{"id":3316,"date":"2013-03-01T09:24:22","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T09:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=3316"},"modified":"2013-03-01T09:24:22","modified_gmt":"2013-03-01T09:24:22","slug":"spinons-orbitons-holons-and-brian-cox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2013\/03\/01\/spinons-orbitons-holons-and-brian-cox\/","title":{"rendered":"Spinons, orbitons, holons, and Brian Cox"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched the latest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b01mmrc0\">Horizon<\/a> last week (BBC 4; Thursday) which featured, Andy Parker, a bloke at CERN who's looking inside quarks \u2013 or hoping to. \u00a0Andy was also trying to create micro (and mercifully very temporary) black holes inside the <a href=\"http:\/\/lhc.web.cern.ch\/lhc\">LHC<\/a> in order to probe the idea of additional dimensions \u2013 11 perhaps. \u00a0And there was a Swiss chap who was splitting electrons into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/not-quite-so-elementary-my-dear-electron-1.10471\">spinons, holons and orbitons<\/a>. \u00a0I thought that wasn't possible, electrons being <em>fundamental<\/em> and all, but it is! \u00a0 Weird and wonderful. \u00a0This Horizon had the best graphics ever, I thought, especially when string theory came into view. \u00a0Cue knitting metaphors and great unravellings. \u00a0Fantastic TV.<\/p>\n<p>And this was followed by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b01qyfhh\">Charlie Broker<\/a> (BBC 2) and his mates poking considerable (and deserved) fun at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/p012qczg\">Brian Cox<\/a>'s new role in which he modestly explains all of life (whilst collecting zillions of frequent flyer points). \u00a0Almost better. \u00a0I found myself wondering whether BC was fundamental, or whether he could be split up as well. \u00a0All you need, it seems, is a tight beam of X-ray photons; a pity, then, that CERN's off-line ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched the latest Horizon last week (BBC 4; Thursday) which featured, Andy Parker, a bloke at CERN who's looking inside quarks \u2013 or hoping to. \u00a0Andy was also trying to create micro (and mercifully very temporary) black holes inside...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}