David Galbraith updated his post on where the web was invented (which includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee) to include the juicy tidbit that the building in which TBL invented the web is in France, not Switzerland.
I'll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders.
Rumor has it that the LHC at CERN has found the Higgs boson. The news runs contrary to some earlier speculation.
The teams are sworn to secrecy, but various physics blogs, and the canteens at Cern, are alive with talk of a possible sighting of the Higgs, and with a mass inline with what many physicists would expect.
Since the Higgs' nickname is the God particle, does this count as the Second Coming? (@gavinpurcell)
Physicists at CERN believe they have observed neutrinos moving at speeds faster than the speed of light, a feat previously assumed to be impossible.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.
This is a tiny fractional change, but one that occurs consistently.
The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.
If true, saying this is a significant discovery is a doubly significant understatement.
Most of the possible masses for the Higgs boson (aka the God particle) have been eliminated with at a 95% confidence level by physicists at CERN. They're checking the other masses and will likely have an answer one way or the other in December.
"We are now entering a very exciting phase in the hunt for the Higgs boson," Sharma said. "If the Higgs boson exists between 114-145 GeV, we should start seeing statistically significant excesses over estimated backgrounds, and if it does not then we hope to rule it out over the entire mass range. One way or the other we are poised for a major discovery, likely by the end of this year."
(via @daveg)
A pair of articles on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN: A Giant Takes On Physics' Biggest Questions and Crash Course. The LHC will hopefully provide the 1.21 gigawatts 7 trillion electron volts needed to uncover the Higgs boson, aka, The God Particle. "What we want is to reduce the world to objects that have no structure, that are points, that are as simple as we can imagine. And then build it up from there again."
