Month: August 2024

A collision between subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider's CMS detector. (credit: Research.gov)

Particle physics is poised to hit the bright lights of Broadway with the adaptation into a musical of the 2013 documentary Particle Fever, which charts the journey to detect the Higgs boson at the world's largest particle accelerator. According to Deadline Hollywood, the creators described their musical as being filled with “heart, humor, and hope,” calling it an “exploration of the very nature of exploration itself... Particle Fever proves that even the very best theories are often no match for reality.”

(Spoiler: Physicists discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.)

Johns Hopkins University's David Kaplan was a film student turned theoretical physicist when he came up with the idea for a documentary on the search for the Higgs boson—at the time, the last remaining piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics yet to be detected. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was designed for that purpose, although the physics community hoped (in vain thus far) to also discover exciting new physics.

A collision between subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider's CMS detector. (credit: Research.gov)

Particle physics is poised to hit the bright lights of Broadway with the adaptation into a musical of the 2013 documentary Particle Fever, which charts the journey to detect the Higgs boson at the world's largest particle accelerator. According to Deadline Hollywood, the creators described their musical as being filled with “heart, humor, and hope,” calling it an “exploration of the very nature of exploration itself... Particle Fever proves that even the very best theories are often no match for reality.”

(Spoiler: Physicists discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.)

Johns Hopkins University's David Kaplan was a film student turned theoretical physicist when he came up with the idea for a documentary on the search for the Higgs boson—at the time, the last remaining piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics yet to be detected. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was designed for that purpose, although the physics community hoped (in vain thus far) to also discover exciting new physics.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards)

The landmark antitrust ruling against Google on Monday is shaking up one of the longest-standing partnerships in tech.

At the heart of the case are billions of dollars’ worth of exclusive agreements Google has inked over the years to become the default search engine on browsers and devices across the world. No company benefited more than fellow Big Tech giant Apple—which US District Judge Amit Mehta called a “crucial partner” to Google.

During a weekslong trial, Apple executives showed up to explain and defend the partnership. Under a deal that first took shape in 2002, Google paid a cut of search advertising revenue to Apple to direct its users to Google Search as default, with payments reaching $20 billion for 2022, according to the court’s findings. In exchange, Google got access to Apple’s valuable user base—more than half of all search queries in the US currently flow through Apple devices.