Astrobiology Magazine: “A New Way to Keep Clean” and other links…
Astrobiology Magazine: “It is almost impossible to get a spacecraft completely clean before launch. Because of this, one of the biggest difficulties in searching for life on planets like Mars is not contaminating the research site with microbes from Earth. Now, scientists have developed a new cleaning protocol that could help alleviate the problem.”
“Physics and philosophy: Much ado about nothing”
The Economist: “Move away from the collective scale, however, and peer closer at empty space, that is, a volume from which all matter and forces have been removed, and it buzzes with energy. The smaller the space, the greater the fluctuations in the energy that pervades it. This makes the void fizz with activity, as particles and their antimatter counterparts zip in and out of existence. It is this activity, at quantum mechanical scales, that banishes nothingness and which is thought to have given birth to the universe.”
“Sons of Atom”
Peter Galison: “Looking back on the early 20th century, Bohr wistfully reflected that Einstein had done so much of relativity theory by himself, while quantum mechanics took a whole generation of physicists 30 years. Telling the quantum story up to 1927 has been an industry for the past 80 years. In the first half of her new book, “The Age of Entanglement,” Louisa Gilder does her level best to cope with this plethora of sources, characters and topics, with mixed results. She writes engagingly, using dialogue reconstructed from letters, papers and memoirs to capture the spirit of confrontation among the players. That’s good. But she seems ill at ease with the German sources and so is reliant on the secondary literature—some of which is well done, some not. That’s not so good.”
Wikipedia.org Moment: Higgs boson
“The Higgs boson is a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics. At present there are no known fundamental scalar particles in nature. …The Higgs boson is the only Standard Model particle that has not yet been observed. Experimental detection of the Higgs boson would help explain the origin of mass in the universe.”