at the top of Mt Washington (6300ft above sea level.)

4) Since the mesons travel at nearly the speed of light, the time axis can be relabelled in thousands of feet and then we can see how many mesons should reach sea level if they decay in the same way in flight as they do at rest: On this basis if the detecting equipment is taken to sea level, 27 counts should be recorded in one hour. Accepting the result of this stage means we can go on to predict what fraction of a group of mesons should be lost through decay in a trip of a given distance (d) and duration~ (d /c) .

5) The scintillation counter is now taken down the mountain to sea level. At sea level a full hour's count is taken : Instead of 27 we have 412 mesons left at sea level. 412 counts corresponds to about 0.7msec on the decay clock. 0.7 divided by 6.3 equals 1/9. These mesons moving at near light speed keep time at 1/9 the rate they do when they are at rest with respect to us. To the observer on the ground, the mesons survive the journey in far greater numbers than one would predict from studying their decay at rest. The time-dilation factor of 9 corresponds obviously to a particular value of meson velocity v.

Why doesn't the electron fall into the nucleus?

The picture of electrons "orbiting" the nucleus like planets around the sun remains an enduring one, not only in popular images of the atom but also in the minds of many of us who know better. The proposal, first made in 1913, that the centrifugal force of the revolving electron just exactly balances the attractive force of the nucleus (in analogy with the centrifugal force of the moon in its orbit exactly counteracting the pull of the Earth's gravity) is a nice picture, but is simply untenable.

An electron, unlike a planet or a satellite, is electrically charged, and it has been known since the mid-19th century that an electric charge that undergoes acceleration (changes velocity and direction) will emit electromagnetic radiation, losing energy in the process. A revolving electron would transform the atom into a miniature radio station, the energy output of which would be at the cost of the potential energy of the electron; according to classical mechanics, the electron would simply spiral into the nucleus and the atom would collapse.

Quantum theory to the rescue!

By the 1920's, it became clear that a tiny object such as the electron cannot be treated as a classical particle having a definite position and velocity. The best we can do is specify the probability of its manifesting itself at any point in space. If you had a magic camera that could take a sequence of pictures of the electron in the 1s orbital of a hydrogen atom, and could combine the resulting dots in a single image, you would see something like this. Clearly, the electron is more likely to be found the closer we move toward the nucleus. This is confirmed by this plot which shows the quantity ...


Read more: http://www.chem1.com/acad/webtut/atomic/WhyTheElectron.html