Three events coming up!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 15th, in the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, I’ll be speaking about my book — specifically, about why and how the relationship between ourselves and the universe is not what it seems. The event will be held at the Broadside Bookshop at 7pm. If you’re in the Pioneer Valley, please come by! And let your friends in the area know, too.
ON May 14, 2024
[UPDATE May 10, 4:00 pm Boston Time, 10:00 pm EU time: AURORAS MAY BE ACTIVE NOW!]
I don’t use exclamation marks in blog post titles lightly. For those of us hoping to see the northern and southern lights (auroras) outside their usual habitat near the Earth’s poles, this is one of those rare weekends where the odds are in our favor. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a rare G4 forecast (out of a range from G1 to G5) for a major geomagnetic “storm”.
Though the large and active sunspot from earlier this week has moved on, it has been followed by an even larger group of sunspots, so enormous that you can easily see them with eclipse glasses if you’ve kept your pair from last month.
Powerful solar flares (explosions at the Sun’s visible surface) and the accompanying large coronal mass ejections (“CMEs”, huge clouds of subatomic particles that stream across space from the Sun toward the planets) keep coming, one after another; the second-largest of the week happened just a few hours ago. In the next 24-72 hours, the combined effects of these CMEs may drive the Earth’s magnetic field haywire, leading to northern and southern lights that are much stronger and much more equatorial than usual.
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ON May 10, 2024
A couple of days ago, I noted a chance of auroras (a.k.a. northern and southern lights) this week. That chance just went up again, with a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The chance of auroras being visible well away from their usual latitudes is pretty high in the 36-48 hour range… meaning the evening of May 10th into the morning of May 11th in both Europe (with the best chances) and in the US and Canada.
Keep in mind that timing and aurora strength are hard to predict, so no prediction is guaranteed; it could come to nothing, or the auroras could show up somewhat earlier and be stronger than expected.
Meanwhile, the SciComm 2 conference continues at the Perimeter Institute. As part of it, experimental particle physicist Clara Nellist gave a public talk to an enthusiastic audience last night, reviewing the LHC experiments and their achievements. You can find it on YouTube if you’d like to watch it.
ON May 9, 2024
I’ll be spending the remainder of this week at the 2nd Scicomm Collider conference, hosted at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, and organized by astrophysicist and writer Katie Mack. I’m very much looking forward to it!
Next week I’ll be back in Massachusetts, in the town of Northampton, where I’ll be speaking about my book. The event is at 7pm on Wednesday, May 15th at the lovely Broadside Bookshop. If you’re in the Pioneer Valley, please join me! And if you have friends in the area, please let them know.
ON May 8, 2024
[This is a follow-up to Monday’s post, going more into depth.]
Among the known elementary particles are three cousins: the electron, the muon and the tau. The three are identical in all known experiments — they have all the same electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions, and no strong nuclear interactions — except for effects that arise from the fact that they have different rest masses:
[These differences arise from their different interactions with the Higgs field; to learn more about this, see Chapter 22 of my book.]
[Note added for clarity: these particles do exhibit slightly different magnetic moments, dramatically different lifetimes, and a number of other differences — but all of those variations can be traced back to the difference in their masses.]
Question: How sure are we that these three cousins aren’t actually the same object, seen in three different quantum states?
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ON May 7, 2024
The Sun has been acting up; a certain sunspot has been producing powerful flares. In the past three days, several have reached or almost reached X-class, and one today was an X4.5 flare. (The letter is a measure of energy released by the flare; an X1 flare is ten times more powerful than an M1 class flare, and an X4.5 flare is almost three times more powerful than an X1 flare.)
With so much solar activity, it’s possible (though certainly not guaranteed) that one or more coronal mass ejections might strike Earth over the next 48 hours and might generate northern and southern lights (“auroras”). If you’re in a good location and the weather is favorable, you might want to check every now and then to see if the atmosphere is shining at you.
ON May 6, 2024
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