Epistolary Higgs

Over the summer, the big physics news was the discovery of a new particle which is, in all likelihood, the Higgs boson. I’m not going to give a detailed explanation of what the Higgs is and how it was found — Bruce Bassett wrote a great post about that here, there’s a more detailed post here, and a set of more detailed posts here.

Instead, here’s an e-mail exchange I had with a friend about the Higgs — he had a question, and I answered it, but there’s a bit more to it than that…

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Postcard from the Edge

This is a picture taken by a robot over one-and-a-half million kilometers away from the earth — over three times farther away than the moon — of the oldest light in the universe. This is impossibly faint light: it took a full year for the robot to collect enough light to take this picture. And even if it weren’t so faint, we wouldn’t be able to see this light with our eyes because it’s beyond the range of visible light, stretched by the expansion of the universe over the last 14 billion years…

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