geekosystem

The Big Bang is pretty complicated stuff, especially if you're trying to explain it in less than four minutes. It happened billions of years ago, so there's no direct record of it. It created everything as far as we know, so we don't have any frame of reference for what came before it. And it rewrote the laws of physics as it happened, so even our best understanding of the phenomenon is necessarily inadequate. It's pretty daunting stuff, all things considered. That's why we're so glad that CERN physicist Tom Whyntie is on hand to offer the following excellent explanation of what we know and how we know it in the latest video offering from TED's education arm, TED-Ed.

When you think of a physicist, what image comes to mind? An asocial nerd? Stephen Hawking? Me, I think of lab-haunting nerds scratching at chalkboards, drawing equations on restaurant napkins, or playing with lasers all day. But then, my father is a physicist  -- worse, he was a military physicist, the most villainous brand of scientist you can imagine. And I'm here to tell you, they really can be nerdy. They're also smart and they know how to party. Case in point: Last night was the second annual Fundamental Physics Prize ceremony, a swanky gala funded by billionaire Yuri Milner that handed out $3 million as a top prize.

After almost a year of suspense as physicists at CERN sifted through figures, parsed data, and double and triple checked their math, this morning saw the team behind the discovery of the Higgs boson finally confident enough to officially announce to the world that they had, in fact, really found a Higgs boson. The only thing that's uncertain now is which Higgs boson they've found, because come on, it wouldn't really be physics without at least one question left unanswered.

Geeks like to argue about things. After seeing Spider-Man 2 back in 2004, my friend and I got into a heated argument over whether or not the big train-stopping scene was possible. Would the webs hold up? Is Spidey's grip strong enough to hold the webs? Would his arms get ripped off? What about all the things he's shooting webs onto, would they hold up? Rather than argue over Chinese food like we did, some students at the University of Leicester actually used physics to settle the debate once and for all, and they published their results.

Never let it be said that the folks at Minute Physics shy away from delving into the really big questions. In the latest episode, the gang takes on the daunting query "What is the Universe?" The answer, predictably, is, like, whoa, man, raising more questions about things like whether we can really know that parts of the Universe we can't observe actually exist, and if concepts like the future or mathematics are part of the universe we live in, or something else entirely. It's a bit of a head trip, but since you've probably got today off anyway, go ahead and ponder the nature of all things great and small from your bed this morning. You've earned it.

We've all wondered what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object -- like if you ran a train into a mountain that didn't have and Acme-brand train hole painted through it, or if Superman tried to push over The Hulk. Well, the science-savvy cartoonists at MinutePhysics are back to address that burning question. No, not the Superman/Hulk one -- that's a battle for another day. Instead, they lay out what things like immovable, unstoppable, and force actually mean, and offer up their best guesses at what the result would be -- which is more than a little surprising. Get a load of it in your Friday morning dose of cartoon science below.

Absolute zero might not be so absolute anymore, according to a study published this week in the journal Science. A team of researchers at Ludwig Maximillian University in Germany are reporting that they have brought individual atoms of potassium gas from a few billionths of a degree above zero degrees Kelvin -- long thought to be the lowest possible temperature -- to a few billionths of a degree below that mark.

One of the great pastimes of geekdom is adding some degree of factual feasibility to works of fantasy in all its forms. With the release of The Hobbit this Friday, audiences everywhere will be reunited with a much younger, more energetic Gollum than the one they've come to know in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But a haunting question that fans have tried to wrap their heads around for years is how has Gollum managed to be so long lived in spite of the fact he dwelled within the perpetual darkness of the Misty Mountains, dining purely on fish. Using assumptions on Hobbit physiology and his working knowledge of Gollum's subterranean home, Rhett Allain -- an associate professor of physics at the Southeastern Louisiana University -- has crunched the numbers and deduced how many fish the little guy needs to eat to function. The number may shock you -- if you actually care about this sort of thing, of course.

A contingent of MIT researchers working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) think they've found something no one has ever seen in the depths of the reams of data provided by the LHC's particle smashups, and no, it's not the Higgs boson, because jeez, you guys, there's more to life than the Higgs boson, you know? By studying collision patterns in heavy metals, researchers think they may be seeing the first signs of a theorized state of matter known as color glass condensate, which could be the result of particles colliding at near-light speed entering a state of quantum entanglement, becoming inexplicably connected to one another.

Sharing isn't always caring, it would seem. In penguins, for example, sharing seems to be the result of being kind of a jerk. Researchers investigating the physics of how penguins share warmth by huddling together on particularly cold Antarctic days found that each penguin is trying only to maximize the heat it retains while snuggling with its colleagues, but that the result is an egalitarian cuddle pile in which every penguin has more or less the same access to warmth. In other more important news, there are researchers working hard on revealing the science behind penguin snuggling, because hooray for science.

You guys, hold the phone. Drop whatever you're doing right now. Is it dropped? Yes? Good. We have tractor beams now! Like where you zap a thing with a laser and pull it toward you with beam power? Yeah, those! We have those now. Even though they are super tiny and effective only on microscopic items like silica spheres suspended in water for right now, they are still working tractor beams, and now that we have the principle down, they are pretty much only going to get cooler from here. If you can't get excited about that, I don't even know what to say, as I have to assume you are already dead inside.

Science may, at long last, have devised a way to answer the question posed by timeless philsopher Freddie Mercury: "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?" A team of physicists at the University of Bonn believe they have a way to test whether or not we're all living in a computer simulation by seeking out the edges of the lattice work that would underlie such a simluation. Which is pretty interesting work except for one thing. If we are living in a simulation, we definitely don't want to know it. Just let us live the lie.

Move over, duct tape; you're not the only brand of store bought tape with near-magical powers anymore. Scotch tape, that humblest denizen of the office supply store, has surprised researchers at the University of Toronto with the ability to transform semiconductors into high-energy superconductors. The discovery could have repercussions for the computing industry -- especially the young field of quantum computing -- and could even improve energy efficiency in electronics in general.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of the most well-known and dearly held tenets of modern quantum physics. It's one of those things about science you totally know, even if you don't know you know it. The principle states that on a quantum level, you can't directly measure anything without changing something about it. Thus, it is impossible to measure a particle's position without affecting its velocity, and vice versa. Still confused? Us to, but luckily this Futurama clip explains the matter brilliantly in the first 30 seconds or so. Go ahead, we'll wait. Back? Great. Now that you understand the uncertainty principle, it's time for the news about it. Thanks to new measurement techniques, physicists are no longer certain that the theory holds up.

MinutePhsyics is back with their latest scientific musing, this time on how our world would be different if it was hollow. Most notably, travelling from one end of the planet to the other would be way faster, as long as you suspended a couple of other laws of nature. Unfortunately, like the crappiest Expedia deal ever, that increase in speed could only be achieved if you were travelling from one pole to another, meaning that your entertainment and hospitality options on arrival would be limited to things like "Looking At Penguins" and "Freezing To Death." There are other drawbacks as well, but we'll leave them for the video while we concentrate on how much fun it would be to fall through a planet. For, like, the first five minutes before it probably gets kind of dark and boring and you just wish there was an in-flight movie.