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Existential quantifier, used in logic to express existence
Existential quantifier, used in logic to express existence

Existence is the state of having being or reality. It is often contrasted with essence, since one can understand the essential features of something without knowing whether it exists. Ontology studies existence and differentiates between singular existence of individual entities and general existence of concepts or universals. Entities present in space and time have concrete existence, in contrast to abstract entities, like numbers and sets. Other distinctions are between possible, contingent, and necessary existence and between physical and mental existence. Some philosophers talk of degrees of existence but the more common view is that an entity either exists or not, with no intermediary states. It is controversial whether existence can be understood as a property of individual objects and, if so, whether there are nonexistent objects. The concept of existence has a long history and played a role in the ancient period in pre-Socratic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophy. (Full article...)

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ATLAS experiment

ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. It was also designed to search for evidence of theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model. This image shows the eight toroid magnets surrounding the calorimeter in the centre.

Photograph credit: Maximilien Brice, CERN

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