On Second Thought
Our current standard unit of time, the second, is based on the cesium clock. But scientists are now planning to redefine it with optical atomic clocks, which have achieved far greater precision, as Alanna Mitchell reports for The New York Times. Optical clocks are sensitive to infinitesimal changes in their environment, even gravitational ones. In 2021 Katie McCormick wrote for Quanta about a clock that revealed gravity's changing influence on time across a 1-mm cloud of atoms.
Explaining the Higgs Mechanism
Symmetry dictates that the W-boson and other particles in the Standard Model should be massless. So why aren't they? Matt O'Dowd explains for PBS Space Time how the Higgs mechanism gives things mass. The key to the Higgs mechanism is that an underlying symmetry of the laws of nature can be "spontaneously" broken by the state of a system, as physicist David Kaplan explained in a 2015 video for Quanta. | |
