Word: massless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have waited a long time, at least in puny human terms. In 1964, Higgs theorized a mechanism to explain how two types of particle, massless like everything else immediately after the Big Bang, came to acquire different masses as the universe cooled. Using this mechanism, which two Belgian physicists simultaneously posited, scientists were able to extrapolate how all particles get their mass. Higgs thus plugged a major hole in the Standard Model, the far-reaching set of equations on the interaction of subatomic particles that is the closest modern physics comes to a testable "theory of everything...
...particles. Theorists struggled for decades to understand why; finally, in the late 1990s, Koshiba?s Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan proved that the missing neutrinos had really just converted into another form, undetectable by Davis's machine (for complex reasons, this also implied that neutrinos, long thought to be massless, actually do have a tiny mass...
...idea behind solar sailing is simple. Although light is made of massless particles called photons, such ephemeral things exert real pressure, especially when they flow from so close a source as the sun. Attach a sail of lightweight Mylar or other material to a spacecraft, set it up in the path of that outrushing energy, and you ought to be able to move in almost any direction...