Physics

Gravity continues to work fine, even though we don't know why. Newton wrote down the first calculus based description. Gravity worked at a distance for reasons beyond our reach. Einstein developed a more accurate description with a little help from his friends, including Grossman, Hilbert and Schwarzschild. "Matter tells space how to warp. And warped space tells matter how to move" is John Wheeler's circular logic jerk. My own work suggests gravity is all about doing close to absolutely nothing, pushed to do trivial harmonic motions because there is other stuff in the Universe. In this blog,…

This article eliminates the need for the Higgs. The quaternionic equation of motion of an elementary particle is in fact a continuity equation in which another quaternionic flavor ψʸ of the transporting field ψˣ is coupled with that transporting field via a source term. The coupling factor acts as the mass of the corresponding particle. This fact comes into the foreground when the Dirac equation is converted from its spinor based form to the much cleaner quaternionic form. After stripping away the matrices and reducing the spinors to a single element, the quaternionic Dirac equation for a…

This morning I read with interest a paper on Physics Today, titled "Communicating the Science of Climate Change", by R. Somerville and S. Hassol. In it, there is a table worth pondering about. Here it is: The table lists a few terms whose meaning is different for scientists and the general public. Without knowing it, I have fought for years against these and other similar terms while writing articles for this blog, trying to avoid giving for granted not just hard physics concepts, but the meaning of words that are used in a different way by my peers and by non-physicists. It is quite nice…

So what is the deal with this 'cosmic speed limit'? Is it really unthinkable that neutrinos move faster than light?  You might want to try an experiment. Go to a nearby ATM, and draw $300 from your account. Now go to the nearest person with a PhD in theoretical physics, and ask her what is her Einstein index. If her index doesn't reach a three-digit figure, wish her success with her career, and go to the next physicist. If, however, her index is expressed in three or more digits, you have found a suitable test candidate. Congratulate her with the respect shown by her peers, and show…

October is passing and the neutrino saga continues to make headlines here and there, but I know that the excitement is bound to slowly dampen, as the preprint claiming superluminal speeds ages in the Arxiv without being sent to a scientific magazine. So it is better for us to return to our usual business: the exclusion of possible new physics models at the Large Hadron Collider. Mind you, we are not talking here of superluminal speeds or other quite fancy and unexpected things that nobody really believed could exist: before the LHC turned on, the majority of my colleagues were confident that…

I was happy to see today a very nice piece discussing the Opera result on allegedly superluminal motion of muon neutrinos, written by Paolo Ciafaloni, a colleague from Lecce University. The piece is in Italian, so you either know the language or need to revert to google translate or some other web resource in order to make sense of it. But the nice thing is that Paolo is caressing the idea of writing a blog of his own, and maybe in English - maybe for Science 2.0 . I warmly encouraged Paolo to do so, and to write in English to reach a larger audience. I hope he will take my suggestion and…

It's been a while, Science 2.0. My excuse (if anybody needed one): I've been rather busy over the summer with fieldwork. Not a good excuse, admittedly. But, anyway, I'm back now! Anyway. There's a rather disparaging quote by Francis Bacon, the 16th century philosopher who basically invented science, who said, Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical. Quantum physics freaks me out as it is, and Francis Bacon's quote is exactly what jumped to mind when seeing this video. Clearly, it's not magic to some people - people that are more learned than me. This is a…

A study by ICARUS re-investigated their neutrino experiments based on the article by Cohen and Glashow, who showed that superluminal neutrinos in standard model physics lose energy through neutral-current weak-interactions, which is somewhat like Cherenkov radiation. Given a neutrino moving faster than light a given distance D through a standard background, one can compute the rate of usually expected energy lost through that radiation. The neutrinos are detected via so called ‘charged-current interactions’, which turn them into muons, 104 of which ICARUS detected. Muon momenta as detected…

The saga of the superluminal neutrinos took a dramatic turn today, with the publication of a very simple yet definitive study by ICARUS, another neutrino experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratories, who has looked at the neutrinos shot from CERN since 2010. The ICARUS team jumped on the chance to test the Opera result based on the article recently published by Cohen and Glashow. The latter argue that superluminal neutrinos should lose energy through  neutral-current weak-interaction radiation -the analogue of Cherenkov radiation for a neutral particle. Given a neutrino moving at a speed v…

The saga of the superluminal neutrinos took a dramatic turn today, with the publication of a very simple yet definitive study by ICARUS, another neutrino experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratories, who has looked at the neutrinos shot from CERN since 2010. The ICARUS team jumped on the chance to test the Opera result based on the article recently published by Cohen and Glashow. The latter argue that superluminal neutrinos should lose energy through  neutral-current weak-interaction radiation -the analogue of Cherenkov radiation for a neutral particle. Given a neutrino moving at a speed v…