Physics

June 28 - Shoot It in the Head Snarky puzzle. If you go down in a gravity field, time ticks slower, rulers look longer to someone else. That is 2 changes. Newton’s scalar theory accounts for just one, duh. Write a 4-potential that could account for both g00 and gRR. If you don’t want Newton to do all the lifting, combine a metric with a potential. Since mixing potential theory and dynamic metrics is blasphemy, expect to take a bullet for the team. The Back Story: Newton’s scalar theory of gravity is useful but wrong. Some prefer to talk about a “domain of applicability”, the collection…

If you haven't already, go enjoy Hank's blog, "Higgs Boson - Forget Science, What Do Bookies Think?". He answered what was the most pressing question to me: one cannot bet that no Higgs will be found. That is a shame, since all previous searches for the Higgs have ended up that way. If you lean that way, what should you do? I recommend buying the "No Stinkin' Higgs" t-shirt, in either white or black, for $15 + $3 US shipping, $10 international. Note: if you have a Ph.D. in physics, you get a $5 discount. If the Higgs is found and confirmed to five sigma, global sales will cease, and you have…

This paper introduces a new model of physics. It is based on logic. It uses the congruence between the logic of quantum physics and a mathematical construct that got its name from David Hilbert. The Hilbert book model extends this construct such that fields and dynamics also fit in the new model. Introduction Every time when I read an article about the phenomena, which occur far from us in the universe, I'm surprised about the attention that this Farawayistan gets compared to the phenomena in the world of the smallest. Everything that happens there is dismissed with collective names such as “…

In the last few days I described in some detail (here and here) the six searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson just produced by CMS, the experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider to which I proudly belong. The prompt reporting of these new results was not a totally painless activity on my side, because I am currently on vacation in southern Crete (you can have a look below at the beach where I spent most of the early afternoon today, Skinaria): my time these days is precious, and my connection with the experiment and with the rest of the world is granted by a internet USB stick by "…

Equations don't sell. Pop science editors tell us that each equation added to a book halves its sales figure. If this is true, Sir Roger Penrose's Cycles of Time, which was recently released in the US, and which I can testify sold at least one copy, would have sold by the billions if only the editor would have scrapped half of the equations. With his 2004 book The Road To Reality Penrose has shown to be capable of blurring the distinction between textbooks and pop science writings. Cycles of Time continues in this tradition. I applaud Renrose's non-populistic attitude, and admire his…

In my short summary of analyses recently published by CMS, yesterday I left out one which had not yet been released. It is the search for the "golden channel" of Higgs decay, the one which motivated the construction of detectors with large acceptance to energetic leptons: the decay to two Z bosons, with a subsequent decay of the Z's to two charged leptons each. I know that combinations of the searches are already of public domain -for instance, you can read a nice summary in the physics world site. I will also write about that in due time. However, I think it is important to know what are the…

An orgy of new results has started. Let me just show a few of them concerning Higgs searches in CMS - I am on vacation after all, and I have little time left to comment these interesting new papers and plots after all the sunbathing and restaurants. Let us start with the Higgs search in the diphoton decay mode by CMS (paper here). With 1.09 inverse femtobarns of data, CMS has a pretty good reach even to this very rare decay mode of the Higgs boson. Let me remind you that only a handful every thousand Higgs particles decay into two photons, in the most favourable circumstances. The diphoton…

Impressive. If you had been seeking for top quarks in 4-inverse-picobarns datasets since 1992 as I have, and then rejoiced at the 7-event signal from which CDF extracted in 1994 mass and cross section of the long-sought sixth quark, you would now also be looking for adjectives upon having a look at the figures in the new CMS paper, which uses over one inverse femtobarn of proton-proton collisions to measure the tiny asymmetric kinematics of top quark pairs produced at the LHC. One inverse femtobarn is a tenth of what CDF and DZERO are currently analyzing, so what am I talking about ? Well,…

The Wiedemann-Franz Law, named after German physicists Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, is a ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities of metals.   In 1853, the two studied the thermal conductivity, a measure of a system's ability to transfer heat, of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals at the same temperature. The origin of this empirical observation did not become clear however until the discovery of the electron and the advent of quantum physics in the early…

This afternoon (2.30 PM Chicago time) Pat Lukens, an old-timer of the CDF experiment, will give a "wine and cheese" seminar at Fermilab on the new observation of a heavy baryon, of the family of baryons containing bottom quarks, which was still at large. The new particle, called "Xi_b^0", fits a hole in the group representation graph of ground-state baryons with J=1/2. You can see it in the graph on the right. Of all states in the middle level (ones containing one bottom quark) only the Xi_b^0 was still missing. By the way: none of the baryons of the top level have yet been observed. I will…