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Harnessing the true power of the atom

Sun, 07/15/2012 - 16:45 — Ben Gilliland

Above: The Sun (seen here in ultraviolet) is the ultimate nuclear fusion reactor, but can we harness this power on Earth?

Last week, we compared the human and environmental cost of nuclear power and fossil fuels and nuclear came out as the clear winner. But nuclear power’s current means of extracting the power of the atom – nuclear fission – is still far from perfect.

To truly harness the energy locked away within the atom we need to look to the Sun.

The Sun is essentially a massive nuclear furnace but, instead of tearing atoms apart – as nuclear fission reactors do – our local star uses its massive gravitational power and million-degree heat to fuse atoms together. Fusion reactions can unleash many times more energy than nuclear fission and, instead of a mess of radioactive particles, the only byproduct is a harmless helium atom. When it comes to liberating energy, nuclear fusion makes fission look down-right clumsy.

Putting nuclear power into perspective

Sun, 07/08/2012 - 17:57 — Ben Gilliland

Sixty years ago we were in love with nuclear power. The new atomic age promised super-fast aircraft, cars and even vacuum cleaners powered by reactors. Most of all, it heralded a new age of clean, cheap and inexhaustible energy.

But it’s fair to say that the love affair is well and truly over.

These days we see nuclear power plants as barely tamed demons, straining to unleash Armageddon and barely held in check by the feeble humans that operate them.

The earthquake that last year caused accidents at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power station – and the recent revelation that human failure contributed to it – have only served to reinforce our mistrust of this most dangerous of creatures.

But is it fair?

Found: One particle, masquerading as god

Wed, 07/04/2012 - 08:54 — Ben Gilliland

So, after (literally) days of fevered speculation, CERN physicists have announced that they found something that seems to be the Higgs boson – the most famous thing that may, or may not have existed (thus bumping whether or not Justin Bieber has talent into the top spot – physicists don't anticipate that this will be found).

At the Large Hadron Collider, two experiments have been bent to task of locating the Higgs – CMS and ATLAS – and both have detected signals in their data that suggest the presence of a particle that weighs in at about 125-126 GeV – about 130 times heavier than a proton.

At CMS, the team have “attained a confidence level” just shy of the golden “five sigma” level of certainty – with one data set reaching five sigma (a one-in-3.5 million chance they are wrong) and the combined result hitting 4.9 sigma (a one-in-two million chance).

Closing in on the God(damn it, Jim! I'm a physicist, not a priest!) particle

Sun, 07/01/2012 - 11:45 — Ben Gilliland

This week, on July 4, in a news conference to be beamed around the world, physicists at CERN (home of the Large Hadron Collider) will be making an announcement about the Higgs boson. We can’t tell you what the announcement will be, but here’s a ‘bluffer's guide’ to the Higgs – just in case.

The Higgs boson was summoned into theoretical existence to plug a hole in a theory that was almost perfect – the ‘standard model’ of particle physics.

The standard model has been hugely successful – it can provide explanations and make predictions about how the counter-intuitive quantum world of particles works. But it couldn’t explain one thing – why the universe has mass.

This was a crucial omission because, without mass, their is no gravity and, without gravity, the roiling soup of particles spat out by the Big Bang would never have coalesced to form the stars and planets – neither you, me or anything else would exist.

The Higgs boson is seen as the answer to this problem. It is the physical emissary of a all-pervading field that interacts with matter to give it the mass that the universe so desperately needs.

Life on Earth, the final act (sorry guys we’ve missed most of the show)

Sun, 06/24/2012 - 15:29 — Ben Gilliland

To we humans, the Earth and the nurturing Sun it orbits are constant and immutable. You can go to bed at night safe in the knowledge that the Sun will rise in the morning and the planet we call home will be just as it has always been. Unfortunately this assumption is desperately flawed.

Humans are like the toddler who can’t conceive of a time that he didn’t exist – for the entire duration of our existence (and that of our entire species) very little has changed on planet Earth, so it’s natural to assume that it will always be so. What we don’t take into account is just how insignificantly short our tenure on planet Earth has been.

Modern humans have walked the planet for 200,000 years, which seems like a long time until you realise that life on Earth first started some 3.8billion years earlier – that’s 3,800,000,000 years. Compared to vast pantheon of life that preceded us, humans have really only just turned up to the party. In all that time when we weren’t around to bear witness, the Earth has changed very drastically indeed.

The E-ELT: Mundane of name, grand of purpose

Mon, 06/18/2012 - 08:01 — Ben Gilliland

In their efforts to explore the mechanisms that drive the cosmos, astronomers use some pretty impressive machines – so you’d think they would bestow them with names that reflect their technological magnitude. But, instead, they give them names that are as banal as the machines are mighty.

In the beginning there was the telescope, and it was good, then they made a large telescope and called it the ‘Large Telescope’. This was superseded the ‘Very Large Telescope’. Then astronomers got really excited and they considered building a telescope so large that it would be known as the ‘Overwhelmingly Large Telescope’. But that superlative was deemed too exciting (or the plan to build a 100metre telescope too expensive) so they down-sized the project and called it... wait for it... the ‘Extremely Large Telescope’.