Physics

The Tevatron experiments have jointly published on the arxiv two days ago a paper which is titled "Evidence for a particle produced in association with weak bosons and decaying to a bottom-antibottom quark pair in the search for the Higgs boson at the Tevatron collider". You can get the paper in the arxiv. The article is the final chapter of a more than decade-long search for the Higgs boson at the Tevatron. In fact I should say two-decade-long, since the first searches started almost twenty years ago. I have been a member of the CDF collaboration (one of the two collaborations that jointly…

Researchers have created the first artificial molecules whose chirality can be rapidly switched from a right-handed to a left-handed orientation with a beam of light.  Chirality is the distinct left/right orientation or “handedness” of some types of molecules, meaning the molecule can take one of two mirror image forms. The right-handed and left-handed forms of such molecule are called “enantiomers” and can exhibit strikingly different properties. One enantiomer of the chiral molecule limonene smells of lemon, the other smells of orange. The ability to observe or even switch the…

If the odds are in your favor, why not bet some money? There have been plenty of high profile bets in physics. Bets spice up stuff. Moreover: If nobody is willing to take your offer, they effectively publicly admit defeat. If Laplace believes in a deterministic, classical universe, if he believes to have a method to use his knowledge to force a certain outcome, he is not only consistent when he bets his first born on that outcome. His bet could prove something about nature! Dick knows that Brian will lose a certain bet with 99% probability, because that is what quantum mechanics tells. Dick…

The communication of science to the general public is a subject dear to me, but unfortunately one that the majority of my colleagues neglect to consider as one to which to devote time and efforts. In the last decade blogs have started to fill the huge gap that exists between scientific journals and general news media, a gap that no popularization magazine can bridge, given their restricted scope. More recently, I see efforts that employ video and graphics more heavily than before, and this is of course a step in the right direction - reading is harder, or at least less immediate, than…

How will the Universe end?  And when? It's been speculation in religion and philosophy since man realized he was special.  Can physics offer anything new? Let's go to the Dark Energy hypotheses and see.  1998 really messed us up, theoretically. Until then, we knew the Universe had to slow down - well, theoretically.  But then the Hubble showed us truly distant supernovae and we got the uncomfortable reality that the Universe was actually expanding more slowly in the past than it is now.  That meant gravity has not been slowing Universal expansion, it has been…

Slowly but surely, because it is a good idea, the Quantum Randi Challenge (QRC) generates interest behind the curtains. Some think that because of this, it is all over, but they are mistaken. Several researchers wanted to properly quote the QRC despite of it finding still no support by ‘professional’ journals on the grounds that it is “extremely important but just not quite right for our fine publication”. “Quantum Randi Challenge” is now available on the archive [http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5294*] - [Update Sep 2013: The didactic part is defended also in Annals of Physics - see reference below…

There is a “Carnival of Cosmology: Dark Energy”; here is my contribution: I will discuss the public acceptance of dark energy (1), then I explain that dark energy is crazy but also that the crazy stuff is actually basic general relativity, so that if you refuse dark energy, the crack-pots are your team (2), and lastly, I explain that dark energy, as opposed to dark matter, is completely natural and obviously exists(3). 1) Perception: Nobel Prize for Einstein’s Greatest Blunder The last Nobel Prize in physics went to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riessand Brian P. Schmidt, all having been vital in…

The following text has been offered as a followup of the Higgs observation by the LHC experiments, which finds a signal at a mass compatible with the pre-discovery predictions made some time ago by Vladimir Khachatryan - ones which I published in this blog. - T.D.Considerations following the Higgs boson discovery - Ashay DharwadkerWe are pleased to know that our theoretical predictionof the Higgs Boson mass of 126 GeV, also announced in a guest post by Vladimir Khachatryan on this blog, is indeed in very good agreement with the recent announcements by the CMSand ATLAS experiments at CERN.…

"Given that the search for the Higgs took some 45 years, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, billions of dollars, not to mention numerous divorces, huge amounts of sleep deprivation, tens of thousands of bad airline meals, etc., etc., we want to be sure as is humanly possible that this is real." Harrison Prosper, Kirby W. Kemper Professor of Physics, Florida State University

As I explained yesterday, I am in the process of receiving payment for a few bets on possible discoveries at the LHC. Two such bets were on between me and Tony Smith, a long time reader of this blog and a lawyer with deep interest in particle physics (and a few interesting ideas). Tony now concedes them. These are for a total of $200 and a bottle of Strega (an italian liquor); the latter has been agreed to be turned into a bottle of good wine, much closer to my taste. I will post here a picture of the wine as I get it; in the meantime, Tony agreed to write something to describe the heart of…