I make the best mistakes

So this is where my shell gets its comparisons from…

Even though I’ve been using Linux for quite some time now, every now and then there are occasions I find something new that actually surprises me.

For instance, did you know that true, false and [ are all programs part of GNU coreutils?

$ which true; which false; which [

/bin/true

/bin/false

/usr/bin/[

Naturally, I did what I do every time I find about a new program living in my $PATH:

$ man true

true - do nothing, successfully

$ man false

false - do nothing, unsuccessfully

$ man [

test - check file types and compare values

 
Uhm. 

So say we all

I just stumbled upon a really special Musicians@Google event. Bear McCreary, the genius behind the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack, was invited to talk about his career.

Battlestar Galactica (2003) is my all time favorite television series. It’s so much more than sci-fi. The way it explores technological singularity, religion, and the human psyche is frighteningly complex. If you aren’t familiar with it, you should really check it out.

Here’s a taste of Bear’s work, with the Battlestar Galactica Orchestra:

Lyrics in Sanskrit:

Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ
Tat savitur vareṇyaṃ
Bhargo devasya dhīmahi
dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt

I’ll leave the translation up to you :)

The theory of everything

I can’t help but speculate what physicists must be feeling right now.

For decades theoretical and experimental particle physicists have been looking for the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle gives mass to all the elementary particles and is predicted to exist by the standard model of particle physics, which predicted the existence of several other particles before they were observed.

This model was developed throughout the early and middle 20th century, and since then, discoveries of the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995) and the tau neutrino (2000) have given it credence.

The particles fit into two categories: bosons, which transmit forces, and fermions (quarks and leptons), which make up matter:

Because of its success in explaining how all of these particles and forces fit together in a wide variety of experimental results, the mathematical equation it translates into is sometimes regarded as the “Theory Of Everything”.

The problem with this theory in its current form is that it depends on the existence of the Higgs particle, that hasn’t been found yet. That’s the ‘H’ used throughout the equation, so the maths will not work without it.

This is why particle physicists have been so busy trying to find it. They figured out this remarkable theory that allows them, in principle, to calculate everything, but they’re missing the final piece of the puzzle, the Higgs boson. 

Fortunately, they managed to convince some governments to build machines to help them solve this and other mysteries. Behold the Large Hadron Collider:

The LHC was built by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) with funding from several countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

It’s designed to collide opposing particle beams moving nearly the speed of light. When these beams collide, new particles emerge and are photographed. The data is then analysed to find out if, by chance, the Higgs is in the photo.

New data has just emerged from the guys at LHC and Tevatron (another particle accelerator from Fermilab) reporting “a tantalizing excess of Higgs-like events”. They’re not claiming a discovery yet, but they find it very intriguing. Symmetry Breaking documents this in-depth.

These are exciting times we’re living on to be a particle physicist.