Happy Time Travelling Day

As today is the day when Marty McFly arrives in the future (or present as it is now - at least until tomorrow) I thought it might be fun to reference back to the only thing that makes Titanic a bearable film...the fact that it is a prequel to Terminator.

If Jack hadn't saved Rose then the ship would have turned around in search for her, thereby avoiding the collision with the iceberg...and all the things that would have entailed from that.

Obviously Jack's mission was to save Rose - presumably she's somehow related to Sarah Connor - and unfortunately 1500 people die in the collateral damage.

Don't believe me, go read the thread on Reddit 

I particularly like the idea that Jack is really The Doctor rescuing a relation to a future potential companion...Rose... :-)

Now scientists have searched for time travellers making comments on social media, apparently without success. But then again time travellers might have very strict rules about such things...as seen in the 1992 film Timescape.

However there is evidence that Twitter featured on the cover of Amiga magazine in April 1988! Well, not quite..but you never know...

Anyway, next week's lottery numbers are 4,7,14,19,22,34 ... I think, sorry can't read my handwriting...

...oh, and I shouldn't say this, but next week James Cameron told me last week he was a time traveller....

#ICanChangeThePast2
#ICannotChangeThePast2

Higgs

A wonderful moment in physics:

We may have glimpsed the Higgs boson, say Cern scientists

Physicists have seen strong hints the Higgs boson exists, but a firm discovery may not come before the end of 2012

• Ian Sample at Cern, Geneva
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 December 2011 16.06 GMT

Scientists could have caught their first glimpse of the Higgs boson, the curious particle thought to underpin the subatomic workings of nature.

Hundreds of physicists crowded into a seminar room at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva on Tuesday, breaking into applauseas Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli, who lead separate teams at Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), revealed evidence for the particle amid the debris of hundreds of trillions of proton collisions at the machine.

New Physics?

First hints of "the new physics"?  At least these results are becoming more public but still not at the statistical level where they become official, however news of CP violation at this magnitude is extremely interesting. First the BBC's report on this (readable by the layman):

LHC reveals hints of 'new physics' in particle decays
15 November 2011 Last updated at 12:18 GMT
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Large Hadron Collider researchers have shown off what may be the facility's first "new physics" outside our current understanding of the Universe. Particles called D-mesons seem to decay slightly differently from their antiparticles, LHCb physicist Matthew Charles told the HCP 2011 meeting on Monday.  The result may help explain why we see so much more matter than antimatter. The team stresses that further analysis will be needed to shore up the result. At the moment, they are claiming a statistical certainty of "3.5 sigma" - suggesting that there is less than a 0.05% chance that the result they see is down to chance. The team has nearly double the amount of data that they have analysed so far, so time will tell whether the result reaches the "five-sigma" level that qualifies it for a formal discovery

and the report from CERN itself:

Charming surprise
The Bulletin - Issue No. 45-46/2011 - Monday 7 November 2011

The CP violation in charm quarks has always been thought to be extremely small. So, looking at particle decays involving matter and antimatter, the LHCb experiment has recently been surprised to observe that things might be different. Theorists are on the case.

The study of the physics of the charm quark was not in the initial plans of the LHCb experiment, whose letter “b” stands for “beauty quark”. However, already one year ago, the Collaboration decided to look into a wider spectrum of processes that involve charm quarks among other things.

The LHCb trigger allows a lot of these processes to be selected, and, among them, one has recently shown interesting features. Other experiments at b-factories have already performed the same measurement but this is the first time that it has been possible to achieve such high precision, thanks to the huge amount of data provided by the very high luminosity of the LHC. “We have observed the decay modes of the D0, a particle made up of a charm quark plus a u antiquark”, explains Pierluigi Campana, LHCb Spokesperson. “In particular, we have studied and combined the decay rates of the D0 and its antiparticle. According to the theory of the Standard Model, we should have measured a very small value of a parameter known as Delta ACP that is calculated using these decay rates and is related to the properties of matter and antimatter. We found that Delta ACP is around 0.8% instead of the predicted 1‰ (or less). Although making precise evaluations in processes involving charm quarks is difficult, the Delta ACP parameter appears to be much higher than expected”.

Finally, Ars Technica has an overall write-up on the FTL neutrinos, CP violation and Higgs:

Fast neutrinos, C-P violations, and the shrinking space for the Higgs

By John Timmer

It has been a busy week in the world of particle physics, with attention focused on the home of the LHC: CERN. This year, the LHC generated five inverse femtobarns worth of data—nearly half the amount generated during the entire lifetime of the Tevatron—before shutting down the proton program a few weeks ago. From now until its scheduled winter shutdown, the LHC will be doing lead ion collisions to examine the quark-gluon interactions that dominated the Universe immediately after the Big Bang.