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Physics, chemistry and mathematics in news

Physics, chemistry and mathematics as they reach the news: measurement and legal time, lasers and the physics of materials, chemistry, and famous problems in mathematics. Prelims has asked about the four fundamental forces and the Higgs boson.

Foundation note: The Large Hadron Collider and the Standard Model

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Navier–Stokes equations: The equations of fluid motion, relating a fluid's velocity, pressure and viscosity.

Clay Mathematics Institute: An American foundation that in 2000 named seven unsolved Millennium Prize Problems, each carrying a prize of one million dollars.

Map projection: A way of drawing the Earth's curved surface flat, which always distorts area, shape, distance or direction.

Rhumb line: A course of constant compass bearing, crossing every meridian at the same angle, which sailors can steer without changing heading.

Traceability: Linking a clock or any measurement, through an unbroken chain of comparisons, to a national reference standard, here the one kept by CSIR-NPL.

Coordinated Universal Time: The international reference time (UTC), maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) from atomic clocks around the world.

Legal Metrology: The law of measurement: state rules that keep the instruments used in trade, health and safety accurate and verified, now extended to time.

particle accelerator: A machine that speeds charged particles to high energy and collides them, so that what comes out of the collision can be studied.

radioactive beam: A beam of unstable nuclei, used to study nuclei that do not survive long enough to occur naturally on Earth.

beam catcher: A block that safely absorbs the leftover high energy particle beam once an experiment has taken what it needs from it.

Brout Englert Higgs mechanism: The process by which particles acquire mass by interacting with a field that fills space.