Science over the last four years

It would seem that I haven't posted here in nearly four years. Life has been busy, and further, I find other social media outlets capture my attention more. But I shall try to post here now and then. So what has happened in physics in the last four years? Too much to write! But here are a few things:

• The Large Hadron Collider has pinned down many of the properties of the Higgs boson.

• Alas, there are few hints of anything unexpected, except for a "bump" in the data at six times the mass of the Higgs boson, which might be some new elementary particle. Stay tuned!

• Quantum mechanics has passed all tests thrown at it. There has been great progress in using it to improve communication security and computation--though that is still a ways off.

• There has been a lot of work in constructing materials from the small scale on up.

• Gravitational waves have been directly observed.

The last one was reported just a few months ago. Two giant black holes merged a billion light years away, and scientists were able for the first time to detect the resulting jiggling of spacetime, just as Einstein predicted. It was a stupendous achievement, and opens our ears to a whole new side of the Universe.

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