Month: May 2018

Enlarge / Los Alamos National Lab, where the work was done. (credit: Los Alamos National Lab)

Fundamental physics, as we've seen, finds itself in a difficult situation. Nothing unexpected has turned up at the Large Hadron Collider. We have phenomena like dark matter and dark energy that are defying explanation. And some of the most exciting ideas that theoreticians are coming up with have steadfastly refused to submit to any form of experimental testing.

On possible route out of this mess is to focus on some of the oddities in the data that we already have. For example, there are a few measurements that seem to show particle behavior that's inconsistent with physics' Standard Model. And there are other cases where two different routes to the same measurement give different results, a possible sign that some new physics is influencing one experimental approach but not another. But before we pursue these oddities, the first step is to confirm that something unexpected is really happening.

This is exactly the situation we have with the decay of neutrons. We have two different ways of measuring the neutron's half-life, and the values they produce disagree by an appreciable amount. To find out whether this disagreement is real, however, we have to up the precision of the measurements. And that's precisely what a large US-Russian collaboration has done.

Enlarge / Los Alamos National Lab, where the work was done. (credit: Los Alamos National Lab)

Fundamental physics, as we've seen, finds itself in a difficult situation. Nothing unexpected has turned up at the Large Hadron Collider. We have phenomena like dark matter and dark energy that are defying explanation. And some of the most exciting ideas that theoreticians are coming up with have steadfastly refused to submit to any form of experimental testing.

On possible route out of this mess is to focus on some of the oddities in the data that we already have. For example, there are a few measurements that seem to show particle behavior that's inconsistent with physics' Standard Model. And there are other cases where two different routes to the same measurement give different results, a possible sign that some new physics is influencing one experimental approach but not another. But before we pursue these oddities, the first step is to confirm that something unexpected is really happening.

This is exactly the situation we have with the decay of neutrons. We have two different ways of measuring the neutron's half-life, and the values they produce disagree by an appreciable amount. To find out whether this disagreement is real, however, we have to up the precision of the measurements. And that's precisely what a large US-Russian collaboration has done.

Enlarge / Kiosks from GTL, a leading video-visitation provider. (credit: GTL)

When Rebecca Parr visited her nephew Justin Harker recently at the Knox County Jail in Tennessee, she didn't get the opportunity to see him face-to-face—or even through glass. Instead, she was ushered into a cramped, crowded room for a "video visitation." She talked to him on a telephone handset while watching a grainy video feed of his face.

"I have experienced prison visitation a lot in my life," she told Ars—her father spent some time in prison when she was a child. "This was the most dehumanizing and impersonal that I've ever experienced. I've visited through glass before and that broke my heart when that happened. This was even worse."

On the kiosks Parr and Harker used, the video camera was several inches above the screen. As a result, "when you look at the person on the screen, you cannot look them in the eye," Parr said. "There's no eye contact whatsoever."