That may be correct but the article you linked has an incredibly misleading title. This process does not convert photons into electrons it simply imparts the photon's energy to one or more electrons which, in the case of thrust, causes them to be ejected from the graphite. The coupling of electrons to photons is extremely well understood, in fact it is the second most accurately tested scientific theory ever discovered (the first being special relativity). The only way to create electrons from photons is to also create an equal number of positrons. However this requires far higher energy processes ~1 MeV of energy which is many orders of magnitude higher than the energies involved in visible light and would easily break apart graphite which is something they ruled out.

They could easily come from all the material which is surrounding the graphite. As the charge builds up on the graphite due to all the electrons being expelled it will develop an increasingly strong electric field eventually will pull electrons from the walls of the chamber. Since the vacuum will also not be perfect the remaining gas molecules could also transfer charge by moving back and forth between the graphite and the chamber walls.

A similar effect exists in the LHC where the electrons are 'helped' to leave the walls by synchrotron radiation hitting the walls of the beam pipe and are then dragged along by the electric field of a bunch of protons forming a electron cloud. This effect is one of the primary limiting factors on the number of protons we can have in an LHC beam.

Actually this could provide more thrust. Use sunlight to propel the craft until it has built up a large enough electric charge that the efficiency of the thrust begins to drop (since it will take an increasing amount of energy to expel the electrons from something with a large positive charge) and then introduce a stream of neutral gas into the sponge. This should strip the electrons off the gas and the remaining positively charge ions will then be repelled by the positive graphite and provide even more thrust.

Of course this means that you need to have a fuel source but it's likely to be far more efficient than current rocket fuel plus there it no need for it to be something explosive like hydrogen - you could probably use Xenon which is a noble gas and so extremely inert and so a lot safer.

The one advantage we have with Netflix over broadcast stations is that it is on demand and, like websites, it is conceivable that if the ads become obnoxious it will motivate someone to provide a plugin to Ad Blocker to deal with them like there is for YouTube.

Actually if that is done well then I don't mind it at all since it is almost invisible. However when done badly it is the most obnoxious of all advertizing since it is impossible to avoid as it is part of the show.

Actually before the Higgs the problem with the model was that the particles all had non-zero masses. This breaks symmetries which we observe to be held in nature and was a huge problem and also gave rise to the violation of unitarity: if there were no masses there would be no unitarity violations.

Part of the beauty of the Higgs mechanism is that not only did it explain how the particles could have masses while the symmetries of nature we observe are preserved but it also called out the unitarity violations which the non-zero particle masses caused!

Every model has its problems though. The issue with the SM is that the Higgs mass is so much lighter than the Planck scale. This means that there has to be something probably not much higher in mass than the scales we have already probed. However this is not a hard constraint. The higher the energy of this new physics the less "natural" but with only one universe to play with there is no way to be certain that a one in a million chance did not occur when setting up the laws of nature....it's just not very likely.

It sounds like he was answering a different question: "What is the shape of a black hole?". That's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. Asking whether they have a shape is akin to asking: "Does something which exists have a shape?". In fact this article is actually a violation of Betteridge's law because the answer is 'yes', Black Holes do indeed have a shape although that answer imparts no useful information whatsoever.

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.