Word: explaining
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...goal of modern theoretical physics is to reveal the universe's lost elegance. A major breakthrough in that effort came in 1964, when Peter Higgs, a shy British scientist in Edinburgh, introduced a theory that could explain how particles that carry two of the four forces - those that carry the electromagnetic force, and those that carry the weak force - came to have different masses as the universe cooled (in the moment after the Big Bang, of course, nothing had mass, existing instead in a sort of naked, ethereal beauty). Extrapolating from Higgs' theory, scientists were able to explain...
...equations that incorporates all that is known about the interaction of subatomic particles and is the closest thing physicists have to a testable "theory of everything." But many theoreticians feel that even if the Higgs boson exists, the Standard Model is unsatisfactory; for instance, it is unable to explain the presence of gravity, or the existence of something called "dark matter," which prevents spiral galaxies like our Milky Way from falling apart. Even the mighty Higgs cannot explain those mysteries - though through telescopes and observation, we know they exist...
Given the problems with the Standard Model, some physicists have come up with elaborate alternatives to explain the workings of the cosmos, including the existence of multiple, alternate dimensions, or hidden "supersymmetric partners" to all the universe's particles. To them, failure to find the Higgs - or finding the Higgs among an ensemble of strange and new particles - would be welcome, since it would suggest that more ambitious theories are needed. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...room to a chorus of “‘sup bro,” “yo bro-sef,” and even a “dude bro-minator.” The culprit for this new and odd behavior becomes clearer when I explain that all of these friends recently became college students. On college campuses “brother” and “sister” are words that are becoming synonymous with “friend,” and this has weakened the power that those words could have...
...less that I was a soldier in Vietnam. It wasn’t out of any shame. I just didn’t want to have anyone look at me in any way beyond what I was, which was a student here. I didn’t want to explain myself to people–not out of any motive except it’s hard, and I didn’t want to go through the labor of it all. So I stayed silent about it. It was too exhausting to talk about. You come out of a jungle...