Well, to be pedantic, the President most certainly *cannot* declare war. Only Congress can do that. It's even in the Constitution and everything.

However, you were probably were referring to his de facto ability as Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces to actually use those forces as required. And that is more or less correct. Congress can't tell him what to do with them directly, but they can remove all of the funding for them if he starts looking like he's running an actual war.

As for privacy... I agree that terrorism is a relatively low probability threat to most Americans. However, it is certainly one that could grow to become more serious, if not checked. We need to find an appropriate technological balance between legitimate intelligence gathering and privacy.

Its true. Hillary will either be an Obama copy, or just as likely, a Bill Clinton copy. Presumably without cigars.

The Republican candidates will be either Bush copies, or corporate CEOs, or Fundamentalists.

Oh, and there's a socialist running this year too. That's sort of new, last one we had was Eugene Debs in the beginning of the 20th Century. Looks like we're due for our socialist this part of the century.

I honestly have no idea who to vote for. More to the point, I'll probably facepalm more than once over the subsequent four years over the person who I do vote for.

Asking questions like "Does a Black Hole have a shape?" makes you have doubts about those qualifications though. In physics you need to be careful to be precise. Anything which exists has a shape and yet he is not questioning the existence of Black Holes nor even whether they are spherical but rather whether they appear distorted from spherical by their gravitational field bending light.

Before the Big Bang there was no space and it is debatable whether there was any time either. So if all space and (perhaps) time can be created from nothing why do you have a problem with the reverse happening at some point?

Actually that is not quite correct. A majority do but there are searches conducted at the LHC for something called R-parity violating SUSY. In these models the lightest SUSY particle can decay and SUSY does not explain Dark Matter.

These models are generally less popular because there are very strong limits on them from existing data. In particular these models allow for flavour changing neutral currents and thing like baryon number violation and there are extremely strong limits on both processes not being seen (although we do eventually expect to see baryon number violation).

Nobody can really answer that: we are going beyond the energy frontier and nobody can really say for certain what, if anything, we will find. However if those two broad assumptions I stated above (weakly interacting and thermally produced) are true for Dark Matter then, barring some pathologically strange model for new physics, we should see Dark Matter whether it is from SUSY or something else.

The reason these assumptions put a limit on the mass is that the heavier the particle the earlier the universe will cool to the point that no more can be produced. If this happens really early on i.e. very massive particles, then these particles will be so dense that they will interact and annihilate back into whatever produced them and so there will be very few left, too few to explain Dark Matter. Similarly if they are too low in mass then there will be far more of them because they decouple from the universe later when it is less dense but then the lower mass per particle means that there is still not enough to explain Dark Matter.

For a weakly interacting particle this 'sweet spot' turns out to be within reach of the LHC. This makes no assumption whatsoever about Supersymmetry only that the particle interact with the weak force. However if they only interact through the Higgs then the mass will be higher or (worse) if via gravity then much, much higher. Another possibility is that Dark Matter was not thermally produced in which case you need to know the production mechanism to find out what it says about the mass.

The Standard Model does not allow for calculation of probabilities greater than one. The Higgs is part of the Standard Model and you only get this effect, called violation of unitarity, for processes like WW scattering if the Higgs is not there. Since the Higgs was found the SM is complete and there is no problem with violating unitarity.

Well assuming it takes a minute in a 650W microwave to cook your disgusting boiled sausage that's roughly 60*650=39kJ of energy, lets call it 40kJ. The LHC beams contain roughly 360MJ. The beams take roughly 90 microseconds to make a complete orbit (27km/3e8 m/s) so that is a power of roughly 4TW (=4 million MW).

Now the sausage is probably only about half a nuclear interaction length (guess) so only about 18% of the protons will interact per sausage crossing and not all of that energy will actually be converted into heat since much will go to secondaries. So lets be conservative and say that 1% of the incident energy heats the sausage. Hence the the time for the sausage to get 40kJ will be 40e3/(4e12*0.01) = 1 micro second.

Assuming the sausage absorbs 1% of the total beam energy (which will happen in under a millisecond) then it will have about 900 times more energy than it needed to cook it which is the energy released by slightly less than 1kg of TNT...and this is one of the reasons why the LHC is know as the Big Bang machine! ;-)

That's probably very unlikely. Michelson-Morley was testing a prediction of the best understanding of light at the time. The non-observation of changes due to motion through the ether was clear evidence that the best understood theory for light was wrong.

Now we have found the Higgs the established model, called the Standard Model, has no more predictions to make: we have found it all. The problem is that there are some phenomena which the Standard Model cannot explain, like Dark Matter, and it relies on some amazing fine-tuning of parameters to have such a light Higgs (the odd of this happening by chance are about the same as winning a lottery 5-6 times in a row...and if someone did that nobody would believe it was simple luck!).

The solutions to these issues involve speculation by theorists and there are multiple candidates. Supersymmetry is probably the leading one but if we fail to see SUSY in the coming run then I, and a lot of my colleagues, will probably start to doubt it as the most likely explanation. However even then it might still be that SUSY is the explanation but at a higher energy scale that we can reach and just a more-than-minimal variety of it.

Personally the thing I expect the most for us to find is Dark Matter. this is based on two broad assumptions that cut across many different theoretical models: that Dark Matter interacts through the weak force and that it was thermally produced in the Big Bang. If these assumptions are correct then the mass of the Dark Matter particle has to be in reach of the LHC. However this is still far from any sort of guarantee: there are other models for Dark Matter out there with good motivation which we would not see e.g. axions.

Actually that is conjecture as there is currently no evidence that protons decay. I'll grant that the expectation is that there are high energy processes which violate baryon number and if this is true then it should be possible for a proton to decay. However there is a simple way around this: suppose the initial conditions of the Big Bang just included a slight excess of baryons? No B violation is needed and protons are absolutely stable.

As you can probably guess I'm a particle physicist and not a cosmologist. However even in the dark energy models presumably a 'big rip' condition is reached in the voids between gravitationally bound objects since there is nothing to stop the acceleration? If so then surely the implications for the stable pockets is not really known since all our understanding of causal disconnection is based on GR which would no longer be valid in the regions between the galaxies.

That makes a lot of sense. I've always wondered why Tesla likes to spend so much money on technologies that are Tesla-specific and have only fleeting usefulness...if they can turn them into government credits, they suddenly make sense.

I wouldn't be surprised if the battery swap stations do indeed work, but I'm sure the demand for them is tiny now and will be nonexistent in a few years.

Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying.

The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist.

Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution

It is if you have the right lawyers.

Sure they could have screwed it up more. They could have mentioned that Alpha Centaurians have invaded Duluth, and are transforming Minnesotans into angry Communist half-snake half-jelly fish chimeras who chant "Serve the giant penis god!"

Now THAT would be a screwed up writeup!

The end result of Libertarianism is economic slavery for the underclasses. Libertarianism is "the freedom to starve."