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Once physicists established the need for the Higgs boson to exist, how did they set out to locate it? It was just a matter of bringing the particles and fields together under the right conditions. You'll see how physicists use Feynman diagrams to keep track of how virtual particles carry the various forces between quarks and leptons.
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In the 1920s physicists established that light and matter display both wave- and particle-like behavior. Probe the nature of this apparent contradiction and the meaning of Werner Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, which introduces a fundamental indeterminacy into physics.
6) Dark Matter
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Four theoretical physicists describe why we believe today that “DARK MATTER” exists and speculate on what might explain it.
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Trace the history of the second law of thermodynamics, considered by many physicists to be the one law of physics most likely to survive unaltered for the next thousand years. The second law says that entropy"”the degree of disorder in a closed system"”only increases or stays the same.
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Physicists and philosophers have relied on thought experiments for thousands of years. But how can we know that the conclusions of thought experiments are correct? Learn what Leibniz' "giant head" and Searle's "Chinese room" can tell us about materialism - and about the potential limits of our own imaginations.
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Having covered the remarkable discoveries in physics, turn to the great gap in our current knowledge, namely the nature of the dark matter and dark energy that constitute more than 95% of the universe. Close with a look at other mysteries that physicists are now working to solve.
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When German physicists split the atom, Albert Einstein warned President Roosevelt of the potential for "extremely powerful bombs of a new type." Chart the course of the nuclear bomb from this letter through the first nuclear chain reaction led by physicist Enrico Fermi, the Manhattan Project, and devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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You investigate the age-old debate over whether the physical world is discrete or continuous. By the 19th century, physicists saw a clear demarcation: Matter is made of discrete atoms, while light is a continuous wave of electromagnetic energy. However, a few odd phenomena remained difficult to explain.
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Six renowned physicists (Roger Penrose, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Artur Ekert, Scott Tremaine and Nobel Laureates David Politzer and Tony Leggett) describe a spectrum of outstanding issues in current theoretical physics, from foundations of quantum mechanics to particle physics to astrophysics and cosmology.
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Although light has wave-like properties, it also behaves like a particle that comes in discrete units of energy, termed quanta. Learn how physicists Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and others built a revolutionary picture of light that recognizes both its wave- and particle-like nature.
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One of the most attractive ideas for physicists searching for a theory of everything is supersymmetry, which treats force- and matter-carrying particles as interchangeable. Explore major problems that supersymmetry solves and the shortcomings that convince some scientists that perhaps some other ideas must also be considered.
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How can you figure out the "height"of the sun in the sky without being able to measure it directly with a ruler? Follow the path of ancient Indian scholars to answer this question using "angle of elevation"and a branch of geometry called trigonometry. You learn the basic trig identities (sine, cosine, and tangent) and how physicists use them to describe circular motion.
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