Monday, May 30, 2016

Science Has the Coolest Words

This article at Quanta outlines how some pretty modest-scaled experiments might do just as much to help us understand the most exotic features of the universe as do those experiments conducted in gigantic facilities like the Large Hadron Collider. With the added benefit of having much less chance of creating a black hole that would destroy life as we know it.

The combination of our annual denominational meeting plus drugs from a recent medical adventure have left me a little tired, so rather than comment on the whole article I will just note the measurement used to gauge the force in one of the experiments. A "newton" is an amount of force; it's equivalent to the force used to depress a computer key. One of the experiments will measure fractions of that force in units called "zeptonewtons."

It's hard to call a day bad when you learn that there is in the world a real thing called a "zeptonewton."

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