Stephen Hawking set to fly weightless

NF Reporter · 04-26-2007, 04:53 AM

AP - Stephen Hawking has been imprisoned by his body for many years. But for a few seconds on Thursday, the celebrated physicist and author will float free, unrestricted by his paralyzed muscles and his wheelchair as he floats weightless on a zero gravity flight.

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waltky · 09-09-2008, 07:12 AM

On the hunt for the Higgs boson...

Hawking’s books have made him a world-renowned theoretical physicist
Tuesday, 9 September 2008 : The sum of human knowledge could be massively increased on Wednesday - but Professor Stephen Hawking could find himself $100 poorer.

Quote:

As Cern prepares to switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) below the French-Swiss border, the physicist has a bet that it will not find the Higgs boson - the most highly sought-after particle in physics. Dubbed the "God particle" because it is so crucial to our understanding of the universe, it is thought to give everything its mass. The most powerful physics experiment ever built, the LHC will re-create the conditions present in the universe just after the Big Bang.

When subatomic particles like protons are smashed together in the LHC, the energies released will create an array of new particles - some of which have not been seen since the big bang itself. It will give scientists a glimpse into how these building blocks of matter are made. "The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions, by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle, the particle that gives mass to all the other particles," Professor Hawking told the Today programme.

Previous atom-smashers have failed to find it, but because the LHC is so much more powerful, there is hope that it will succeed. Even a failure, Professor Hawking says, would be exciting, because that would pose new questions about the laws of nature. "I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won't find the Higgs."

He believes another important discovery that the experiment could make is superpartners, or particles that should theoretically exist. They are 'supersymmetric partners' to those particles we already know of at present. "Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe," he says.

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