Physics

In the last few days CMS released four new publications, which you can download from the Cornell arxiv site. These are exquisite new measurements in the fields of top physics, exotica searches, and higgs physics, and so I thought I would give you the coordinates here, and comment briefly on the first result in the list: paper 1, paper 2, paper 3, paper 4. The result I want to comment on is titled "Evidence for associated production of a single top quark and W boson in pp collisions at 7 TeV". As the title suggests, this is a search for a particular production of top quarks in proton-proton…

At this link you can find the video of an interview I gave for Festivaletteratura Mantova (the literature festival held last week). I discuss science outreach, the media, the discovery of the Higgs boson and its impact on laypersons, and a more technical issue about the origin of mass. Unfortunately the interview is longish and I do not know whether I'll find the stamina to produce a writeup in English for this site. We'll see...

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) famously offers $1000000 to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities.  Its has helped to stem the spread of pseudoscience.  The Quantum Randi Challenge is quite similar (although its main purpose for you personally is to teach you quantum mechanics intuitively):  The large reward it offers is instant fame.  Whoever overcomes the challenge would deserve a Nobel Prize in physics!  But the Quantum Randi Challenge does not depend on a foundation that is at times discredited as colluding in establishment conspiracy. In…

It sometimes happens that my comments in the threads of my own blog get long and detailed (do not take this as me boasting about anything - it is just a fact). When that happens, I reason that they deserve to be promoted to a post by themselves, because threads are read by way fewer readers, and some of them might thus lose some interesting bit. Because of the above I am (re)posting the text below, which explains some "a priori" reasons why quarks come with fractional electric charges in multiples of one third, why the sum of charges of fermions in one family nullify, and why our universe…

Last Saturday night Gian Francesco Giudice and I discussed the discovery of the Higgs boson and its aftermath in front of a wide audience gathered in the Aula Magna of Mantova University. The event was #173 in the wide program of the town's literature festival, a week of seminars, interviews, performances by authors of books, journalists, and intellectuals in a broader sense. Directed by the organizer of the event Matteo Polettini, who is also a physicist although he specialized in statistical mechanics, Gian Francesco and I started off by laying out the ideas of why there had to be a…

It would be idiotic to claim that quantum mechanics just follows from getting stoned and blurting “everything is possible”. One of the difficulties with understanding the derivation of quantum mechanics (QM) from tautological modal realism [1] is that vital steps are omitted from the discussion (see for example many comments here). An important early step is grasping the indeterminism contained in tautological modal realism (TMR). Before discussing indeterminism, let us briefly see where indeterminism is in the bigger picture. The derivation of QM looks as follows [numbers like (3) refer to…

On Friday evening I will be talking in the wonderful Piazza Mantegna, in downtown Mantova (see picture below). It is an event organized by Festivaletteratura (literature festival), where I will be armed with blackboard and chalks, plus a mike, and where I will explain the way a discovery of a new particle comes about. On Saturday instead I will be at the aula magna of the Mantova University, where in company with Gian Francesco Giudice (a CERN theorist) I will discuss the Higgs boson discovery and the aftermath. That is a more "serious" event and we will be discussing in front of a paying…

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote in 1984: “...the most revolutionary discovery in science is yet to come! And come, not by questioning the quantum, but by uncovering that utterly simple idea that demands the quantum.” Wheeler, 1984 [1] Here is where a “modal realist version of Einstein”, while contemplating the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox involving the infamous Alice and Bob characters, could have stumbled onto Wheeler’s “utterly simple idea that demands the quantum”: “What matches up the many different Bobs with the possible Alices (all observe only one Bob and one Alice)…

Large collaborations of physicists have a consolidated habit of meeting three or four times per year for a full week of discussions and talks. This has multiple purposes, one of them being the possibility to bring together members who live and work off-site (which may mean several thousand miles away from CERN). So, to alleviate a little the lab-centered life of experiments, one of these events every year is typically held away from the lab, in the site of one of the institutions participating in the experiment. So that's why I am in Lisbon this week. A "CMS Week" has just started this…

A new ATLAS search for supersymmetric signatures in 2011 LHC data has appeared last week in the arxiv. The result ? No hint of a signal, not even for ready money. So if you are on a hurry, you can just have a glance at the graph below, which summarizes the measurement in terms of excluded regions of a slice of the complicated parameter space of SUSY theories. Otherwise, if you want to know a bit more of what this is about, I can provide some detail. Let me write this article by assuming you know nothing. So what is ATLAS ? ATLAS is one of the two general-purpose particle detectors installed…