Physics

Veritasium is still wrong by his own standards because he did not give the full real explaination which is rooted in the real theory of electricity and magnetism.  Quantum Electro Dynamics.  In fact with that theory in hand the way this works out is more straight forward. He went to Cal Tech and got help from Richard Abbott at Cal tech to run an experiment on a small scale done by Dr Brian Haidet PhD of the Channel Alpha Phoenix.  This involves really running wires that are very long, and one meter apart.   Both found that some small current, mili amps, flows almost…

The "Learning to Discover" workshops and "AI and Physics" conference are taking place at Institut Pascal, a centre set on the top of a hill surrounded by woods near Orsay, France. The event focuses on new artificial intelligence techniques to improve the discovery potential of fundamental science experiments.Below you can see a summary of the event agenda:  - Apr 19-20 Representation learning workshop- Apr 21-22 Dealing with uncertainties workshop- Apr 25-26 Generative models workshop - Apr 27-29 AI and Physics Conference I attended in person to one of the three workshops last week,…

The world’s largest particle accelerator is back in business. Today, two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the Large Hadron Collider’s 27-kilometer ring at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV), marking the conclusion of a three year hiatus for maintenance, consolidation and upgrade work. The work was done so that it can operate at an even higher energy and deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments but high-energy collisions still months away. The beams circulated today were a test at injection energy and contained a small…

No.... Ok, ok, I will elaborate. But first I feel the need to explain what we are talking about here, to anybody who does not have a Ph.D. in particle physics and is still reading this column. Background: The Tevatron, CDF, and the W boson The stage is set at the Tevatron collider, which until the advent of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has kept for twenty-five years the record for highest-energy collisions. It operated from 1985 to 2011, and delivered proton-antiproton collisions to two large multi-purpose experiments, CDF and DZERO. The latter used the data to discover the sixth and…

It is very unlikely that Fermilab’s new findings on the mass of the Wboson mean that the standard model is broken. It will be exciting if it does. This is not to say that their experimental findings are wrong. Fermilab themselves propose the much more likely possibility that we need to compute the predicted values more precisely in the standard model. Another possibility that occurs to me is that we scientists need to both compute the values predicted by established theory even more precisely and also extend the established theory a little bit. The new #Wboson mass value shows tension…

Ever since experimental physics was a thing, the worth of scientists could be appraised by how carefully they designed their experiments, making sure that their devices could answer as precisely as possible the questions that crowded their mind. Indeed, the success of their research depended on making the right choices on what apparatus to build, with what materials, what precise geometry, and how to operate it for best results. (Above: Ramsay and Pierre Curie in their lab) Indeed, experimental sciences had for centuries a romantic flavor, as you could picture the scientist as a sociopath who…

Like the vast majority of readers of this column, I very strongly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing atrocities. War is never an answer to international controversies. And I would like to add: I am in favor of all sanctions that financially hit the aggressor, including cutting Russia from use of international banking circuits and similar impactful actions. That said, I will say here what I think about this ongoing rush to find ways to hurt a country whose citizens are largely innocent of their leader's crimes. I think most of these creative initiatives are counter-…

Over the course of the past two decades we have witnessed the rise of deep learning as a paradigm-changing technology. Deep learning allows algorithms to dramatically improve their performance on multivariate analysis tasks. Deep neural networks, in particular, are very flexible models capable of effective generalization of available data, with unbeatable results in their predictions. Indeed, from the outside, nowadays it looks as if the game changer in predictive analysis was the construction of large neural network architectures. But it was not.What really makes a difference in the…

The harsh truth of nuclear war in our modern era is not that everyone would die right away but that hundreds of millions would die in the combatant states while hundreds of millions would have to survive radiation and starvation. If you are one who sees the flash, has time to Duck and Cover, and for whom the light is distant you are not in the clear. Instead, soon fallout will be upon you a deadly black rain, and black ash will be upon you. How to survive this if you have not prepared at all up to this point? Dirt and Distance are your friends. Your first friend is distance. Even with the…

The behaviour of matter at quantum level includes a number of surprising effects, which we are lucky enough to be able to study and observe in different physical systems. Some of these effects are due to the radically different properties of particles endowed with integer amounts of spin (which we call bosons), and particles endowed with half-integer amounts of spin (which we call fermions). Already a difficulty arises if we want to discuss these properties. What is spin? Spin can be colloquially likened to a measure of how much a body rotates around some axis. However, for elementary…