force physics science questions with pictures

The extra particles would have explained the tiny Higgs mass, restoring what physicists call “naturalness” to their equations. The Higgs mass seems unnaturally dialed down relative to these higher energies, as if huge numbers in the underlying equation that determines its value all miraculously cancel out. The hierarchy problem, as the puzzle is called, asks why the Higgs boson is so lightweight - a hundred million billion times less massive than the highest energy scales that exist in nature. The swarm of additional particles would have solved a major puzzle about an already known one, the famed Higgs boson. The crisis became undeniable in 2016, when, despite a major upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva still hadn’t conjured up any of the new elementary particles that theorists had been expecting for decades. Then incremental progress resumes.įor several years, the particle physicists who study nature’s fundamental building blocks have been in a textbook Kuhnian crisis. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. Sooner or later, though, facts crop up that clash with the reigning paradigm. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. He receives funding from the National Science Foundation.In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. How could an explosive Big Bang be the birth of our universe?ĭejan Stojkovic works for the State University of New York, University at Buffalo. It was written by: Dejan Stojkovic, University at Buffalo.Ĭould a human enter a black hole to study it? This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.Īnd since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. But if they do find strong evidence pointing to the existence of wormholes – which they may be able to do by looking at odd movements in star orbits – the discovery will shape how scientists see and understand the universe. It may take scientists a little while to come up with a consensus about whether or not they can exist. It took people 50 years to start taking black holes seriously – the term “black hole” wasn’t even coined until 1967. However, this description was so peculiar that the leading scientists of that era refused to believe that black holes could actually exist in nature. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real – black holes, which we astrophysicists know abound in our universe, weren’t accepted when scientists first suggested they existed, back in the 1910s.Įinstein first formulated his famous field equations in 1915, and German scientist Karl Schwarzschild found a way to mathematically describe black holes after only one year. While wormholes are interesting objects to think about, they still aren’t accepted in mainstream science. They may also answer age-old questions about what the universe looks like. While scientists have no evidence that wormholes actually exist in our world, they’re good tools to help astrophysicists like me think about space and time. You might emerge from one end of a wormhole at a time earlier than when you entered its other end. Instead of traveling for many millions of years from one galaxy to another, under the right conditions one could theoretically use a wormhole to cut the travel time down to hours or minutes.īecause wormholes represent shortcuts through space-time, they could even act like time machines. That’s the idea behind a wormhole.Ī wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other.

But, if they wanted to get there faster, they could dig a tunnel straight through the mountain to create a shortcut.

People from these towns would probably have to travel all the way around the mountain to visit one another. Imagine two towns on two opposite sides of a mountain.

What are wormholes and do they exist? – Chinglembi D., age 12, Silchar, Assam, India

Force physics science questions with pictures