The Conversation
Subscribe
  • Academic rigour, journalistic flair
  • For curious minds
  • Expert news and views
  • Debate and ideas
  • From the curious to the serious

Hot Topics

  1. Gay marriage
  2. Australia in the Asian Century
  3. Convergence review
  4. Federal Budget 2012
  5. War on drugs
  6. Bob Brown
  7. Explainer
  8. Square Kilometre Array
  9. Medical myths
  10. Transparency and medicine

Large Hadron Collider

Analysis and Comment (8)

Aapone-20110924000346156010-file_switzerland_cern_opera-original
Another week, another rush to proclaim Einstein was wrong. Martial Trezzini/AFP

Neutrinos and the speed of light? Not so fast …

The bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind in here” A faster-than-light neutrino walks into a bar … The media is champing at the bit to proclaim a discovery of faster-than-light travel by a subatomic…
4291413264_137620e540_o-1304574736
We've got the time, if you've got the theory. h.koppdelaney/Flickr

Explainer: the fifth dimension

By now we’re used to the idea that the world has four dimensions: three spatial and one temporal. But what if there were a fifth dimension – what would that dimension look like, and how would it relate…
De0063m
As yet we can only guess what the Higgs boson might look like. DESY Zeuthen

Explainer: the Higgs boson particle

Theoretical physics is full of mysteries and unknowns. In the case of some particles, we can predict their existence even if we can’t find them. Such is the status of the Higgs boson. And yet detecting…
File_first_gold_beam-beam_collision_events_at_rhic_at_100_100_gev_c_per_beam_recorded_by_star
Is the "Z-prime" lurking within a "jungle" of particles at the LHC? Argonne National Laboratory

Explainer: the Z' (hypothetical) particle

There’s nothing like an unexpected result to get physicists excited. So in 2008, when some strange behaviour was detected from a rarely-produced particle known as the “top quark”, there was much interest…
Aapone-20080910000118319086-switzerland-science-physics-cern-britain--original
Time travel has long been a staple of science fiction but the LHC might make it a reality. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

Is the Large Hadron Collider a time machine?

Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be called a time machine in one sense: it enables us to examine conditions as they were during the universe’s early stages. But is the 27km-long particle…