Particular Physics

astronomnomy:

Click on this, play with the checkboxes and scroll around the page, you will not regret it. 

Hubble stared at a tiny patch of sky for twenty-three days straight to produce this beautiful image of thousands of galaxies, some of which are 13.2 billion years old. This is the “deepest” image of the sky to date, known as the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.

Dr Stephen Wilkins (Uni of Sussex, UK) has merged all the images taken of XDF with different telescopes, and has catalogued the luminosities (a measure of brightness), redshift (a measure of distance, the higher the number the further away the galaxy is) and spectral energy distributions (energy signatures across all colours of light) for each galaxy. 

Enjoy!

An opportunity here to look into the depths of the Universe with Hubble and see a deep field image in multiple wavelengths. The cataloguing and ease of use is very impressive. 

Have a look!

Another nice interactive website, but instead of looking at the scale of objects and the Universe from a spatial perspective, it looks at the amount of time that has stretched before us, and the relative proportions of different eras of development of the Universe and life.

The Science Museum will host an immersive exhibition bringing to life the science which goes into the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN, and they physics which is being studied with the vast quantities of proton-proton collision data collected by the various experiments.

It looks set to be an impressive exhibition, running for six months, from November 2013. Tickets are available online now and futher information can also be found through the link!

weakinteractions:

I like Carl Zimmer’s  response to the recent internet-uproar about government-funded “duck penis” research.

This kind of criticism is common — it’s very easy to exclaim “how could knowledge of duck penises possibly be useful?!?” but not as easy to understand the criticized research and think carefully about the reasons why we support basic science in general. (And the fact that it’s about a subject many people find comical certainly helps.)

Zimmer writes,

I just want to address the question of why we fund basic research in the first place.

Scientists use the word “basic” to distinguish scientific research that’s not directed at some specific practical problem. Developing a vaccine for the latest strain of the flu is applied research. Learning how the body generates antibodies to flu viruses is basic research. Basic research can lead to applications, but we don’t know in advance what particular studies will or won’t do so. That’s because we have much left to understand about how the world works.

He goes on to explain why duck penises may be important, and may uncover clues on human evolution and human reproductive issues. Importantly, as it goes with most basic science, no one had any idea about these connections until someone looked, and looking takes money. And, oh yeah, this isn’t new news. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been funding the research in question for over 6 years, and Zimmer reported on it in 2007.

What people don’t realize is that, although most science isn’t about penises, many research subjects are similarly difficult to connect directly to their positive impacts on society. But that’s true of much research that has later proven invaluable. That’s why, when scientists hear that the NSF is supporting research on duck penises, it doesn’t sound shocking. It sounds reasonable.

If you want to eliminate research on duck penises, than you must also eliminate similar (although less giggle-inducing) basic science, and you’d end up with very little research left. But we know that science, in general, improves our society. The most-cited example in particle physics is the birth of the World Wide Web, which came about as a result of the computing needs at CERN, but of course could not have been predicted as a result.