Scaling down the observable universe to make it fit within our moon's orbit, the Milky Way gets reduced to a village. We live close to the edge of this village, at a comfortable distance from the…

Alan Guth, the discoverer of cosmic inflation, gave a talk at MIT on November 1, which convinced me, a natural skeptic about these issues, that the multiverse may very well exist. Two routes to the…

As I reported in a post a few days ago, the Italian sentencing of seven scientists to 6-years imprisonment for their misassessment of the risks of the population of L'Aquila, soon thereafter struck…

Outside the very large and the very small, the universe is rather easy to understand in modern times.  At the very large, we have to try and make dark matter and dark energy work.  At the…

Let me write here a short note -just for the record- to mention a proceedings paper I wrote for the ICFP 2012 conference. I spoke in Crete last June about the latest results of the CMS experiment,…

Human thought has led to a variety of remarkable and profound insights. Many of these insights are well established and have been embraced by a significant portion of the global population. The…

Claims on the Internet live on indefinitely.  I claimed to have found a testable candidate to unify gravity with the three other fundamental forces of Nature.  Thanks to sometimes trying…

"The problem of averaging data containing discrepant values is nicely discussed in Ref. x [...] It is difficult to develop a procedure that handles simultaneously in a reasonable way two basic…

Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recently observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons we know today,…

I had a dream. So what, we all do. Well, this was particular, because I remember all of it well, and because it involved a very interesting situation. I was at Fermilab, in an office on a top-level…