howard georgi

The Un-Particle


Sometimes you have to wonder if physicists are just playing out a
cosmic joke on the rest of us. Harvard's Howard Georgi, a renowned
theorist, has suggested that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the
giant accelerator due to switch on next year, might be able to detect
what he calls "unparticles." The members of this new class of matter
have no mass, and should be difficult to detect, but physicists are
already at work trying to figure out how to find them at the LHC.

While Georgi deserves applause for the clever nomenclature, the
astrophysics community still prevails in this department, having
proposed the existence of such strange beauties as repulsive dark
matter (RDM), self-annihilating dark matter (SADM), and, our favorite,
fuzzy dark matter (FDM).—Gregory Mone

Via Phys Org

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