1. Your roommate is writing a science-fiction novel set very far in the future, 70 Gy after the Big Bang. One of the characters is a cosmologist, and your roommate wants to know what the cosmologist will measure for the Hubble constant. What’s your answer, assuming a steady expansion rate?
2. When physicists “discover” a new particle, it isn’t by finding the particle itself in their detectors. Rather, they look for events that might indicate the particle’s decay. For a given type of event, they plot the frequency of events (number per unit energy interval) versus energy. The particle shows up as a bump or deviation from an otherwise smooth background curve. You can explore this indirect approach to particle detection by plotting the data in the table below. These data are from the Large Hadron Collider and show events producing a pair of photons versus the energyof the pair. You should see a modest bump whose energy you can roughly determine. That bump is evidence for the Higgs boson.