I’ve written a couple of posts about SOPA and PIPA, the copyright legislation currently making its way through Congress, and the widespread efforts to stop it. There’s some good news on that front: these pieces of legislation have been attracting increasing amounts of media attention lately, and Congress is beginning to respond. The DNS blocking provisions of the bill have been pulled (for now, at least), removing a threat to one of the foundations of the internet, and over in the Senate, influential senators are asking for a vote on PIPA (the PROTECT-IP Act) to be postponed so the bill can be further reviewed and possibly amended. Additionally, the White House has issued an official response to two petitions calling for President Obama to veto any of this legislation that does pass through Congress, and while he hasn’t promised to do so, it does show that the administration is at least thinking about the implications this legislation would have for free expression online.

But the war against SOPA and PIPA is not over yet, in part because a lot of people just don’t know all this is happening. To raise awareness, Reddit will be proceeding with …

Here’s one for the fellow Star Trek fans out there. At the end of Star Trek: Nemesis (SPOILER ALERT), the Enterprise-E and Shinzon’s Romulan warbird, the Scimitar, get involved in a battle in which the Scimitar latches on to the Enterprise using grips. One of the community members at Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange thought to ask, when the Scimitar fired its engines in reverse, why did it detach from the Enterprise rather than dragging both ships along?

At the question on SFFSE, there are two proposed explanations, the inertia of the Enterprise and the failure point of the grips. Both of them are relevant, but inertia doesn’t explain what happens all by itself. After all, if it were just inertia, what’s to say that the Scimitar detaches from the Enterprise instead of the engines detaching from both ships? As we’ll see, inertia does play a role in determining how much force is exerted on each part of each of the two ships’ structures. But once that force distribution is determined, it really comes down to whether the amount of force on the grips is enough to break them.

In the grand tradition of …

The Guardian has published a list of their top 10 science stories for the year. It’s a good summary of some of the major advances in science that took place this year, but only if you look past the sensationalism and focus on the facts.

Item 2, for instance: “Flying faster than the speed of light just might be possible after all.” Probably not, though. Despite what the article says, the OPERA experiment has not been properly verified, and most physicists do not take the idea of FTL neutrinos seriously at this time.

Or item 10: “And finally, we learned that the Higgs boson really does exist.” Again, we’re not sure. To be fair, this one is decently plausible, but ATLAS and CMS have only achieved a \(\sim 3\sigma\) observation so far, and it’s entirely possible that it turns out to be nothing.

Since the big news in the physics world is this morning’s presentation of the Higgs search results from the LHC, it’s only appropriate that I comment on it here, even though every physics blog in the world will be doing the exact same thing so there will be no shortage of Higgs information out there ;-) In summary: no, they haven’t really found it, but there is a bump around \(\SI{126}{GeV}\) that could represent detection of a Higgs boson. It will take another year’s worth of data to be confident either way.

Here are the plots that were released this morning by ATLAS and CMS, respectively:

The quantity being plotted here is the cross section for candidate Higgs events, which is denoted \(\sigma\), relative to a theoretical prediction, \(\sigma_{SM}\). In other words, the thing on the vertical axis is related to the fraction of collisions in which something that looks like a sign of a Higgs boson comes out. (I’ll perhaps post on this in more detail later; for now see Matt Strassler’s post on Higgs production for a good explanation.) But not everything that looks like a sign of a Higgs …

Just to keep everyone up to date on the latest rumors circulating in the physics world: there is speculation that ATLAS and CMS have a \(3\sigma\) candidate Higgs detection at around \(\SI{125}{\giga\electronvolt}\). I’m not going to speculate on the veracity of the rumors, but there will be a press conference next week on the 13th at which they officially announce their latest results, and it’s bound to be something interesting. Stay tuned!