Cosmic to Quantum

quantumaniac:

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, English for Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire - is known as CERN. Established in 1954, CERN is a laboratory used to operate the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. Located in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland - CERN, as an organization, comprises 20 member states. 

CERN is a term that is frequently misused, it is not an experiment, but rather the laboratory itself - one which represents over 600 universities and 100 nationalities. 

CERN houses many particle accelerators and other expensive machinery necessary for high-energy physics research. Besides physics, CERN is most famous for being the effective birthplace of the World Wide Web. Many of the most revolutionary physics breakthroughs of the past four decades have taken place at CERN, including:

• 1973: The discovery of neutral currents.
• 1983: The discovery of W and Z bosons.
• 1995: The first creation of antihydrogen atoms.
• 2011: Maintaining antihydrogen for over 15 minutes.

Currently, the majority of happenings at CERN are directed towards the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an enormous experiment aiming to solve many of our most fundamental questions about the universe. Most of the well-known particle detector experiments in the world are a part of the LHC, including: 

• ALICE: (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)
• ATLAS: (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus)
• CMS: (Compact Muon Solenoid)
• MoEDAL: (Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC)
• LHCb: (Large Hadron Collider beauty)
• LHCf: (Large Hadron Collider forward)

But the LHC is by no means the only exciting experiment at CERN, in fact, here’s the complete list. Over this past weekend, CERN reached a new energy threshold of 4 TeV per beam - awesome! 

The Elements Revealed: An Interactive Periodic Table

Whether gas, liquid or solid; radioactive or stable, reactive or inert; toxic or in your vitamin pill, the 118 building blocks each has its own chemically idiosyncratic characteristics, along with certain commonalities. See what makes your favorite element unique on this interactive periodic table

9gag:

Epic Physics teacher is epic

quantumaniac:

What is e? 

Our Universe is ruled by a list of mathematical equations - many of them involving constants, such as Pi, Planck’s Constant, g, and e. But what is e? Everyone associates it with math, but many people have no idea what it is. 

Usually, e is defined as: 

While that may seem really fancy, the concept behind it is fairly simple. As the value of n increases in that function, all the way to infinity - your answer becomes closer to e. So if you plug in 1,000,000 as n - you will add a relatively small value to 1 (because 1/1,000,000 is so small) and then it will be raised to the 1,000,000th power! While this may seem huge, the value is still close to 1 - so multiplying it by itself will not increase it’s value by much. e is approximately equal to 2.71828. 

Sometimes called Euler’s number, e was first studied by Leonard Euler in the 1720s - though its existence was known over a century beforehand. If you are familiar with logarithms, e is the base of the natural log (ln.) Most commonly, e is found when dealing with compound interest - the interest starts off at a low amount but gradually increases. 

If you have taken Calculus, a fascinating note is that the derivative of e is, that’s right, e. Because of it’s interesting exponential growth shape, e is it’s own derivative! 

e also makes many appearances in Nuclear Science, because the gradual behavior of a substance’s half-life can be explained very well using this constant.